ICv2 has a meaty interview with Dark Horse’s Mike Richardson (part 1, part 2, part 3) which touches upon manga, the omnibus format, DH failed attempt to pick up Fruits Basket (!), and reminders that the company’s collaboration with manga super-group CLAMP should bear fruit later this year. Go read.
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This is fun… Manga.about.com has compiled a top 10 (plus 1) trends to watch out for in 2008, although I must say the choice for the top spot fills me with a chilling sense of dread.
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One more random thought on VizBig… upping the size on these volumes is nice, but I’m slightly dissappointed that the announced dimension specs, 5.75″ x 8.625″ inches, still are not proportional to standard Japanese A5/B6 measurements; rather, they are simply the 5 x 7.5 books, enlarged.
The standard size employed by Tokyopop, Del Rey, and Viz is actually too tall (or not wide enough, depending on how they resize the manuscript), so the trim does not reflect the Japanese version 100%. (Ironically, older, unflopped Viz books actually had correct proportions.) Our own books are cut to 6 x 8.5, which is ever so slightly bigger than their Japanese counterparts, but still not exactly proportional… we’re off by about 0.011″ inches vertically. (We use 6 x 8.5 because it gives us files with a nice and round pixel size.)
The only publisher that I can recall off the top of my head to use absolutely “correct” trim size is Eros/Fantagraphics. In fact, their new ero manga releases (Pink Sniper, Domin-8 Me) are exactly the same size as the Japanese originals: A5, or approximately 5.83″ x 8.27″ inches.
Some of you might be thinking right now “wow, this guy has some serious anal-retentive issues.” Granted, this isn’t a huge deal, but this does cause minute cosmetic problems… pages aren’t centered properly, weird artifacts like registration marks or page numbers are seen, incomplete or blank areas where the artwork cuts off, et cetera. Most readers won’t notice most of these issues, but they’re the exact sort of things that get Japan junior editors into trouble.
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Back in the early days of ADV they used Japanese trim sizes. AzuDai was A5, Nanako 7 was tiny shinsho sized and all of their MediaWorks titles were B6… Then they switched around the time they released Chrono Crusade (that would have been nice in an A5).
Arent BroBooks’ releases the right height but a little wider than their JA versions? -
The standard TOKYOPOP size was chosen as a compromise between the proportions of narrow Japanese books (like anything in the 290-310 yen range, such as Jump books or shoujo like Fruits Basket) and standard-width B6/A5 Japanese books (anything 540 yen or above). On smaller books either more art is lost on the top/bottom or there’s more white on the inside margin, and on larger books more art is typically lost on the outside. The Japanese standards are not proportional to each other, so there is no one U.S. book size that will fit all without some sacrifice.
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So, why don’t publishers simply publish manga in A5/B6 sizes? Do paper mills simply not cut paper in those sizes in the U.S.?
I’m hoping some day when the U.S. goes metric (in my lifetime?) we’ll also adopt the A/B page standard.
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I kind of like the size that tokyopop is using, it fits nice and snug into all the book cases i have at my house.
And i know that my local comicbook store is using specialy made bookcases for all his manga (seeing how much Tokyopop releases, most of it is from them, but also quite abit from Viz and others), point beeing, having them made to fit as many books as he can in as small a spos as possible it will be a real problem when a company gets the ide: “Hey, lets change the sizing of our releases!”. That will cause more problems then some people think.
Not that i think it will happen, but it would be great of all the companys (Tokyopop, Viz.. take yout pick) would get together and work out a “release” size of manga to be released in. It would be great for peoples private storage of manga, and it will be easy for the stores that sells it.
Just my 2 cents.
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Since I had to look up Japanese book sizes, I thought other readers might had to as well. See under “wide-ban”:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.anime.misc/msg/5d27267af9378103
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Oops€”make that “book formats”. ^_^;
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