Digital Manga Steps To the Forefront

After copublishing a series of strong-selling manga titles with Dark Horse, Digital Manga, a successful licenser and packager of manga for the U.S. market, is stepping out of the background to publish its own titles. And that's not all. Hikaru Sasahara, the president and founder of Digital Manga, told PW the company also runs Akadotretail.com, an online retail site offering Asian books and pop merchandise. DM also owns akadot.com, an online news service, and there's Pop Japan (Popjapantravel.com), a travel agency catering to U.S. anime/manga fans looking to visit Japan. And, of course, Sasahara continues to act as a scout and rights agent representing a number of big-budget Japanese film and animation properties to Hollywood studios.

Currently Digital Manga is the copublisher (along with Dark Horse) of Trigun (50,000 copies), Berserk (27,000 copies) and Hellsing (about 40,000 copies), three of the top-selling manga in the country. The company will begin publishing its own line in the spring, issuing 15 titles this year including a series of nonfiction manga. The company had plans to publish digital versions of Japanese comic. But digital comics stalled and Sasaharu noticed that "the manga sections in bookstores just kept growing," so DM switched its focus to print.

Japanese-born Sasaharu's family business is animation. His father founded a small anime studio in Japan in the 1930s that continues today. But he has lived in the U.S. for more than 30 years. "I know what people want to read," he told PW. "No one has quite my background for understanding the two cultures." In 2003, he began working with Michael Richardson, president of Dark Horse Comics, to publish manga for the U.S. market, locating and licensing the best Japanese-language manga to co-publish.

For its own line, Digital is publishing what Sasaharu calls "educational" manga that include biographical titles on Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, Anne Frank and Beethoven. There's also a line of "poli-manga" that will feature potentially controversial titles on Marilyn Monroe and JFK and another on North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il, which Sasaharu claims has sold more than 400,000 copies in South Korea. There's also a line of about 25 how-to draw manga titles.

Digital Manga's sales tripled in 2003, and Sasaharu is confident about the future of Asian pop culture in the U.S. He compares the manga market to the Japanese gaming market. Twenty years ago, he told PW, the U.S. game market was very small. "No one would have thought gaming would grow like it has in the U.S.," Sasaharu said. "Now it's bigger in the U.S. than in Japan." And he expects a similar growth pattern for manga.

"The U.S. and Japan are converging on culture," he explained. "We listen to the same music, wear the same fashion, eat the same junk food, have the same mentality. The notion that manga is a fad is just the wrong perception."