Love Manga Rules: Talking with David Taylor

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on May 9, 2006 Sign up now!

by Calvin Reid, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 5/9/2006

For hard-core manga fans, comics journalists prowling for information or anyone who may have just discovered David Taylor's blog Love Manga, there really couldn't be anything worst than the first post on Love Manga on April 9 of this year.

"Well I was going to do some more posts," wrote Taylor, "but... as it stands this is the last post I’m writing for Love Manga." Say what? After faithful readers had choked on their morning coffee, they realized they would have to face the fast-expanding world of English-language manga without Taylor's thoughtful commentary on it. In little over a year, the London-based Taylor transformed Love Manga into the place to go for all manner of trade information and general discussion about manga in English translation, or manga back in Japan for that matter.

My own disappointment over the site's final post is almost purely selfish. I can't begin to count all the stuff I learned on the site, information that I subsequently turned into articles for the online publication you're reading right now. And Love Manga attracted comics professionals as well as new artists, from Queenie Chan and Rivkah to Rikki Simons, Jake Forbes and many others. Like a very smoothly produced Internet talk show, Taylor provided news, informed and civil commentary, endless lists of new and interesting titles and even celebrity guests. The site will be missed tremendously.

Once I resigned myself to life without Love Manga, PWCW immediately contacted Taylor and got him to answer a few questions about starting Love Manga, the growth of the English-language manga market and what he's got planned for the future—including a new and improved Love Manga down the road and, knock on wood, a possible visit to next year's New York Comic-con.

PW Comics Week: Tell us about your background—particularly the source of your high manga I.Q.

David Taylor: Contrary to what a lot people believe from Love Manga, I'm actually English—a Londoner through and through—which in some way allowed me to have this unique outlook on the translated manga industry. I had spent the last seven years working for a big children's book publisher (who ironically are just branching out into the graphic novel/manga market), which helped temper my consumer demands with the reality of how a generic publisher really works.

Put those two things together and add in a driven passion for all things sequential-art-based over the last seven years, and you start to get a clearer picture [of my comics reading], but it’s not all manga based.

As did a lot of people my age, I started out with the more traditional Western comics. I was bought the occasional Batman or Fantastic Four when I was a kid, which I read and enjoyed, but I didn't really consider the idea that I should be consistently reading them week in, week out. Instead the [English comics] Beano, Dandy and Eagle—especially Eagle—were my compulsions.

When I broke into the novelty of buying goods myself, it was the odder imprints and small-press works that stoked my imagination—and still does to this day, but it took getting together with my wife, Immelda, that drew me into the more exotic manga books.

I've always had a penchant for Eastern art over the West, though I seemed to have been stuck in the Subcontinent when I met Immelda. After melding her manga collection (Silent Mobius, Dirty Pair and always Blade of the Immortal) into my meager comics collection, it began to drag me into my oriental passion.

Fast forward seven years, and that small library of manga has exploded into well over 1,000 volumes of translated works which sit happily alongside our manga art books, books on manga and all manner of reference works eagerly devoured in our quest to further our understanding of this addictive medium.

PWCW: When did you begin blogging about manga and when did you start the Love Manga site?

DT: It was one of those "I've got a really good idea" thoughts that snowballed a bit out of control. If I was actually in a sane mood, it would have been instantly disregarded as a very bad idea. But with no particular care or attention paid to how I was going to do this, I jumped in just over a year ago and started writing.

In a very short time I came to realize that this was quickly going to spiral into something a lot bigger then I originally intended. I'd have to make some conscious decisions, such as moving from Blogger to my own Wordpress site (best decision ever!) and even picking a theme for the site which didn't look a complete mess.

I've always been interested in ways to use the Internet—I am a techie after all—and blogging was becoming all the rage. We even had our own comics blogosphere which I took great delight in lurking on. I wanted to have somewhere I could talk about manga with like-minded people, but in an environment that I had some control over. At the time, a blog seemed the ideal way to go.

PWCW: Why did you start blogging and when did you start focusing on the U.S. market? I assume this was when there wasn't a lot of information available about manga outside of Japan.

