So, I read Deb Aoki’s transcript of the panel The State of the Manga Industry from last weekend’s New York Anime Festival. Did you? You probably should, it’s very interesting in spots, particularly Kurt Hassler’s answers about Yen Press’s plans as they approach their first anniversary (Black God Volume 1 shipped through Diamond on October 10th, 2007). I certainly hope Haruhi hits for those guys…
Anyway, I bring it up here specifically because part of the panel has been bugging me for days now, the part about manga magazines. I’ve been following all of the manga magazines since their inception, I have a real interest in serialized manga anthologies going back to when I bought untranslated Shonen Jump volumes from a Japanese grocery store every month. I gotta say, Michael Gombos from Dark Horse’s comments on the nature of Shonen Jump… That really didn’t sit well with me. Here’s the relevant section from the Panel:
Is America Ready for More Manga Anthology Magazines?
Dark Horse launched and then folded their anthology magazine Super Manga Blast years ago. Several others came and went like VIZ Media’s Pulp and Animerica Extra, Raijin Weekly from now defunct Raijin Comics and TokyoPop’s Mixxzine.Fast forward to Summer 2008, when Yen Press launched their anthology magazine Yen Plus and Del Rey Manga published the first issue of their manga-lit anthology, Faust. So is America ready to read and buy more manga magazines?
Michael Gombos, Dark Horse: “(Dark Horse) did put one out, Super Manga Blast, which was canceled a few years back. You can put out an anthology, but I don’t think it’ll be profitable, or at least that’s been our experience. For VIZ’s Shonen Jump, they treat it like an advertising expense.“
“I can only speak from Dark Horse’s experiences, but it only made enough to pay for the translations for the paperback editions. There’s a burst of energy when something starts, but its hard to sustain over the long term.”
Italics emphasis mine.
Speaking as someone who really researches manga, I don’t think that’s actually true. The last circulation numbers that I was made aware of put Shonen Jump in the 200k/month sales bracket, possibly higher. Just working on available information like price, rough costs, and the amount of advertising in the magazine, there’s no way that Viz’s Shonen Jump isn’t turning a profit. Further, I’ve never, ever heard anyone from Viz ever refer to Shonen Jump as an advertising expense.
I also… and I’m sorry for seeming worked up here, but… how can you even begin to compare Super Manga Blast to Shonen Jump? They’re for audiences that differ in age and taste, one of them never got newsstand distribution, one of them never had nationally syndicated cartoons based on the properties it contains, one never came with Free Yu-Gi-Oh Cards. Where is Gombos getting this information from? Because this contradicts everything I know about Shonen Jump, and I think in the end it’s him, not me, that’s wrong about this stuff.
Particularly when, at the beginning of the next paragraph, he starts “I can only speak from Dark Horse’s experiences…”.
So, yeah. I would take that statement with a grain of salt.
I don’t imagine Viz will ever publically comment on an offhand remark like this, they don’t tend to, uh, engage their fellow publishers in public fora… But I’m super, super curious about where Gombos got his information now…
– Christopher
Wow, sounds like one company is resentful of another company’s success…
I doubt that a weekly magazine would work very well with our current culture (as much as that would rock), but monthly seems like it would work based off a number of factors (flagship titles, demographic, price, distribution, marketing). I wish Yen Monthly the best (but wish it was around $5 an issue).
How close(or far) are we to having a serial that only features OEL?
For many companies, publishing anthologies are a way to get the funds for printing single issue releases, especially if they’re stories that no one knows about. Yen Press has a hard hill to climb because some of their catalogue is new material, and so an anthology is the most cost effective way to get those new series out there, and revenue from sales of Yen+ will certainly go toward the graphic novel releases of the new series’. We had the same plan in affect when we started RUSH, but funds made from sales and subscriptions went … elsewhere.
I’ve never considered Jump an anthology used as a means to ‘debut’ or ‘finance’ graphic novels, because it features manga, most of which have anime tie-ins. I’ve always felt Jump in the USA was a means to collect revenue from advertisers looking to get to that lucrative market that’s buying anything and everything connected with the tv show they like. ^_^
I can only suspect that Gombos was likely speaking in terms of Jump being an ‘advertising well’ for them, as opposed to Jump being an ‘advertising tool’. ?? Maybe?
Hi! I was in the audience during that panel, and Kurt Hassler agreed with Michael Gombos that the anthology was a marketing tool. So the main purpose of Yen Plus is marketing.
Thumbing through the August 2008 (v. 4.8) issue of Shojo Beat, I count 12 pages of non-Viz ads (plus 2 pages of Ad Council public service advertising). (Some of the non-Viz ads might feature material connected to Viz, but did not sport the red Viz logo.) Counting the covers, that gives us 364 pages total, with twelve full page ads, all on the glossy pages, three of which are on the covers, which cost more. The newsprint pages only featured Viz house ads.
I don’t know anything about advertising economics, so I don’t know if twelve ad pages for a $5.99 magazine makes sense. I guess someone needs to get their page rates, factor the circulation, compute the cost of production… or just call up Marc Weidenbaum and ask him. (According to Wikipedia, half of the 38,000 circulation of Shojo Beat is subscriptions. (12 issues, $34.99)) (Marvel Comics has stated that subscriptions alone fund the Marvel Adventures line.)
200,000 is about what MAD Magazine sells. Apples and oranges?
Kristoffer, if you subscribe to Yen+ instead of buying at newsstands, the price is $49.99/12 issues, which actually works out to only ~$4.17 an issue, for the record.
I was also at the state of the manga panel and I’ll have to agree with Torsten. Kurt Hassler essentially agreed completely with Gombos in the sense that he said anthologies are essential even if they don’t make money.
Hassler said that anthologies should be seen as a cost of doing business; that they are purely a marketing vehicle and essential for getting your book in front of the audience a publisher is after. Viz has had success with Shonen Jump but I think less so with ShojoBeat. Nevertheless they are both essential to marketing Viz titles.
In Japan, most of the more popular anthologies don’t turn any profit actually. If they were designed to make a profit, they would be sold at a higher price, and 500 pages weekly anthologies coudln’t be sold at $2.
The anthologies’ role is to get the audience acquainted with the series before the collected volumes are released. And this is very effective.
While most US publishers have to promote separately every single series they release, Japanese publishers can concentrate on promoting the magazine and a few flagship series that will drive people to the magazines.
Promote the most popular series, then people will buy the anthology, where they can read 10 to 20 different series every week/month.
If your monthly magazine has 100,000 readers, that’s 100,000 people you can expose to 10 to 20 different series every month, that’s an easy way to advertise your new series.
Obviously the cost of setting up a magazine is higher than publishing collections, but if American publishers are courageous enough to follow the Japanese model to a T by pricing the anthologies at a very low price, they could possibly reap much higher profits, because the cheap magazines would be a cheap “gateway drug” into manga.
Hi, Chris,
This isn’t exactly on topic but I think it is related and you might find it interesting: cartoonist Rod McKie sent us an article talking about and comparing the old model of British comics with Japanese manga and in a way that let even the fairly manga non-literate like me understand the points he was making: http://forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/?p=9754.