April 2009

Canned Dogs’ Zepy is a true hero… head over there to read select translations of mangaka Satou Shuuhou’s writings on the business of manga, and what led up to his decision to bypass traditional publishing and look to paid web distribution.  Shuuhou provides real numbers on cost and pay, from earning $100 per page in his early days to making $160,000 a year in page rates now… which is completely wiped out by material costs and salary for his assistants (and he’s a multi-million selling author!).  Shuuhou also discusses the lack of security in manga serialization, and the unfairness he perceives in his royalties pay, which does not scale proportionately with increased sales/lowered costs.

Caveat – the calculations of cost-per-book are informative, if one-sided.  Obviously, there are far more expenditures involved than production.  And there is a flip side to flat-rate royalties… the publisher swallows more costs on average to low-selling books.  Finally, in Japan (and particularly print) there are legitimate costs that won’t be reflected in any accounting book.  Things that… grease the wheels of business, so to speak, and I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.  Canned Dogs also promises more translated posts from other mangaka with dissenting opinions, so some of these points will likely be revisited.

This is yet another in a string of high-profile creators making very public criticisms of publisher Shogakukan and their editors (makes you wonder what’s going on over there).  But whether or not there’s a real epidemic of bad editor-artist relationships, Shuuhou does concede that it would be impossible for him to print and distribute books himself, and that his pay arrangement isn’t out of the ordinary for manga artists.  His decision to look toward digital distribution is borne out of necessity, dictated by his own unique financial situation.  But there’s also an element of timing.  A real market exists for paid online manga in Japan; industry reports as of late have been extremely bullish on digital sales.  If there’s any place where digital comic sales will become strong enough to bypass the trade endgame altogether, it’s Japan.  So this may be equal parts desperation and foresight.

Beyond one artist’s personal struggle, this article raises greater questions about the industry overall: Is the Tezuka-style manga studio set-up antiquated in this day and age?  Is the manga magazine itself vulnerable to a sort of ”spontaneous obsolescence?”  (If it isn’t broken already, as Shuuhou clearly believes.)  That’s probably the most troubling thing in all of this… the manga magazines of Japan are a lot more like US newspapers than comic books.  They’re dependent on advertising, they have massive production scale, and they’re usually published at a loss.  If the current newspaper armageddon is an indictment of a fatally flawed business model and not of faulty content, then isn’t the Japanese manga magazine susceptible to the same sudden combination of forces bankrupting print news left and right?

Be a hero yourself and read the whole thing.

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Missed it… Chris Mautner attends a screening of Tekkonkinkreet presided over by manga scholar Frederick Schodt.

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This is random… the Wall Street Journal profiles the man who created the much-reviled Comic Sans font.

I can only hope Wildwords/Wild&Crazy doesn’t become too ubiquitous in manga to be passe… I love that font.  Thank you, Jim Lee.

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Want to produce your own 20-page doujinshi for 1 dollar a pop?  Yamila Abraham shows you a way.

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Deb Aoki notes that DMP’s Vampire Hunter D manga will be appearing on the iPhone via uClick.  A question for those who do read comics on the iPhone… would you prefer to have full sized pages and zoom and pan around to read it, or would you like every page to be broken down into individually cropped panels?

A few more interesting links on the whole AmazonFail debacle…

At various news outlets, Amazon is blaming the delistings on a “glitch.”  At the Seattle PI, a spokesperson offers a more detailed explanation: it was the fault of the French arm of Amazon… specifically, it may be an editing error by a single employee.  There are still lingering doubts and inconsistencies for some.  Dear Author brings up past episodes of similar manipulations.  Vroman’s Bookstore blog writes the fiasco demonstrates the dangers of near-monopolies.

Meanwhile, this livejournal entry describes how fringe “morality” groups have trolled companies in the past, and thinks Amazon may be vulnerable to such tactics.

Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, and say that this is indeed the result of personnel error… I wonder if this event isn’t a good argument against having such policies for adult products in the first place?  As long as the loophole exists, it may be nefariously exploited by special interest groups, by users with an axe to grind, by rogue or careless employees, even by unscrupulous competitors.  There are many ways to make adult products “discreet,” without making them nearly impossible to find.

Regardless, Amazon is restoring the affected books to their proper rankings, but the damage has been done.  Whether the effects linger or not, some are already seeking to immortalize it… online retailer JList is already offering an Amazonfail t-shirt.

Man, I wonder what it feels like to be a gay, hearing-impaired, porn-loving Amazon shareholder right now.

Edit: Gia notes in the comment section that a hacker has claimed responsibility.  True or not, Gawker says the flagging system used to tag products as “inappropriate” has been disabled.  Loophole closed?

Edit 2: The Seattle PI has more from an anonymous tipster inside Amazon, who claims the mass deranking really was a simple, single human error which affected over 57,000 products.

Why this error seemed to disproportionately target gay/lesbian-positive books is still an area of concern, although there is one very remote explanation… perhaps people simply found more instances of the glitch in the genre because they were actively looking for it, since the news began within gay/lesbian writer circles (The Beat points out one victim that wasn’t an LGBT title… Craig Yoe’s Secret Identity).  All of this serves as a good reminder of Hanlon’s Razor, but considering how often the LGBT community seems to be victims of such random “glitches,” they are perfectly right to be skeptical.  And all the authors affected still deserve a thorough and very public apology.

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Rocket Bomber talks gross and net margins and returns at bookstores.  1% profit is supposedly the industry average profit… that’s awfully frightening.

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According to the Manila Standard Today, the Phillipines is banning all Japanese pornographic manga and anime as part of a greater anti-child porn law.  My heart goes out to my Pinoy brethren. (Found via AnimeVice)

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Online retailer JList has secured publication rights to doujinshi by LINDA Project, offering the circle’s works in English and French, and without any censorship, in DRM-free downloads.

LINDA Project has a curious reputation among some, as a circle which actively goes after illicit online scans of their manga and doujinshi.  A common retort has been that their works were not available legally to Western readers… now that argument may no longer hold water.

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Anime On DVD looks at the ebook options available to manga readers, and the approaches of various publishers such as Netcomics and Infinity Studios, which I still find somewhat perplexing.  I do wonder if their eBook-on-a-DVD has been successful in converting their print readers…