Manga at the Con

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on February 28, 2006 Sign up now!

by Kai-Ming Cha and Calvin Reid, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 2/28/2006

Netcomics's Heewoon Chung

Manga may not have been the focus of the New York Comic-Con, but it was certainly well represented. The big manga publishers were all on hand, and it was difficult to walk very far without encountering a cosplayer or anime- and manga-connected merchandise. Indeed, one of the biggest publishing stories of the convention—the move of Fred Gallagher's very popular Megatokyo from Dark Horse to DC's CMX line for the fourth volume—involved a manga property, and an OEL manga property at that.

Betsy Mitchell and Dallas Middaugh at Del Rey Manga were hyped about School Rumble—"this is our big book for this year"—a comical, not quite shojo, not –quite shonen manga; and Air Gear by the manga artist currently known as Oh Great! Tokyopop announced more prose novels (Gundam Seed, Gravitation and Love Hina among them); a long list of new licensed manga (Loveless and GTO: The Early Years); and rolled out a lot more OEL (21 titles). Viz is celebrating the 10th anniversary of Pokemon with a bunch of projects. They're adding Drifting Classroom by Umezu to their Signature line; he's known in Japan as the Stephen King of manga. Viz has also been offering more prose works and plans a Rurouni Kenshin novel in October and a Naruto novel in November.

The were panels on yaoi (or boys' love) and manhwa (Korean comics), which provided useful initiations into a couple of niches within the manga niche. Moderated by PWCW's Sunyoung Lee, the Saturday panel on Korean manhwa featured CPM soonjung (shojo) author Sook Kim, Tokyopop's Jeremy Ross and Heewoon Chung from Korean comics publisher Netcomics. The manhwa panel offered a fascinating look at the Korean comics industry, essentially a former print industry that has migrated almost entirely to the Web. Chung described an industry that has been transformed by the Korean love of technology. Manhwa publishers now overwhelmingly offer inexpensive online subscription access (roughly 25 cents a chapter) to tens of thousands of manhwa volumes and publish print editions of only the most popular online titles. The well-attended yaoi panel that followed—informatively called "Brokeback Manga"—moderated by PWCW's Kai-Ming Cha, featured CPM yaoi author Youka Nitta (Embracing Love?); Tokyopop editor Lillian Diaz-Przybyl; and Masumi O'Donnell of CPM's Be Beautiful yaoi imprint. The panelists provided a historical perspective on a fast-growing category: books about beautiful boys obsessed with other beautiful boys, created overwhelmingly by women for women.

And a year after scaling back its manga publishing by nearly 80%, ADV Manga, part of one of the largest suppliers of Japanese anime in the U.S., is looking to find recovery and growth. ADV's Chris Oarr said the company will work to link its manga titles more closely to their anime siblings. ADV is publishing the manga Neon Genesis Evangelion: Angelic Days (it also has the anime) and the anime Full Metal Panic is also coming this year. Paradoxically by scaling back, Oarr claims, ADV is "selling more manga units by selling fewer titles. Trees aren't dying for no reason."