There’s a nice, meaty interview with Tokyopop publisher Mike Kiley over at ICv2 with lots of interesting nuggets on original graphic novels, Tokyopop’s balance between licensed and original material, and cautious speculation on what might be the next big thing. Some of my favorite bits:
“It comes down to whether the books suck or not. I confess to a little anxiety over what the hardcore otaku community might think of books that look a little different, or that told stories slightly different. At the end of the day it’s a very sophisticated readership. If the books are good, if they look good, if the story’s are compelling, if they’re told in a manga-fied way people buy them. Those books have the potential to be extremely successful in terms of raw numbers when measured against some of the more classic licensed books, in my opinion.”
Not sucking is a really excellent baseline goal for any publisher. It was interesting to read that the mid-list for OGNs actually moves higher numbers than the mid-list for licensed stuff. (That might be a function of the licensed stuff forming a much larger pool, and it might also have to do with the vigorous promotion Tokyopop has given its OGNs.)
What is manga, though, Mr. Kiley?
“Defining all of it as having something manga-like about it is sometimes a challenge. And that’s why some of our original books will be easily identifiable as manga and will be directly embraced by the current manga readership. Other books that we publish, people are going to sit on the floor in the manga section and open them up and really be confused, ‘What is this?’ That’s okay. That’s part of the process of all of us trying to figure out what manga really means to the consumers of manga in the United States.”
I must confess that I’ve never seen the legendary gaggle of children sitting on a bookstore floor. I have seen male twenty-somethings reading Marvel and DC trades in the café, then putting the copies back on the shelves before they leave the store.
Back on the subject of Tokyopop’s OGN creators, Svetlana Chmakova, creator of Dramacon, will be taking part in a special event in Toronto called “TRIPLE THREAT: A Manga, Superhero, Videogame extravaganza!”
I saw Dramacon on a recent new releases list, but I haven’t seen a copy of it in a bookstore yet. Has it actually been distributed, or was this another case of a manga publisher front-loading its listings at the beginning of the month, regardless of when the titles actually come out?