It's actually a bit old news but, as of May 31 Tokyo Pop manga is no more. They've closed shop after 14 years, in which they nearly defined the market for manga in the United States. Tokyo Pop began in 1997 as Mixx Publication, they launched in a bold fashion with Mixx Zine an attempt to make an Japanese style manga anthology for america, down to the paper stock (they upgraded to glossy on issue 2) and colored pages. The big coup was that Mixx had procured the rights to Sailor Moon, then the biggest thing in Anime and Manga. Though manga had been published in the America since at least the 1980's Tokyo Pop changed the model of sale from the standard monthly comic book, to the now standard first run trade paperback model. This is the model of comic sales that it still changing the face of comics to this day.
The official line, is that Tokyo Pop suffered from two major things. One was the bankruptcy of Borders, the other was the loss of their licenses with the publisher Kodansha the owner of many of their titles. Borders bookstore has been in a lot of trouble for years, and apparently they where Tokyo Pop's biggest merchant. The falling of Borders led to mass layoffs including many key people. Last year I had heard that Tokyo Pop had lost all of it's Kodansha titles. I thought then "whoa that sucks we'll never see the end of (X) series" but little did I know of Kodansha's motives. You see Tokyo Pop made manga Mainstream. In fact they did so well at this that Kodansha the largest publisher in Japan decided, "if manga is mainstream in america, why do we need a middle man". Thus Kodansha is launching it's own line of manga in the States later this year. Starting with ironically enough, Sailor Moon.
But I have a few reasons that I think came to play in Tokyo pop being the first to fall from the first manga boom. First as mentioned above they are a victim of their success. When Mixx became Tokyo Pop and discontinued their magazines and comics in favor of first run trade paper backs. They took comics out of the comic book shops and the direct market, and put them into the mainstream book store. This led manga to higher exposure and it also led to the Graphic Novel sections in bookstores to increase. And the publishers noticed. Starting with Del Rey, mainstream publishers with all of their power and knowledge of the book store system started publishing comics as well. Leading up to Kodansha's decision to publish in america for themselves.
Next, Tokyo Pop wasn't actually that good at what they where doing. They may have been one of the biggest publishers of manga in the United States but, they where largely held up by the massive fad that manga had become in the first decade of the 21st century. As much as you like manga you have to admit it was a major fad, and as it has gone back down to just another form of entertainment Tokyo Pop has just not delivered as good a product as their competitors. The print quality is okay at best, the translations are known to be a bit off (more on that later), and Viz's Shonnen Jump line has been doing far better in terms of schedule. Also from the very beginning, one never felt that Manga was what they where interested in promoting, in fact they called it "motionless picture entertainment", not manga for most of their early days. Not that long into the first year of Mixx Zine, they where already branching out into dating sim video games with "Graduation 2", as far as I can remember it bombed, correct me if I'm wrong. Then MIxx Zine started to evolve into a Japanese and asian pop culture magazine with manga. Then the magazine took the name Tokyo Pop and the manga was demoted to a second feature, presented in landscape two comic pages to a page. This is where I ended my subscription, I hated seeing the manga anthology being changed into a low rent teen magazine, but I could not forgive having to turn my the magazine on it's side to read miniaturized versions of the comics I was getting the magazine for. Some leading light in manga publishing. However it was around this time that they began their publishing of first run trades we forgave them a lot because hell we didn't have to wait for serialization to finish to get the next book. But just as they where getting good at this they branched into Anime, fair enough, but they where no where as good at this as at manga so the video label faded relatively quickly. But what happened is that they stopped looking back as well as forward when choosing titles to license, a problem in all of american manga, and instead of publishing the classics that fans where after as well as the hip and new, they chose to make a market out of the burgeoning Original English Manga (OEL). I have no problem with OEL in fact many of my favorite comics have been OEL. But it distracted from their supposed agenda of bringing us the best manga. Tokyo Pop then got into Television with "Worlds Greatest Otaku" basically Tokyo Pop Became a Lifestyle company and manga got left behind.
And last was Scanlation. Scanlation is where fans scan, translate and post Manga on the internet. And this argument is not about the right and wrong of downloading, it's about the fans and Tokyo Pop's relation to them, and the way the world is changing. Tokyo Pop has been plagued since the beginning by "loose" translations. At the very least they Americanize the shit out of everything they publish. Usually in the form of colloquialisms. In the case of Sailor Moon they chose to keep the much maligned American names of the characters, and with Initial D a much anticipated series at the time actually got into censorship. These things combined, and fans no longer "trusted" the integrity of Tokyo Pop's translations. To the point where it was assumed that Tokyo Pop would "ruin" any series that they would bring out. So these fans turned to Scanlators for these series' out of a belief that their translations where better or at least truer to the original. Now a cynic would say that they just did this because the scanlations are free, but I personally know many people that would read them for this exact reason and would still buy many dollars worth of books from other publishers. Now this was not a problem for Tokyo Pop when Manga was a fad, but once the fad had died down and the fans where the backbone of their market. It had to have hurt.
Another effect scanlations had and still have is that, they dull the cutting edge of many a manga. You see, since manga is a translated and repurposed product, many of the series already have a following when they arrive in an "official" capacity in the US. As scanlators don't have to worry about publishing rights or print houses, as soon as they've bought scanned and translated it, it's up on the inter-web for all to see causing "new" series' to be old hat buy the time they "oficially" come out.This has recently been exemplified by the series Hetalia. Hetalia, has been the darling of fan sub Scanlation series' for the last couple of years, it's been huge. But now as the trend surrounding the series has been winding down, Tokyo Pop has finally gotten the series out "officially". Because the speed of the internet, Tokyo Pop has released one of the biggest new books, after it's audience has moved on! Maybe it would get big again after a mainstream audience reads it, but that's all academic now. It's cancelled now that Tokyo Pop has closed shop. Of course scanlation is going to be a big problem for anyone planning to make money off of manga for the above reason, but it should not be the end for any of them as long as they pick good series' that have "legs" and can be bigger than a trend. Scanlations and what they mean for comics will have to be and deserves to be a subject for another day.
But all that said. The late great Tokyo Pop manga deserves our gratitude. because it was they that redefined how manga was perceived and sold in our country. And as a direct fallout, the position of comics in bookstores was greatly improved, helping to lead us to the current age of the comic business.
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