PW Comics Week confirms that Tokyopop is backing off a bit on its online exclusives:
Tokyopop publisher Mike Kiley says three of the books, Dragon Head, King City and Heaven!!, will be removed from its web exclusives program, “based on suggestions from retailers whose opinions we value.”
There’s a little more there, about retailers and their reactions, but the one subject the Tokyopop people seem totally averse to mentioning is price. Without some sort of discount, or at the very least free shipping, the online exclusives are doomed to fail.
Meanwhile, Dave Carter does the math to explain why everyone thinks Tokyopop is flooding the market—but not Viz. The short answer: For the month he looked at, Tokyopop had a lot more volume 1s.
The Mainichi Daily News has an article on Shakespeare manga in the UK.
The Broccoli blog reports that the translations of the first volumes of Galaxy Angel II and Disgaea 2 are complete. I found this interesting:
Unfortunately Broccoli doesn’t have an English style guide when they make characters. Everything is first determined in katakana, then they sometimes make English spellings that are used for products (like trading cards), and some things don’t get English spellings at all. Let alone some words get multiple spellings. It’s because how things are spelled aren’t that important in Japan.
Manga Junkie finds another unlikely-to-be-licensed gem. This one is a 4-koma manga about a cat who is depicted as a woman part of the time:
Yeah, it’s moe, but there’s nothing morally disturbing (even if Hime is depicted as a human & calls her owner “nii-chan”), and the art is cute.
It’s too bad that the cover art isn’t that cute. It’ll draw the moe loving ota’s, but cat loving women like me wouldn’t pick it up by looking at the cover. There are cuter color images within the manga too (they’re not printed in color, but was originally in color), altho it’s more loli-tic.
Yaoi911 reviews Empty Heart, and the Honololu Star-Bulletin looks at R.O.D.
The local paper profiles manga artist Billy Martinez. But this makes me say “Aaargh!”:
Martinez said the defining characteristics of manga art are the unusually large eyes of the characters, the prevalence of so-called “speed lines” to connote action and emotional intensity, and a serial, soap-opera style of storytelling.
(Via Journalista.)