DT: I was actually quite slow on the uptake really. I knew right from the outset that Love Manga had a specific agenda to follow. Talk about manga—to be more specific, talk about translated manga. This wasn't a snobbish decision to ignore the original manga market in the East but more of a concern that my level of knowledge would be inadequate to hold anything more than just a superficial discussion.

But you would be right in saying there wasn't a huge amount of dedicated manga information on the Internet. We did of course have great sites like Anime News Network, Anime on DVD and Pata's own Irresponsible Pictures, to highlight a few. But as the names suggest, for at least two of them manga wasn't the primary agenda. In a way that summed up a lot of how I felt about manga at that time. There was a period about five or 10 years ago when books were definitely not the flavor of the month where children or young adults were concerned. When you move that into the anime/manga world it is no surprise that anime was the dominant form.

In the U.K. we had such helpful companies as Manga U.K.—a company that doesn’t produce manga but anime—which helped foster a period of intense confusion as to what everything meant. No matter where you looked, manga was here but it seemed that people only wanted to talk about anime.

Today I expect people do not need to separate the two. I strongly believe that there is room to look at both in a purely isolated fashion and that is partly what I had in mind when I created Love Manga. It is not an attempt to malign or disregard the anime market but rather to put the emphasis firmly on manga. For the ultimate comprehensive view, you have to look at both—and not just that, but Japanese culture as a whole. For my little sandbox, though, manga is king.

But it has been known for even Love Manga to stop at the mention of a Witch Hunter Robin episode.

PWCW: Can you describe the U.S. manga market—how it has changed and grown during your time blogging?

DT: Tremendously, exponentially and rather dramatically. Pick any of those and you would barely have scratched the surface of the changes that the U.S. and U.K. manga markets have gone through in just my time at the helm of Love Manga. I think we are still only in its infancy here and we can all expect a lot more to happen in the near future.

For a good indicator one should look at the two big players in the market, Viz Media and Tokyopop. Both are not the same publishers they were when I started and not all the changes are immediately obvious or have had their full effects felt yet.

Since the end of 2004 to the present, manga's presence in the West has gone through an explosion. The growth in the U.S. was so staggering that it was impossible for even the more stoic U.K. publishers to ignore. In 2004, according to Bookscan, manga was a part-time guest to their graphic novel charts. In 2005 you'd find it hard to spot a non-manga title outside of a lucrative film deal, and now in 2006 you’re going to be hard-pressed to find anything other than a manga title with a corresponding Cartoon Network showing of its partner anime. 2005 was really the year of manga stamping its authority all over bookstores. There is still a ways to go, I think but Tokyopop's recent joining at the hip with HarperCollins is another step in the right direction. 2006, though, is all about (I shudder at the use of the word) synergy. Viz Media proved beyond a shadow of a doubt with Naruto that running a property in both manga and anime is almost a license to print money. The trick now though is to repeat that or better it, with the most likely candidate, Bleach, next up.

So: Is the world (mainstream) ready for manga? I'd rather spin that around and ask: Is manga ready for the World? With all its success and popularity, some unwanted questions are slowly being asked of manga. The cultural divide between the U.S. and Japan (less prevalent between Japan and Europe) is so vast—in particular with regard to sexuality—that innocent concepts can easily offend the U.S. Toward the end of 2005 and certainly in 2006 a small amount of often laughable stories began to appear about horrified parents realizing what their children's manga really contained. But whilst it may be low-key and humorous, it is something that I think will have to be looked at in the future, be it a united consensus on age-ratings or some other form of education for parents.

Though if you wanted to neatly side-step that entire can of worms, then how about [original English-language] manga created from a non-Japanese point of view—surely that would be safer? Outside of the veritable explosion of translated manga, well, everywhere, Tokyopop's original [English-language] manga line alongside Seven Seas' world manga and the much-maligned Antarctic Press [two U.S. companies that publish OEL manga] exemplify the most fun and fundamental change in manga over the last year. I say fundamental because [heated debates about original manga] have evoked the most controversy as everyone and their pet tried to come to an agreement on just what manga is. I like to go through the whole process of categorizing this as manga and this as just a plain comic, but at the end of the day, if the story and art is good, f then I'll enjoy reading it...

PWCW: What has been most satisfying to you about Love Manga and its relationship to its audience and the category.

