Shocking… Publishers Weekly reports that DC manga imprint CMX will stop publishing new titles after July 1st. Full shutdown will probably follow shortly thereafter. My condolences to the staff at CMX, who did a lot with very little, and consistently churned out top-quality releases.
Other reports, early reactions, mostly dismay, and some tongue lashings directed at DC (in ascending magnitude of F-bombs dropped):
This will take some time to digest, but a few initial thoughts of my own… a couple of common threads in almost all of the posts regard the censorship of Tenjo Tenge, and the lack of marketing support DC gave to the imprint. They certainly didn’t help, but my gut feeling is that the fallout from these two things is being overstated. Rather, I’m concerned with the viability of the mainstream manga model itself. Without a doubt, the $10 trade paperback as popularized by Tokyopop and Viz, and adopted by almost every other manga publisher, is most responsible for the rise of the manga category in bookstores. The low price point moved manga from boutique publishing towards mainstream publishing, like movies, music, and manga in Japan, which works on the following principle… there are always far more movies, music, and books that are unprofitable, but profits from the handful of big winners subsidize the legion of piddling losers. (This is why ticket sales of Avatar or the latest One Piece volume in Japan are misleading indicators of the overall health of their respective industry.) This system of relying on a few properties may not work for mid-list publishers like CMX, Go Comi, Infinity Studios, Aurora, et al… they don’t have one mega-hit, a Naruto or a Love Hina, to sustain them, especially when the economy and devaluation of media by piracy (I don’t mean scanlations per se, but the effect of general piracy of practically every form of art) have all but broken traditional PED models.
To put it simply… is the $10 manga under-priced? This might seem an absurd question when everyone is clamoring for even cheaper digital comics, but unless one is able to compete with the likes of Viz on major licenses, it seems to me the only other option is to operate as a specialty publisher (such as ourselves) where a greater emphasis is placed on books that are self-sustaining. The $10 price point offers very little wiggle room, and there’s no sense in going after price-sensitive readers when free entertainment options abound online.
The biggest absurdity of all is that amid all the troubles for the industry, there are more manga readers than ever.
Edit: Forgot to add this link the first time around… writing for PW, Ms. Alverson also spoke with several industry insiders and watchers about Viz’s layoff. My personal view aligns best with that of Ed Chavez… VizAnime and SigIkki have launched, Shojo Beat is over, no big anime licenses seem to be in the pipeline, and few other books are likely to get the Naruto Nation treatment. Is it possible that the layoff won’t affect Viz’s schedule as much as people seem to think? Maybe…
The Comics Reporter reminds us of CMX’s unfulfilled promise: bridging a widening gap between the Direct Market and manga readers who went to bookstores in droves, backed by DC’s expertise. Didn’t happen.
Edit 2: School Library Journal (is it kosher for me to link them?) has a nice roundtable on what DC did, or failed to do, for its manga imprint.
Edit 3: Rocket Bomber weighs in.
You know, I don’t recall any other event to have elicited so much blasphemous language from the collective manga blogosphere as CMX’s demise. Personally, I’m one who does little swearing in public or unfamiliar company, because I cherish the act. I want my curses not to be regarded as common vulgarity, but as sincere and succinct expressions of rage and disgust. I think that is true of most of these posters above as well. Perhaps this is one of those situations that warrants it.
Oh, what the hell. Fuck.
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Apparently someone is going around suggesting that child porn complaints be directed to sponsors of scanlation sites in order to cut off the sites’ revenue and shut them down, thereby “save” the industry. If you don’t intrinsically understand why this tactic is wrong (or that when I facetiously suggested something similar in this post, I was making a cynical observation to critique Google’s policies), then you should definitely head on over to Manga Curmudgeon post haste.
Mr. Welsh highlights an additional dilemma: why shouldn’t advertisers and web searches take obvious copyright infringement as seriously as questionable images of non-existent people of unverifiable age? We already know why they don’t; there are no direct consequences, either legal or in public perception. We should work to change that second part.
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Valleywag writer Ryan Tate shares an email exchange he had with Steve Jobs, in which the Apple ruler described the iPad “revolution” as offering “freedom from porn.”
Let’s forget the fact that Apple isn’t just censoring porn on the iPad. Claiming to protect children from porn by restricting programs and content on a device with an internet browser is kinda, sorta, blatantly disingenuous, isn’t it? He might as well be upfront about it and say that Apple wants all the benefits, but none of the risks.
By closing official channels off to legit companies, only unscrupulous people who circumvent the regulations will stand to profit – for example, pirates who make Apps that are simply RSS feeds, so the content could become drastically different after the approval process.
BTW, which do you think is the more plausible scenario? Scan aggregators censoring their own sites to play nice with publishers or out of some other altruistic concern, or simply to appease Google or their advertisers, and make sure their 99-cent apps won’t be rejected by Apple?
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Even a site like Wikipedia isn’t immune from this sort of trolling, btw.
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Spotted via The Beat… manga remains popular for kids at a Queens, NY library, but is being threatened by budget cuts.
So umm… any other manga publisher wanting to fade into the night, this might be a good way to lighten your inventory before you implode…
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