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NEWS: Kodansha to Publish, Sell Manga in U.S. in September

I have a bad feeling about this. Remember what happened the last time a Japanese company set up shop in a U.S. market?

Overpriced

So the rumors were true after all.

Quote:

Kodansha intends to transfer its copyrights to this local subsidiary to enter the overseas publishing industry directly.

.... and does this mean the part about them yanking the licenses for currently running titles from others (like Del Rey) is as well? That sounds monumentally stupid but I'm not sure how else to interpret this.

I have a bad feeling about this. Remember what happened the last time a Japanese company set up shop in a U.S. market?

Overpriced, under-translated titles. I'm talking, of course, about Bandai Visual USA. And Shogakukan, a.k.a ShoPro? Before the merger with the already-established Viz, they were turning out "gems" like "Megaman NT Warrior". #

I just hope that they bother to set their prices a bit closer to the Japanese market in this case (wouldn't five-dollar manga be awesome?) and that they also bother to hire people who respect the English language (unlike the monkeys at Tokyopop, and idiot weeaboo at Dark Horse who they assigned Trigun to).

Hopefully they'll release more Seinen/Josei works. Too much shonen/shojo crap on bookstores right now.

Comic212 wrote:

I can also confirm that Dark Horse no longer has the license for AKIRA (licensed from Kodansha) and that Tokyopop has canceled Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad volumes 13 and 14, and this is a Kodansha-licensed title as well, so it looks like they might have lost that license.

Almost a decade ago, Kodansha experimented with a line of Kodansha Bilingual Comics that included CLAMP's Cardcaptor Sakura, Ken Akamatsu's Love Hina, and Yōzaburō Kanari and Fumiya Sato's The New Kindaichi Files (Kindaichi Case Files). Kodansha stopped publishing those titles when Tokyopop licensed the right to publish English editions of many of them.

Tokyopop has canceled Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad volumes 13 and 14, and this is a Kodansha-licensed title as well, so it looks like they might have lost that license.

I have a bad feeling about this. Remember what happened the last time a Japanese company set up shop in a U.S. market?

It's quite possible that they will not produce product just like Japan though, since by the wording of things it looks like they'll be using local printing...

I just really hope they consider publishing some of their manga magazines like afternoon or morning here, maybe 1-2 months delayed from the Japanese one. That would be totally awesome.

Quote:

Almost a decade ago, Kodansha experimented with a line of Kodansha Bilingual Comics that included CLAMP's Cardcaptor Sakura, Ken Akamatsu's Love Hina, and Yōzaburō Kanari and Fumiya Sato's The New Kindaichi Files (Kindaichi Case Files). Kodansha stopped publishing those titles when Tokyopop licensed the right to publish English editions of many of them.

This sounds as if Koudansha wanted to reach english readers, but the target readership for those bilingual comics have always been the japanese themselves.