DT: The fact that Love Manga has an audience—really, no kidding. I'm constantly surprised that so many people read the site on a daily basis, and feel inclined to participate in the discussions. Anyone reading my site will know that I don't write in any particular professional manner but rather in a more conversational style, as if I were talking with a group of friends. In this way I hope to encourage people to join in.

More satisfying were the type of people joining in. I was very happy that many industry-related people felt comfortable enough to want to write on my site., It is extremely satisfying and does my ego a whole world of good.

But most important to me is that people used the site as a source of research. Be it the week's new titles, how a title placed in a particular sales chart or the "Best of 2005" section—the most viewed section of Love Manga—it's these sort of things that keep people coming back to the site, which in turn makes it all the more worthwhile for me.

PWCW: Why are you logging out of the manga blogosphere now, and what are your plans—manga, blogging or whatever—for the future?

DT: Purely all personal reasons really. I’ve just moved to another job and life itself was getting really busy and something had to give. This is the problem I see with blogging. I feel I should be offering up useful or new content at least once a day, and I was finding it hard to manage even that. It didn't seem fair to all the people that regularly checked my site to see the same old last post still sitting there.

This isn’t permanent. I enjoyed myself far too much to give this up now. I've met so many new people and groups that I would have never come in contact with just as a pure reader. This is a little break, and once I think I can achieve a balance it will be back into full swing again.

Though things will be different. The site URL, for one, will change (actually already has! lovemanga.co.uk) but the focus of the blog will also be subtly different. No reviews still, there are just far too many better people reviewing manga—though anyone is welcome to ask my opinion on what I like. Rather, the site will take on a more reference feel. I want to try and make the site more useful for those seeking relevant information about manga, be it where to buy, what’s coming out or purely links to good reviews. I am also looking at trying to push the U.K. scene more—that is something I take particular pride in. All very exciting.

PWCW: Is Pata bringing his blog Irresponsible Pictures back to life because you're shutting down? Are you two the Batman and Robin of manga blogging?

DT: It is definitely tag-team blogging; the L to his Light or something like that. It isn’t anything consciously decided between the two of us—though I am happy to see his return. Whilst we're on the subject, it would seem appropriate to mention Brigid’s Manga Blog (http://www.manga4kids.com/wordpress/) which over the recent weeks has gone on a real posting blitz. There are not many of us, but what is out there is very good.

PWCW: Do you get to the U.S. much and can we expect you to be here in the future?

DT: No is the simple answer. Traveling abroad is something I’ve just started doing recently. I’ve only ever been to the U.S. once, and that was for Anime Expo 05. I thoroughly enjoyed my time there and everyone I met was fantastically nice. I’m planning/hoping to go to Japan later on the year, which leaves next year free for lots of U.S. conventions. The priority, though, is to get the to New York Comic-Con, it's so simple and near it seems foolish to miss it.

PWCW: Name a couple of manga you're hyped about reading now.

DT: Oh, where to start. Off the top of my head, I'd say Dark Horse's revamped Crying Freeman has to be up there. I am a big Kazuo Koike fan and an even bigger Ryoichi Ikegami fan, so it is almost a no-brainer for me (much like Wounded Man—no one said I had to have any taste in my manga choices!). I was fully anticipating to still harbor love for my original Viz editions but so far, [after seeing] the first volume that Dark Horse released, Viz can keep their version. I'll quickly tack on Lady Snowblood. Volume 3 arrived a couple of days back and got devoured instantly in much the same way the new Path of the Assassin will be.

Dragon Head and Eden from Tokyopop and Dark Horse, respectively, are always going to do well with me. In my cheerful outlook on life, I always like a good apocalyptic tale and both of them dish out tension and harsh reality in spades.

I should say Death Note, Monster and Fullmetal Alchemist from Viz Media next. Every new volume is a welcome addition to my manga shelves. But I think that is really cheating as I know [in advance] I'm going to like them.. So instead I'll plump for Four Constables from Dr Master and JoJo's Bizarre Adventures from Viz Media, two titles which I wasn't expecting to like but am now an ardent convert to.

Really that is just such a small and very heavily male selection, but I could quickly turn this answer into a long list of titles and no one wants to read that. If push comes to shove, if either Kazuo Koike or Ryoichi Ikegami are involved in the creation process, there is a good chance you will find me reading it. ^.^