The biggest story in 2007

Looking through the various year-end round-ups and industry predictions for the new year (Precocious Curmudgeon has a pretty good one), there is one item that’s glaringly absent from the lists, at least to me… a story whose importance has not yet come to pass, its many potential implications not readily apparent: the formation of Aurora Publishing.  A women-oriented manga publisher, Aurora is launching full force this new year with two separate imprints (in addition to more standard romance manga they’ve already released)… LuvLuv, which offers Ladies Comics, and Deux, which focuses on Boy’s Love.

The most obvious significance is their line of Ladies Comics, a genre that thus far has been unproven in the North American market.  And given manga’s success with younger female readers and the reading patterns of the populace in general, this is also the one untapped market that may prove most lucrative.  There is simply nothing more mainstream than the soccer moms.

But what really makes Aurora a possible bellwether for the manga industry, even if it ultimately does not become a top manga publisher in North America, is its pedigree; Aurora is a wholy owned subsidiary of Japanese publisher Ohzora Publishing.  Aurora is by no means the first or only example of a Japanese publisher taking a direct interest in the West… Viz and Broccoli are also essentially Japanese.  However, with Comic Raijin’s failure to crack the market a few years ago, that idea probably fell out of vogue for most.  But when coupled with current reports that peg the industry at over $200 million, I think this signals our arrival at a tipping point where most sizeable Japanese publishers are going to begin thinking “hey, we can make more money publishing directly in North America than licensing out our books!”, and shift their priorities accordingly.  Whether this is the reality is very debatable, but the groundwork has already been laid, the retail and distribution mechanisms exist, e-books are (still) just over the horizon, and the market is now big enough that the benefits outweigh the risks of going it by themselves.  Basically, this the the best time to do it.

And this is ultimately the best outcome for Japan, which seems to be pouring more and more money into promoting manga… for Japanese manga publishers to become truly international, much in the same way that Japanese video game developers like Capcom or Konami have established themselves around the world.  So here’s my not-so-bold prediction for 2008: if Aurora sees even moderate success, expect a couple more Japanese publishers to throw their hat into the ring as well and create N.A. subsidiaries.