Forum - View topicNEWS: Tokyopop Restarts Manga Licensing With Konohana Kitan, Hanger, Futaribeya
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 5920 |
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Minus the bit about bankruptcy being akin to a breakup, one happens as consequence of a choice and in some instances can be seen as good thing.....the other most decidedly isn't. |
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Weazul-chan
 Posts: 625 Location: Michigan |
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TheAnimeRevolutionizer
 Posts: 329 |
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This actually addresses my question entirely. Thank you Zeether. Yeesh, no wonder why the OEL market never caught on... Thanks Tokyopop. blech |
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Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 9838 Location: Virginia |
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TheAnimeRevolutionizer
The problem with the OEL market is that Tokyopop signed newbie writers to what could be considered a "yellow dog contract" (it shouldn't happen to even a yellow dog). My understanding is that they had to completely relinquish the rights to any work Tokyopop published. Tokyopop gave up on the OEL market long before they closed. They didn't actually go bankrupt. While there was some speculation that they were trying to avoid returns from the Borders bankruptcy, Tokyopop simply shut mostly down as the owner felt he had better fish to fry. Even then he didn't give back the rights to the OEL authors. |
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Zalis116
Moderator
 Posts: 6867 Location: Kazune City |
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So from what I gather from this thread, Stu Levy was/is a cackling maniac who liked to stop releasing certain series midway for the sole purpose of torturing the fans and drinking their rage-filled tears. Because surely those decisions couldn't have been made on account of those titles simply not selling very well.
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2545 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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Fair enough, & I agree, but at the same time I can't think of another manga publisher that literally released all but the final volume (or at least final two or three) for numerous titles; even at that point, they might as well just finish them. Titles like Saiyuki Reload & Culdcept had their final volumes saw release before TokyoPop stopped doing manga, & Culdcept's final volume even pre-dated Kodansha pulling their licenses from TP. Hell, B't X's final volume didn't see release until over two years following its last release, & it literally came out just months before TP abandoned manga entirely until now (& at a slightly premium price point, at that, so maybe they were considering finishing up other titles?). Hell, I was literally told by a TP rep, on their own forums back in the day, that employees were betting over whether B't X's final volume would actually see release one day, because "only 8 people bought it". Sure, I guess that may have likely been hyperbole, but at the same time I almost want to believe that the biggest reason why B't X, of all titles, did get finished up years later was simply because there was actual money on the line due to the supposed bet. Granted, I couldn't care less now, because I'm happy B't X got finished, but it doesn't exactly put TP in a shining light. Titles like Samurai Deeper Kyo & Rave Master were lucky to be finished up by Kodansha USA, not to mention Vertical finishing Shonan Junai Gumi, but many others weren't that lucky (I'm guessing TokyoPop's attempted rebranding of GetBackers bombed so badly that Kodansha didn't even want to try touching that manga). Don't mistake me as a TokyoPop hater by any means, because that company did still put out plenty of quality content & I'm still happy to have a number of their releases, but at the same time I can understand where many others are coming from with their hatred for the company. |
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harminia
 Posts: 2000 Location: australia |
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Talking about the closure makes me remember how TP were closing around the time they were set to release the final volume of Hanako & the Terror of Allegory and I was freaking out that they would never release that last volume. I got lucky in that it actually got completed, but it was a pretty short series.
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manapear
Posts: 1525 |
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TP is trash, but I am interested in the BL and GL title. Gat darn.
Their handling of series was back and forth and messy (as much as I loved some of the niche stuff they picked up), but how they treated OEL authors was horrible. I remember someone took that contract to a lawyer and had it dissected, and it was. . . a mess. They were really slick about trying to scam creators out of their own content. |
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ZeetherKID77
 Posts: 981 |
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Kodansha pulling licenses from them was another reason why. The only reason I dislike him is because of his baffling decisions to market Initial D as "the new Speed Racer." Speed Racer was a wacky, unrealistic show about car racing that got popular because of its Americanized release, Initial D is anything but unrealistic (okay, it might bend the rules a bit, but it's still grounded in reality) and has a cultural significance that doesn't benefit from Americanizing the names/adding awful rap music to the anime. |
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lys
 Posts: 1008 Location: mitten-state |
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Ok y'all, I have to take a stand here and say that Tokyopop actually did have some GOOD translations and nice releases, in spite of the many missteps and issues that others have brought up here (I am a snob about lettering and wouldn't give them great marks for that, but no one else has brought that up so you can see how important it is to most people... :) ). I collected a lot of their shoujo manga, and quite a few of those were great. (when comparing their translations with some of the re-translated editions that've come out since from other publishers, there were cases where I still preferred Tokyopop's). And though most people probably don't pay much attention to the graphic design angle either, they also had some really lovely and clever cover and logo designs during a certain span of time (VB Rose (gold foil!), Gakuen Alice (spot gloss!), Portrait of M&N (elegant, matte finish), and Happy Cafe (charming coffee stains :) ) are a few I still adore...) There are many folks in the industry who got their start (or part of it) with Tokyopop and are still doing great work on series you probably read and enjoy today. The quality of these upcoming releases will really be mostly dependent on who they hire to do the work. All that said, the way Tokyopop collapsed here the first time had enough mess and nonsense that I personally think they'd be better off making a fresh start with a new name and brand that doesn't dredge all this stuff up again. (then again, with all the younguns commenting here who had to have this history explained, maybe it'll work out for them after all...) |
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Kalessin
 Posts: 931 |
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From what I've heard of him, I've never gotten the impression that he actively hates fans or is out to get them but rather that he simply doesn't care. He's primarily interested in his own ego and doesn't care about the fans or even necessarily running a business intelligently, so he's perfectly willing to make decisions that treat fans like dirt, but it isn't really his goal to treat them like dirt.
