TOKYOPOP, UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE BRING MANGA TO SUNDAY PAPERS

[MattBrady]

In a move to attract younger readers – a demographic that they are clearly losing (the average age of newpapers readers is 53) – several major North American papers will be debuting original English language (OEL) manga in their Sunday comics sections in January.

According to an AP report appearing in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and other outlets, Universal Press Syndicate will begin carrying Van Von Hunter, by Ron Kaulfersch and Mike Schwark; and Peach Fuzz by Lindsay Cibos and Jared Hodges. Both are original Tokyopop strips, created by winners of the company’s Rising Stars of Manga contest, rather than material licensed from Japanese publishing houses.

Tokyopop’s Stuart Levy is quoted by the AP as saying, "The newspapers want the manga more even than we want the newspapers. Newspapers are looking for new fresh ways to appeal to young people."

Newspapers that will begin carrying the Tokyopop manga in their comics sections include: the Los Angeles Times, Denver Post, Vancouver Sun, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and The Detroit News.

Newspapers and Universal Press Syndicate clearly see this as a chance to pull younger readers back to newspapers, and perhaps bring back an element of competition once again in households between parents and kids over the comics section on Sundays.

Kirk LaPointe, managing editor of The Vancouver Sun, was quoted as saying, “We want to bring more features that appeal to a younger readership, and many of the comics we carry have an older following. We also like the artistic nature of manga and feel it will contribute to the graphical beauty of the paper overall."

Of course, while newspapers are aligning themselves to be the winners in this deal, Tokyopop is positioned for the bigger win, by essentially putting a weekly ad in newspapers for its copious offerings, available at any bookstore across North America. The report states that Tokyopop sees $40 million annually from the sales of roughly 10 million manga books a year. Levy’s next plan, according to the report – an English-language manga service on the web which will allow manga fans to download comics on to mobile devices, mirroring many such popular services in Japan.

[Mr Wesley]

This is... intriguing.

For those paper that choose one or both of these, I wonder what the reaction will be for the fans of the strips that will lose their slot. Around here, every time the paper drops a comic strip there is a public outcry for it's return. Doesn't matter if it's Doonesbury or the Family Circus.

So, when something like Van Von Hunter shows up and Classic Peanuts goes away... I think this is going to get more attention in January than anyone thinks.

[Sesshomaru]

This could be fairly more popular if instead of fake mangas , they were publishing a few stuff from their catalog . Still probably a good initiative .

[Blind Assassin]

Originally posted by Sesshomaru
This could be fairly more popular if instead of fake mangas , they were publishing a few stuff from their catalog . Still probably a good initiative .

There was an article yesterday basically saying that newspaper subscriptions/circulations are down.

With people able to go on the net and get their news there (reuters.com, bbc.com, UPI.com, cnn.com, etc) the newspaper is no longer the only place to read the news.

Factor in many newspapers having versions available on-line, and I can see that newspapers aren't that relevant anymore.

I read The Boston Globe on-line every single day. I read the city/local news, the national news, and the op-ed/letters page.

That's all I need. NO pages and pages of car ads, no horoscopes, weather, and other stuff I don't want to read.

Why would I pay 5 or 6 bucks a week to get something delivered to my front porch full of stuff I don't read (sports, entertainment, weather) when I can get it 'delivered' to my bedroom computer for free and point and click on what I think is relevant, and skip what I don't-- at no cost?

THAT is the issue newspapers need to address. With so many sources and outlets available for people to get the news they want to see, as opposed to the news they are given by the newspapers, I don't see how adding some manga strips are going to change anything.

[Blind Assassin]

here is a link to that article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/08/bu...a/08paper.html

Newspaper circulation fell 2.6 percent in the six-month period that ended in September, more than in any comparable six-month period since 1991, according to figures released yesterday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The bureau reported the drop in daily circulation at 789 newspapers over the year-ago period. The drop in Sunday circulation was 3.1 percent over the same period.

The decline comes as readers, especially young ones, turn increasingly to the Internet for news, including the sites run by newspapers, as well as to free metropolitan dailies. Daily newspaper circulation reached its peak in 1984, when 63.3 million people subscribed to 1,688 newspapers.

As of September, circulation had dropped to 45.2 million at 1,457 papers (only half of the papers reported their figures to the circulations bureau).


and also:

Still, he said, despite the industry's notable problems of high costs and stagnant advertising revenue, the news was not all gloom and doom, because many readers have migrated to newspaper Web sites.

More than 47 million people visited newspaper Web sites in September, the newspaper association said. That is almost one-third of all Internet users and is the highest number recorded since the association began tracking online usage in January 2004.

