Love and Comics at Go! Comi Part II

by Kai-Ming Cha, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 6/26/2007

Audrey Taylor and David Wise have been professionally and romantically involved for 10 years, culminating in the launch of their small manga publishing house, Go! Comi, in 2005. This is the second part of an interview with the two (click here for part one) in which they discuss the current licensing situation in Japan as well as the launch of their new original yaoi, The Masque of the Red Death, created by Elfquest creator Wendi Pini.

PW Comics Week How have the challenges facing a small manga publisher changed over the past two years? Or even the past six months?

Audrey Taylor: [The American manga market has] become more and more crowded and more competitive because the [quality of] competition is extremely high. Right now, there are so many companies [already in the market] or companies opening new divisions aimed at the U.S. market.

David Wise: The other thing is that the backlog of series that have been around for years, that have 15-20 volumes, [have been snapped up by U.S. licensors]. We're burning through them faster than they can turn them out. If you want to just release titles on a schedule, there's still a lot of stuff out there. But we can't afford to take chances. We have to license material that we believe in and that we think is going to sell. We're having to go after newer artists and newer series, and there are risks in that. There's the risk that a series may get canceled early in its run. There's the risk that the mangaka [the artist or writer] may drop dead—which is a genuine risk. And there's the risk that the series could go from teen to triple mature in one breathtaking tankobon [which is a common practice in Japanese publishing]. That may be a good way to boost readership in Japan, but it's a problem for us. We don't want to change the age-rating mid-series.

AT: We've been conservative in our age-ratings because we don't want to worry parents. We want them to know that we've rated the books at the [most appropriate] possible rating for the material. But if you rate something Older Teen that could have been rated Teen, you may be letting parents know that you're being careful, but you're also letting the kids know that this is pretty damn cool. I mean, kids love an edgy rating.

DW: All of our titles sold really well for manga that has no anime tie-ins and that are relatively unknown by fans. There were no scanlations [online English translations of unlicensed manga done by fans].

AT: We're kind of picking the diamonds in the rough, the hidden gems. The Internet world is fascinating. It's a mix of Japanese fans and what American fans hear about from the Japanese fans. And there's a strong following in Japan for the S Group—[manga publishers] Shueisha, Hakshensha, Shogakukan. So you can find any of their titles online getting talked about by fans. Then there are the manga magazines with series in them that Japanese fans would love but haven't heard about. We comb everything.

DW: At the same time, we started this company to do original stuff. [When you license] you're kind of at the mercy of the licensor in terms of how you can exploit the properties, how you can promote it—and you have no ownership position in the property. If you look at Tokyopop's cellphone manga, it's all their own original stuff. There's no need for them to get approval from Japan.

When we were looking for [American manga] artists for Almost Legendary Shannon, we were just haunting artist's alley at Yaoicon. What we found were some really good pinup artists, but most of the artists were still very young and they were drawing from the outside in. They hadn't internalized it. Manga was just too new at that time. But now, it's happened.

AT: Manga is not about the shape of the face or the eyes, it's about the spirit imbued in the line itself. There's a certain—I keep saying heart and soul—but it has soul, it has energy, emotion, and it's all in the line.

PWCW: You recently picked Wendy Pini, the creator of the popular Elfquest series, who is both manga-influenced and a mature artist, to work on The Masque of the Red Death, a new original yaoi series aimed at women 17 and older.

DW: Wendy Pini was the first comic artist in the U.S. influenced by manga in the 1960s.

AT: It was mostly her storytelling, her drawing style, too, but really her storytelling was heavily manga influenced.

DW: She created a hugely popular phenomenon [Elfquest] and now wants to get involved in another [newly] popular phenomenon—yaoi. It doesn't get any better than this. We've got Wendy Pini, yaoi overtones and a story aimed at mature readers. There really isn't much of that in Japan. The readership is starting to mature, and one of the complaints we're hearing is that readers—especially female readers—are getting sick of high school romances. People [here in the U.S. say] that they want josei [manga for women in their 20s and up], but it's very culturally specific [to Japan].

AT: Unfortunately, in Japan, young women are expected to grow up to be office ladies—secretaries, assistants. So there's OL manga, there's romance, there's some sports manga and gambling manga. But we've got an audience here [in the U.S.] that wants the same genres they had when they were young, but with more depth, more meat, more complexity. So, more fantasy, science-fiction, science fantasy—everything that's popular.

PWCW: Why are you launching Masque as a Web comic?

DW: We like long, involved series that develop over the course of many tankobon. It's one of the things that appeals to us about manga. So, on a monthly or weekly basis, it would be great to have a print magazine, like Viz's Shonen Jump. But it's just not feasible for us to publish a print magazine of original stuff. In Japan, you have a commuter culture where kids are on trains reading manga and everyone is reading. In America, everyone drives a car. To this generation, the Internet is a lifestyle. For many of them, their first exposure to manga was on the Internet. So the Internet is a logical place for us to go to publish long-continuing stories. We feel that Web comics can be a viable narrative storytelling technique.