More on Shuuhou, manga industry | DMP manga for iPhones

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?