All the News and Reviews from Anime Expo 2026

Manga Licensing Is An Exercise In Empathy

“99.99% of the people working in the manga field are doing it because [they] love it,” Leyla Aker of Square Enix Manga & Books stated emphatically to the panel crowd. “There's a certain gentle madness you need to have.”

At the "Japan to the US: How Manga is Acquired and What Breaks Through?" panel at Anime Expo 2026, the panelists made the case that, while they're guided by their hearts, they still have to carefully consider the commercial viability of title when deciding what to license for publication.

There's the typical analysis they do to make sure that a title will sell as many copies as it can in addition to resonating with audiences. Does it have the right type of characters? The right story? Is the art broadly appealing? Is that genre saturated already? But beyond that lies the fundamental tension: What do you do when you feel in your bones that a title has “the juice”—that irreducible magic about it that you know will resonate with readers—but the hard data suggests that it won't sell?

The refrain at the panel was that you have to take a leap of faith. But to take that leap, you have to build confidence in that decision, and for manga licensing, that means looking beyond the hard data. “It's an exercise in empathy,” Ben Applegate, Director of Publishing Services at Kodansha, says of selecting titles. “The muscle you build over years of doing this is that ability to put yourself in another reader's shoes.”

Sometimes when you see a work and you just know it will be a hit with fans because it resonates so deeply for yourself. “You have this instinctual reaction to [a title],” said Hope Donovan of Viz Media. “You're moved by something and think 'others would be moved by this too.'” Everyone agreed that sometimes the more compelling data is your or your colleagues' emotional response to a title.

Rebecca Taylor, Editor In Chief at Inklore, acknowledged the emotional side of licensing, but emphasized that these decisions are still made carefully, and are backed up with as much hard analytical data as they can get.

Things like industry-wide sales figures can be a very useful barometer: if sales are up, companies will take more risks. “There's an element of daring,” said one panelist. And hard data can lead you astray too: “If you can describe a manga as part of a trend, that trend is already over.”

Audiences have made it clear: They want emotionally indulgent but emotionally intelligent stories. They want not-necessarily-romantic-but-strong connections between characters. They want gorgeous art. They want genres that haven't been brought over as much as others, and titles that may have been around and reached an audience but haven't been brought to print in English yet.

By the end of the pannel, one thing was made clear: The reality is that not every title will be a best-seller, but every title gets the same careful consideration, backed by the undeniable passion of some seriously dedicated manga publishers.

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