A Year of Growth at Seven Seas

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on September 5, 2006 Sign up now!

by Kai-Ming Cha, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 9/5/2006

Combining a love and understanding of Japanese manga, savvy use of the Web and a skillfully produced list featuring original and now licensed manga, Seven Seas Entertainment, a small independent U.S. manga publisher, has carved out an impressive niche for itself and its readers in a U.S. manga market dominated by licensed manga series from Tokyopop, Viz, Del Rey and others.

Launched in 2005 by Jason DeAngelis and Dallas Middaugh (who left the company to join Del Rey Manga), Seven Seas manga specialized in original manga, or Original English Language manga—comics created by non-Japanese artists that uses visual and narrative styles typical of Japanese comics—as the material was beginning to be called. The term was becoming popular and U.S. manga giant Tokyopop was beginning to aggressively produce and promote OEL titles like Steady Beat by Rivkah, Dramacon by Svetlana Chmakova and War Craft by Richard A. Knaak and Jae-Hwan Kim.

Seven Seas has published 13 titles so far and has made popular hits out of such titles Amazing Agent Luna, No Man's Land, Aoi House and Last Hope. The company has plans for eight more titles for the end of this year and the beginning of 2007, including three Japanese licenses.

Seven Seas (gomanga.com) has built a reputation for skillful use of the Web, making use of online previews and serializations, interviews with creators, Flash animation and the Go Manga community, a lively online community with forums for each of its titles. "Our Web site has been one of the biggest contributing factors to our growth," says Seven Seas founder and chief creative officer Jason DeAngelis. "Really you just have to give readers a reason to come back to your site."

To produce Seven Seas titles, DeAngelis has set up a virtual studio of sorts. Artists were originally headquartered in the Philippines while he and his editorial staff worked from the U.S. Now Seven Seas also works with artists in Australia, Canada Malaysia, the U.K., the U.S. and Japan. They do prepress in the Philippines and handle editorial discussions and meetings via instant messaging and e-mails. Seven Seas is also intent on turning its material into films and other media; the house is represented in Hollywood by Circle of Confusion, which is shopping around a number of its properties.

"They're doing everything right," says Kuo-Yu Liang, v-p at Diamond Comics Distribution. Liang says that includes everything from producing original manga in the right-to-left format of the translated original Japanese manga that dominates the U.S. market to offering manga downloads for portable devices like Sony's PSP, practices now considered de rigueur on most manga publishers' Web sites. DeAngelis has a full-time Flash animator on staff; his team created an animated preview for No Man's Land, an original manga series written by DeAngelis, that's available for viewing at the company's site and on Youtube.com.

The publisher created a Flash animation version of Diva v. Poe, an illustrated children's picture book by Kurt Hassler coming from Seven Seas this October. In addition to being a children's book author, Hassler is also the graphic novel and manga buyer for Borders Books and Music and is credited with turning the graphic novel category into one of the fastest-growing sections of the bookstore chain. Hassler is also a well-known manga author (he writes under the name Segamu); the second volume of his comics manga fantasy series Sokora Refugees is due from Tokyopop in October. Seven Seas has a strong relationship with Hassler and the company has offered a number of its titles exclusively through Borders.

Upcoming licensed series include Kashimashi, or Girl Meets Girl, a yuri (girls' love) series due in December; and Kodomo no Jikan, which Seven Seas describes as "a little loli," a manga genre involving romance between an older man and a younger girl.

DeAngelis says Seven Seas was supposed to be strictly a publisher of original manga, but he decided "we could bring the same attention to detail and high quality to licensed works as we do to originals." Seven Seas' biggest licensing coup is Boogiepop. "We really owe it to a certain Mr. Isoda of Media Works for our first break into licenses," DeAngelis says. "He was impressed with our vision and passion and granted us the license."

First published in Japan in 1997, Boogiepop and Others by Kouhei Kadano set the foundation for a new genre of prose novel: the "light," or young adult novel. The novel uses fantasy and myth in a high school setting to tell the story of a shinigami (death spirit) called Boogiepop. The Boogiepop franchise boasts more than two million Boogiepop prose novels in print; a feature film and manga adaptation; an original manga series entitled Boogiepop Dual; and an animation series, Boogiepop Phantom. So far, Seven Seas has three Boogiepop licenses. The company began publishing the prose novel in February, followed by the manga adaptation, Boogiepop Doesn't Laugh, in April. Serialization of Boogiepop Dual begins later this month. At the Seven Seas Web site, viewers can read sample chapters from the novel and both manga series, and can view commercials for the subtitled Boogiepop anime.

DeAngelis, who spent who spent six years in Japan studying martial arts, originally used manga as a vehicle to learn Japanese. "After reading the first 30 volumes of Dragonball with dictionary in hand, I was completely hooked," he says. "I read any manga I could get my hands on in the original Japanese." This led DeAngelis to begin translating manga for other American publishers and, eventually, to creating his own material. In addition to No Man's Land, DeAngelis has written such titles as Blade for Barter and Captain Nemo, which are also published by Seven Seas. In fact, several key staffers at Seven Seas are also creators. Senior editor of licensed properties and Webmaster Adam Arnold is also the author of Seven Seas' Aoi House.

Seven Seas will continue its prose publishing with the novel Shinigami no Balad, (Ballad of a Shinigami) an eight-volume serialized novel scheduled to begin in March 2007. Seven Seas is also considering novelized versions of its manga titles, such as Amazing Agent Luna. Other projects include a Speed Racer manga (April 2007), based on the classic anime series but with an original story by Dwayne Alexander Smith and artwork by Elmer Damaso.

"We've gradually managed to carve out a name for ourselves as innovators," says DeAngelis. "And we plan to continue that trend."

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