"The reach of the paper is up, so that's the good news," he said. "The bad news is that we don't know how to monetize that."

[maxx]

so i take it this is more for newpapers than tokyopop. This is very interesting.

kinda surprised tp hasn't gone the way of shonen jump.

[Jason Seaver]

Originally posted by Sesshomaru
This could be fairly more popular if instead of fake mangas , they were publishing a few stuff from their catalog . Still probably a good initiative .

I imagine that papers with that median reader age of 53 don't want to run a "hey, you read it right to left" disclaimer every week.

Also, is Van Von Hunter a TokyoPop "original"? I thought it debuted on the web, with TokyoPop doing reprints after it won the contest.

[HugoMF]

Does anyone else miss Peanuts and all other classics?

We also like the artistic nature of manga and feel it will contribute to the graphical beauty of the paper overall.

Lol.

[industri]

NEWSPAPERS

On the subject of newspapers... it's not as simple as the Internet killing circulation... it's a dramatic shift in how people expect to have their information delivered to them.

I work for a newspaper... and while some readership has dropped off for larger daily papers, weekly and community readership continues to grow.

I think one of the main differences is that people expect to be wowed by the presentation of a document (see the modern trend in College/University textbooks to use a more "web-like" look to their page layouts) - and newspapers are far more traditional than that. I also think people don't read as often as they used to (with this site being an unfair sample... we're all comic fans), and the downhill trend is a combination of free news, presentation vs expectation, and a general shift in news readership.

As for killing other comics to make room for these strips... I think it's a mediocre idea that will fall pretty quickly. Strips like these (think Spider-Man, Rex Morgan etc) that don't delivery the pithy funny line and don't leave you chuckling in a "clip it and save it for your fridge" kinda way don't have as much staying power... and the readership for these strips already buy the books and don't necessarily need the supplemental Sunday strip.

My 2¢ anyways...

i.

[thepoet]

I'm jealous. I wish I was a part of this.

Y'all should check out Grounded Angel at www.komikwerks.com. That's my first creation. I've got others at various stages...

[Nat Gertler]

Originally posted by industri
Strips like these (think Spider-Man, Rex Morgan etc) that don't delivery the pithy funny line and don't leave you chuckling in a "clip it and save it for your fridge" kinda way don't have as much staying power...

While I think the success of these will have to do with what they present and how they present it (an argument for doing original English material, which can be created to fit the newspaper pacing), I'm gonna have to point out that the strips you say don't have "staying power", one has stayed around for more than a quarter century, the other for more than half a century.

[Superfrick]

Originally posted by maxx
so i take it this is more for newpapers than tokyopop. This is very interesting.

kinda surprised tp hasn't gone the way of shonen jump.

Because there simply isn't the readership numbers, and the things we demand in comic books (good paper, coloring, etc) are VERY EXPENSIVE compared to printing black & white on recycled newsprint-stock paper. The internet would indeed break in two if say, Spider-man suddenly went the Jump route.

Also, anthologies tend to sell for Sh*t in the USA. I don't know why.

[Superfrick]

Originally posted by Sesshomaru
This could be fairly more popular if instead of fake mangas , they were publishing a few stuff from their catalog . Still probably a good initiative .

Define fake mangas?

[industri]

I guess by "staying power" (it was poorly worded, my bad) I refer to the widespread readership that a NEW comic requires to be a solid venture...

Now... if they're just reprinting pieces of existing books (it's not clear to me... though it sounds like new material) - the cost might be right, but the readership not so much...

Anyways - not worth worrying about until we see it. Let's hope, simply for the "neatness" of the venture, that it goes well... but I'm skeptical.

i.

[Ray Dillon]

Whoa. That's awesome! Hopefully this wil mean more updated comics in newspapers. This is a definitely a good thing. Of course, I doubt kids are going to read the rest of the paper, I never did after reading Garfield or Calvin and Hobbes, but it's good to give them something to be excited about.

[beta-ray]

Can't say much for the choice of manga (haven't read them), but I like the idea...

[skullduggery]

Originally posted by industri
NEWSPAPERS

On the subject of newspapers... it's not as simple as the Internet killing circulation... it's a dramatic shift in how people expect to have their information delivered to them.


I think one of the main differences is that people expect to be wowed by the presentation of a document (see the modern trend in College/University textbooks to use a more "web-like" look to their page layouts) - and newspapers are far more traditional than that. I also think people don't read as often as they used to (with this site being an unfair sample... we're all comic fans), and the downhill trend is a combination of free news, presentation vs expectation, and a general shift in news readership.i.

