After picking up three manga licenses dropped last year by ADV Manga, Tokyopop plans new translations of Kozue Amano’s Aria, Nanae Chrono’s Peacemaker Kurogane, and Kazuko Higashiyama and Sakura Kinoshita’s Tactics. And the publisher also licensed Aqua, the prequel to Aria, and Peace Maker, the prequel to Peacemaker Kurogane.
This set of acquisitions fits Tokyopop’s strategy of licensing several manga by the same creator. “We first started doing this based on the success of CLAMP,” said Tokyopop editor Lillian Diaz-Przybyl, pointing out the superstar all-female manga collective. “We thought the way to build a franchise here is to build a fan base for a particular artist or group of artists, so we tried to pick up things from the same artist and become specialists in artists.”
While ADV chose to license only the sequel series, Tokyopop saw the prequels as a key part of the package. “We very consciously tried to pick up things American fandom had never seen,” Diaz-Przybyl said. “If we had the beginning part of a series, hopefully that would push sales up on the second half of the story,” she explained. “There is a reason why ADV stopped publishing these series. They were not a marketing success. We hope with a relaunch, this is going to start things over from the beginning and give it a fresh look.”
Peace Maker debuted in August, and Diaz-Przybyl said Peacemaker Kurogane won’t be published until all five volumes of Peace Maker are out. “The first Peace Maker series ends in a massive climax,” she said, “and I think it would be a little bit of an anticlimax to jump ahead in the story.”
Aqua and Aria, on the other hand, will overlap: vol. 1 of Aqua was published October 9, vol. 1 of Aria will be published in December, and vol. 2 of Aqua in February. The two series tell the story of a girl who wants to be a gondolier on Mars, which has been reshaped to resemble Venice. “It’s an easy series to overlook, just because it is so slow paced, nothing over the top and sexy,” Diaz-Przybyl said. “The pacing is really beautiful, the art is fantastic. It’s just a really relaxing read.” While Aria was never a top seller for ADV, Diaz-Przybyl said, “the people who are into it are really into it, and they are expecting a high level of quality and the rest of the story.”
Other publishers have tried—with varying success—to release manga series based on the popularity of the creator. Dark Horse has five series in their collection by Kazuo Koike, and CMX will release The Palette of 12 Secret Colors by Nari Kusakawa, the manga creator behind CMX's Recipe for Gertrude.
The problem is that bookstores usually shelve manga by title, not author. “Getting readers to make the connections can be really difficult,” said Diaz-Przybyl. Even incorporating the author’s name into the title, as Tokoyopop did with Mitsukazu Mihara’s books, didn’t help; booksellers still shelved them by series title.
Diaz-Przybyl hasn’t given up. “I do think we have the evidence, marketing-wise and research-wise, that people do develop a taste for a certain artist,” she said. And Fans want to know about other series that their favorite artists are working on, she said. “I think that it’s a valid strategy, but we haven’t hit on how to do it yet.”