They released a lot of good series, and it's not like they treated them all terribly. IIRC, they're also the ones that really pioneered keeping manga in its original right-to-left format, and thankfully, these days, we rarely have to worry about flipping. It's not like everything that Tokyopop did was terrible. They did have some serious misteps, but they did a lot of good stuff too. IMHO, the biggest problem by far is that they just dropped everything with no warning because Stu decided he wanted to do something else. They left far too many series unfinished, some of which have gotten license-rescued but most of which haven't (or in some cases, even if they have, no new volumes were released). Unfortunately, it's not always possible for a publisher to finish a series (since for better or worse, they are a business and need to stay profitable), but Tokypop left far too many series unfinished unnecessarily. And it's not like all of those series can be gotten via scanlations for the desperate fan to get the rest. Some can and some can't. I certainly wouldn't would be against a new manga publisher entering the fray - especially if they then do a good job - but overall, the current publishers seem to be doing a good job, and Stu has proven that he can't be trusted to run a manga company in a manner that's even going to try to not screw over the fans.
I found it interesting to read Yen Press' release of Fruits Basket, because in some places, Yen Press' translation made choices that bothered me because it didn't match what I remembered from Tokypop's translation (not that it was wrong, just different), whereas in other places, it translated things differently, and it helped clarify things (not necessarily because Tokyopop got it wrong but because what was being translated didn't translate well). An example of the latter would be Toru's father talking about his father "losing his edge" in the Tokypop release, and in Yen Press' release, he said that he had "diminished." Neither choice really makes sense IMHO (it's like they're trying to use a short phrase to describe something that really needs a longer explanation), and I do prefer Tokypop's translation choice, but there's something to be said for having both. Invevitably though, when you can't read and understand the original, you can't really properly judge translations, and it becomes easy to simply prefer the one you read first regardless of which is actually better. That sort of thing happens all the time with fansubs and scanlations when compared with official releases. Similarly, it's not all that hard to have a case where one translation actually does a better job of getting the meaning across, but it doesn't flow as well in English, so the it comes off as worse. Translation is tricky business and that's without even getting into all of the arguments about whether honorifcs and the like should be kept or not. Unrelated to the translation, probably the thing that annoys me the most about Yen Press' Fruits Basket release in comparison to Tokypop's is that all of the mangaka's notes on the extra illustrations are gone. I'm pretty sure that that was because it was based on the newer Japanese release where the mangaka had all of her sidebar stuff stripped out (and I guess that she decided to have the notes on the illustrations stripped out too), but I liked having those notes on the illustrations. So, that's not really Yen Press' fault, but it is something where Tokypop's release was better IMHO. And I sure wish that Yen Press would release it digitally (I assume that they haven't, because they don't have permission to given that they release most stuff digitially now). I prefer reading the physical books, but those can get damaged so easily, and in the long run, I have a far better guarantee of still having access to the series if I have it digitally. But that's a big problem with almost all of Tokypop's releases. A few got license-rescued and ended up in digital form, but not all of those rescued got digital releases, and none of the ones that weren't license rescued can be gotten digitally (not legally anyway). |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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Wow, Tokyopop's coming back in earnest. I knew we should have salted the earth where they lay so that nothing could grow again.
There is a place for optimism, and Tokyopop and Stu Levy are so far from it that even the outskirts of cautious optimism can't be seen with a telescope.
I can grudgingly accept that discontinuing midway a series that's not selling well is a business necessity, but A) I reserve the right to be annoyed about it when it happens to something I'm collecting, and B) Tokyopop did it way more than any other company, which is a pretty sure sign that they're pretty bad at what they're doing, and odds are in more than one way. And discontinuing titles aside, there's a lot of stupid, disrespectful or otherwise bad things he'd done, up to and including the circumstances of Tokyopop ceasing operations. EDIT: Oh, and it's a pity that Futaribeya sounds interesting, because I will never purchase another Tokyopop release of anything as long as I live, I don't care how much I otherwise want it. |
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Agent355
 Posts: 5113 Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready... |
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I never read that letter before. Wow. First of all, trying to make Initial D into a property for kids on par with Speed Racer was a huge miscalculation on their part, and a misunderstanding of the market. I don't think Initial D ever ended up airing on U.S. TV. Second of all, how will White-Out and felt tipped pens correct edited sex scenes? 
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daishi808
Posts: 16 |
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It's for the better. Have you heard the TokyoPop english dub? Terrible. |
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Alan45
Village Elder Posts: 9838 Location: Virginia |
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lys wrote:
VB Rose is a sore spot with me. It was a really engaging series. I would have gladly given up on all the gold foil if they had finished the series. I think it had only a couple of volumes to go. However, the owner wanted to make a movie and the manga business had to go. |
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