Forum - View topicTokyopop recent quality issues
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RestLessone
 Posts: 1426 Location: New York |
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Tokyopop’s lack of quality has bothered me. Their translations where hit and miss depending on the series, but I was fine with them. I avoid Tokyopop titles now, though I’m debating whether or not to get the last volume of Crescent Moon directly for them. I guess part of it stems from the fact that they don’t have any deals with manga publishers in Japan. VIZ Media, Del Rey, and Yen Press all have that, enabling them to get popular series. Tokyopop once in awhile gets something like Fruits Basket that’s big, but once it dies down…The fact that they didn’t put time into making the last volumes of the series high quality doesn’t seem like a good sign.
It's pretty unfortunate. Tokyopop usually had color images with series that were popular or they wanted more interest in, I guess. The Saiyuki series would sometimes get color pages, sometimes not. The first volume of Remote, Gravitation EX, and Trash (though why they put any in that one, seeing as it's a oneshot that showed no signs of ever continuing in Japan, is a mystery; maybe because the author of Fake created it) all had color inserts, with Remote getting quite a few. However, I've stopped buying from Tokyopop for the time being, so who knows if they're still being printed like that. Those copies were from months ago. Del Rey seems to have more, but I really haven’t bought many from them, despite the quality, and Free Collars Kingdom seemed to originally have colored title pages with the chapter listings. Stuff like Naruto, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Bleach can get away with it because of their popularity, though my editions of Wolf’s Rain have color; VIZ isn't really that consistent. It seems Dark Horse does them depending on popularity, but I’m not sure. Gantz has color, but The Ring (or at least my edition, which I purchased awhile ago, and who knows if it originally did) does not. Honestly, Yen Press seems to be the only company consistently including color pages, but it isn’t a surprise considering their resources. |
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RestLessone
Posts: 1426 Location: New York |
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Ack, sorry for the double post. It won't let me remove it, and I honestly have no idea how it happened.
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darkhunter
 Posts: 2992 Location: Los Angelas |
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TP manga are now 13 dollar and the quality is much lower? If they sold these toilet paper manga at 5 bucks a pop, it would be more reasonable.
US manga industry is pretty much dead imo. The economy is down and nobody is buying manga like the used to back in 2005. A recent border express were selling manga at buy one get one free and still there was like only 1 person there browsing. |
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Moomintroll
 Posts: 1600 Location: Nottingham (UK) |
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Tokyopop might be pretty much moribund but Viz are expanding at a rate of knots, Vertical have announced their plans to grow their manga range over the next couple of years, Dark Horse, Yen, Del Rey and CMX are all continuing to license new stuff and there's more manga coming out from indie comics publishers then ever before. I'm sure some of the smaller publishers in the market are feeling the pinch but it's a bit early to claim that the sky is falling.
Actually, that's exactly what they are doing. The problem Tokyopop has is that they aren't buying manga like they used to back in 2007. |
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The Xenos
 Posts: 1519 Location: Boston |
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Planetes was a fantastic book from them. I forgot that little mistake, but it's very nice they fixed it.
Meanwhile, as you can see from my icon, a favorite manga is Blame!. TokyoPop released some color pages in the first and/or maybe second book. Yet even bigger were complaints that the contrast and brightness of the art was way too dark. I had a Japanese copy and it was noticeable, especially in the detailed dark landscapes of the book This seemed to be fixed in later volumes. Though we didn't get any more color pages and as usual those were a bit murky and of course not as nice. |
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zawa113
 Posts: 7358 |
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My god, how did I forget that one? It seemed even worse on the color pages that weren't printed in color, but I'm thinking of Cardcaptor Sakura in particular right now. I got the first, flipped editions for the first 6 volumes and got the normal un-flipped version for the Master of the Clow. I remember the first 6 versions were kinda light at times, almost too light, but I preferred them being a tad light over being too dark to see things at time, I got the first ed flipped versions on purpose to avoid that once I saw Master of the Clow's books. Know I had that issue in CCS:MotC, very annoying, did the re-prints of CCS in un-flipped have that issue too? |
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kyokun703
 Posts: 2505 Location: Orgrimmar |
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Ooo, good news!!
From the Amazon discussion, from a Tokyopop rep: "A few months ago, a number of you were discussing the new paper in our manga -- I believe J. Gebhard began the conversation -- and I responded that we were exploring our paper options since we made the paper change in March. I'm here to report that our printer has now found a mill in the U.S. that will produce the equivalent of our 50-lb paper -- paper that is nearly identical in quality to what we used before we made the switch this past March. Books that will go on sale in October will have this new paper." Yay! |
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lys
 Posts: 1011 Location: mitten-state |
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More info on the paper-upgrade here.