I think you've got part of it right. It is how people expect information delivered.
I stopped subscribing to the local newspaper a few years ago.
Basically because I get my information from the internet.
Most of the stuff I was reading in the newspaper I had read the day before on the internet.
We subscribe to the newspaper at the office I work at. And every now and again I'll take a glance at it when I'm in the kitchen. And most of what I see is stuff I already read about the day before (and in some cases two days).

I had a similar experience with Comics Buyers Guide. Quite often, I already knew a lot of the information in the weekly publication. When they went to the monthly format, that just made it all the worse (because now the info was upwards of a month and a half or more old). Part of their shift however was in the depth of reporting they now do. With a monthly format, they've gone to longer and more detailed articles. Which is what I suppose one has to do in such a case.
I didn't really like the change (I liked have a weekly periodical with columns and features that I enjoyed), so I ended up dropping that as well. I didn't like the trade off of one column a month from a given writer that was now three to four pages long (but generally a single topic) vs. having four individual (topic) columns that were a page in length from the same writer.

[Sesshomaru]

Define fake mangas

I've said so in a few other threads , and since my opinion about it is kinda negative , i dont feel like debating much about it or rather "trolling"...
But it boils down to me considering that kind of stuff as OEL (original english language) comics or if you really want OEL manga...
Those arent really what you would call manga and are often wrongly advertised and marketed as such .

I'd instead redirect you to that nice CB Cebulski interview that imo kinda sum up nicely why those books cant be called manga , and what are OELs .

[T Campbell]

Reverse racism. This reasoning neatly invalidates anyone who is not Japanese who wants to work in the mode of Ranma or Akira, ever, for any reason. We've spent five hundred years learning to label people by what kind of personality they have before considering the nation they come from. Is it so unreasonable to label our comics by the same standard?

CB Cebulski simplifies the case. In Japan, "manga" means "comics." No adjective-- "comics" are Japanese by default. But Japanese manga-ka are aware of the power of the "manga" brand in America and they've rather liked having a total monopoly on that brand and they'd like to keep on having one. Hey, I would, too.

By this standard, foreigners simply cannot win-- either their work is gaijin, or it's counterfeit. Cebulski and others seem to feel it would be ignorant for English-speakers not to play by these rules. But the rules are as willfully ignorant as a beer-swilling Ugly American who proclaims all foreign movies crap.

All I ask is a level playing field. If Americans can actually learn from other countries for a change, they shouldn't have to put up with labels like "imitation" and "fake" as payment for their broad-mindedness. The Japanese invented this form of comics, but they don't get to patent it.

[thepoet]

Couldn't have said it better. Bravo, T.

[Sesshomaru]

I probably should have used another word than fake as it convey automatically a negative tone , but i didnt like talking much about it yesterday .....
Anyway , i still feel that regardless of their quality , those still arent manga . Still i wont lie , and say i like those OEL , most i have encountered (most aka not all ) are crappy imo , however i do believe that someday their quality will could be good , even awesome . Hell , a bunch of years ago , i thought the same of most manhwa (korean manga) , and today i completely enjoy and eagerly await some of them .

Plenty good artists and animation people borrowed with great intelligence things from manga and japanimation ... take Udon studios , with Deadpool , agent X , Street fighter , Darkstalkers etc etc , they showed a level of artistic level that imo got nothing to blush about , when compared to a lot of mangaka , however you see them trying to sell their stuff as manga , when they easily could , and would probably succeed in doing so .

That sudden wish to label anything that look remotely manga is imo a gimmick some publishers are trying to force , while relying on a current manga fad , to sells more . Of course they arent wrong to trying to create their own properties and trying to distance themselvves gradually from licensing , however i feel that if their love of manga was truely genuine , they would be publishing far more than the most generics shonen and shojo inspired books , more than 2 aspects of the so many manga styles than currently exists .

I dont think i have convinced someone here , but then so be it ... i still stand by my opinion , will still buy comics regardless of their country of origins , yet give to them their proper (imo) labels , be it deemed racism or whatever.

[djcoffman]

I think this is the most naive thing that a syndicate could do... my lord, if they think they got letters and paper cancellations because of Liberty Meadows, I can only imagine how many soccer moms and grandmas are going to write about the BARELY there outfits in modern day manga.

Another perfect example of how syndicates just DON'T GET IT.

[ljbarker]

I doubt the syndicates would insert anything that was beyond PG-13. And I think TokyoPop has enough access to artists and content to ensure that.

And the newspapers should realize that grandmas ARE their only audience now, so if they don't try and pump new readers into the product they'll meet the same fate as grandma will in a few years.