New Manga House Debuts This Summer
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on April 17, 2007 Sign up now!
by Kai-Ming Cha, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 4/17/2007
There's a new manga publisher in town. Aurora Publishing, a subsidiary of the Japanese publisher, Ohzora, debuts this summer with two titles, a new yaoi imprint and plans to introduce a new shojo genre aimed at older teen girls.
The new titles include Walkin' Butterfly, a girls comic (shojo manga), and Hate to Love You by popular yaoi manga-ka Makoto Tateno, a guest at last year's Otakon convention in Baltimore. Hate to Love You, a one-volume title, will introduce Aurora's yaoi imprint, Deux. And Aurora's general manager, Mikako Ogata, also plans to bring a new genre of girls comics to the U.S. called Teens Love, mature romance stories intended for an older female audience. Teens Love is Aurora's attempt at attracting a female readership that isn't into yaoi, but is ready for more visually stimulating romance. "It's a little bit explicit," Ogata explained. "It's love stories and relationships, but sexy, a little bit erotic. Girls here don't have anything like that."
Ogata intends to target the late teens with Aurora's shojo manga and yaoi, although she said she hopes women in their 20s will also be interested in the publisher's books. Yaoi , also called BL, or boys' love, is a genre about men in relationships with men, generally created by women for women.
Based in Torrance, Calif., Aurora will publish six titles in 2007, three shojo titles under Aurora and three yaoi from Deux. Aside from the June releases, slated in time for Anime Expo, Aurora and its Deux imprint plan to release two more books in August and the last two books of the year in October or November. Titles include Flock of Angels, a shojo mystery, and Nightmares for Sale, which Ogata describes as a horror work similar to Pet Shop of Horrors. Deux titles include Spring Fever and I Shall Never Return, a yaoi series with an original video animation released direct to the home market, or OVA, with the same title that was licensed by Media Blasters, another U.S. manga publisher. Ogata hopes to do some cross promotion with Media Blasters.
A well-established, mid-level publisher in Japan, Ohzora is the licensor of such properties as the Project X series, Pet Shop of Horrors, and the Harlequin manga line—licensed for U.S. publication to Digital Manga Publishing, Tokyopop and Dark Horse, respectively. Ogata said that these properties will remain with the current licensees. "As long as the contracts remains effective, Aurora will not publish any of these," she said. "But once [the contracts are] terminated, Aurora will have the first refusal of any titles that Ohzora possesses."
Like others in the manga field in the U.S., Aurora plans to license from other Japanese companies as well, and parent company Ohzora will handle the negotiations. In the U.S., Aurora and Deux books will be distributed by Diamond Book Distribution "in all markets," Ogata said.
Ogata believes that the future growth of manga in America depends on the expansion of the entire market by reaching a new audience. "Most publishers put out so many titles per month," Ogata said. "But only the big titles like Naruto are selling really well. There are no mid-level sales books." The only genre that Ogata sees doing consistently well is yaoi. "You can expect sales of 10,000 copies for each book, but that's the only genre [like that]," she said.