I'm so happy to hear this from Tokyopop. The switch will start with the October releases, which means my long-awaited volume 6 of VB Rose will be printed on nice paper!! Hopefully, this also means things are stabilizing for them. Tokyopop may have slowed down its releases and licensing-acquisitions from the insane pace it used to be, but they are still licensing and publishing new series that I'm really excited for! As for colour pages: in my experience, most Japanese releases don't include these in the collected formats; only for the initial magazine releases. So, while it's definitely really nice to have that extra bonus feature in the books released here, I certainly don't expect it from any company. I can only think of two manga in my collection with colour pages, and one of those is from Tokyopop (the one-shot Galaxy Girl, Panda Boy. and what lovely colour pages they are, too!!). |
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Jump Guru
 Posts: 71 Location: United States |
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You have to look at the bright side. I got a load of Dragon Ball and Black Jack volumes from Kim Dong Publishing in Vietnam. They print their stuff on the most CHEAPEST paper EVER. Its so thin the ink bleed a bit through the other side. (its officially licensed) |
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murph76
 Posts: 3291 Location: Akron, OH |
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I'm late to this news. I wonder if they will be reprinting Fruits Basket Vol. 23 using the heavier paper? I might consider picking up another copy if so. To me, that one skinny volume looks strange sitting next to the others, because the others have been so uniform and consistent. |
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littlegreenwolf
 Posts: 4796 Location: Seattle, WA |
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I'd just hold out waiting then. They're more than likely to reprint it with the new paper once the original release sells out, which it probably will. No reason for them to go back to the other paper mill for a random reprint. |
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KrisEllieOphi
 Posts: 111 Location: Texas |
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Just to nag on TP's quality a bit....
The most recent volume of Tsubasa: Those With Wings had a page that was out of order (the page was backwards). The series (meaning both volumes so far) has had inconsistent spelling in names and locations. Dialog was given to an incorrect character. Grammar (spelling, punctuation) was off in several locations. Some of the sentence structure was horrible. I don't get it. They pay professional editors, right? These aren't freakin' 1,000 page novels here. Why is there such a disregard for simple quality? |
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HyugaHinata
 Posts: 3505 |
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They need to hire me. I translate, translate-check, and edit my own work. I'd refuse to work without furigana though. I'm not wasting 5 years of my life on something that was made obsolete with furigana. 
They could do away with all editors/English adaptation specialists. The only problem is that I'd never be able to work to anyone else's schedule. If I could set my own deadlines, it'd be golden. |
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Jaymie
Posts: 915 |
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That's another reason why I absolutely can't stand Tokyopop. They make more typing errors than all of the other major publishers combined. It's completely unnecessary. They wonder why they're losing so much money, but isn't it obvious? For one thing, the only major shonen title of their's that I can think of at the moment is Rave Master. That's not a good sign at all. Then they have their questionable CEO, D.J. Milky, running around spending thousands on that Princess Ai crap that no one cares about. Do we really need Princess Ai pencil cases and notebooks? He's just like one of those teenage girls who can't draw manga for her life, but is desperately trying anyway. Except that he's in a position of power, and he can get away with pushing out crap even at the expense of his company. They thought they could save costs by changing the paper, but didn't they realize that the new paper would turn off all of their customers? Instead of saving them money, it will make them lose their money and their small puddle of a fanbase. Another problem of mine is how hard they try to push their name out there. Is it really necessary to ruin their titles' covers by adding that unnecessary Tokyopop logo? And the spines have that ugly red and white mark. Why can't they be like Yen Press and have one small logo on the spine, and leave it at that? Even Viz's is pretty small, and at least their imprint logos don't take up an entire inch of space. I hate how all of their bad products flood the market while their good ones go out-of-print, which makes it impossible to find them. With a normal publisher, good products flood the market and bad ones are hard-to-find, as it should be. |
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Tamaria
 Posts: 1512 Location: De Achterhoek |
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The lack of shounen would have been fine if they had something else to focus on. I guess they still have series that appeal to teenage girls, but many of those are already finished or on a hiatus. They simply don't have many quality titles to support the loads of garbage they licensed. Not to mention all the good titles they cancelled... And yeah, the robo-fish-thingy is awful. I don't like Viz that much, because some of their logos are exceptionally ugly (new Signature Line, ew). I personally like the way DelRay and CMX do it. Their logo's may be fairly large, but they change the colours to match the spine. At the same time they're still consistent, so putting several of their series next to eachother on a shelve looks pretty cool. Tokyopop puts red on pink and purple, yuck. |
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