Forum - View topicInteresting goings on in the publishing buisiness
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The Xenos
 Posts: 1519 Location: Boston |
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Virgin Comics pops like TokyoPop?
Not sure if anyone else is a geek about comics publishing as well as the comics and manga themselves. I recently read an article about yet another publisher splitting up the company. This time it's Virgin Comics. I can't help but be reminded of TokyoPop's problems and the article itself mentions it too. http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2008/08/27/requiem-for-a-virgin-2/ with some background on Virgin Comics in this preceding post http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2008/08/25/virgin-comics-changes-ahead/ Now Virgin seems to be in bigger trouble than TokyoPop, but they seemed to have some similar problems. A third publisher Platinum also was making big news about problems and maybe closing up shop too. TokyoPop had the manga label slant. I know most about them and have been following them for years, for good and bad. Virgin had an in with Indian mythology comics founded by some noted experts as well as another in with attracting Hollywood names to develop stories. They also are a new subdivision of Richard Branson's multinational company Virgin. I only checked out one of their early books because it was penned by Garth Ennis from an idea by John Woo with covers by Yoshitaka Amano. Later I noticed books being developed by the likes of Nick Cage, Ed Burns, and ironically enough Jenna Jameson. Meanwhile, I know very little about Platinum except that I picked up one graphic novel for like a quarter or a dollar. Goes to show how well they did. (Then again, I've sadly seen some of TokyoPop's original OEL books in dollar bins as well, including some I really liked.) This article suggests that one big problem, and I felt strongly about this in TokyoPop myself, was that the companies seemed more interesting in 'farming IPs (intellectual properties)' for multimedia use than just turning out good books. The idea of using comics just to get a movie deal is not a gold mine. There's a gold rush for it right now, but I think most people will be finding fools gold. There's the exception of author Mark Millar laughing at everyone all the way to the bank. Still, using comics and manga as a route to movies is simply not a great idea. You have to respect the medium and the publishing industry first if you want to have that extra income from selling your ideas to movie studios. Anyway, I thought this article highlights some problems at companies such as Virgin and, most relevant to this board, TokyoPop. No mater how well they say they're doing, things below the surface or just over the horizon might not be so well. Plus there's an interesting parallel. TokyoPop has the Japanese angle and they seemed to do well with that. Yet the Indian mythology that was a big part of Virgin Comics just never seemed to take off. I find it interesting that these Japanese books take off, but the Indian themed ones do not. Then again, I think Virgin was aiming at an older audience then the majority of TokyoPop's manga readers. So that's another difference. Is anyone else also interested in looking at the actual publishing business behind manga and comics in addition to the books themselves? I was just going to post about this new story, but put that as a subtitle. I'm sure I can find other relevant ones about the industry and I'm sure there will be plenty of interesting stories still flowing out of TokyoPop during its restructuring. |
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Moomintroll
 Posts: 1600 Location: Nottingham (UK) |
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I think Virgin were probably right to think that the next big (potentially enormous) comics market is India but wrong to think they had any clue as to how to run a comics publisher (as opposed to an IP farm).
Anyway, to answer your question, yes, I am interested in reading about and discussing the business side of things but I suspect that unless the discussion largely revolves around manga publishers and / or trends that will impact manga publishers (e.g. the recent decision of Japanese publishers to directly enter the North American and European markets or the future prospects of Tokyopop's multi-media ambitions), the mod's will shut things down on the basis that ANN isn't a general seq-art forum. |
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