PWCW interviews SLG publisher; DBD signs new manga publisher?

PW Comics Weekly has a great interview with SLG publisher Dan Vado, whose panel-that-will-not-die at Wondercon is still causing reverberations throughout alt and indie comics creator circles.  But here Vado is given a chance to extrapolate on those ideas, and comics hopefuls should read his words carefully.  I’m not going to say that any one person has all the answers, or that there’s some gospel truth that applies equally and neatly to every publisher or creator out there, but Vado speaks with the weight of “been there, done that” experience, the kind that always trumps even the most superficially plausible theory and well-reasoned conjecture.

The rise of the bookstore market as a new avenue for graphic novels has been greeted with a lot of, in my humble opinion, overzealous optimism from many in comics circles who direct bile with equal enthusiasm at the direct market as if comic stores, and even comic pamphlets, need to be crushed and done away with rather than allowed to co-exist with bookstores (the animosity that while not completely undeserved, feeds off of an oversimplification of the situation.)  Often overlooked among the myth and hype are the pitfalls of the book market system itself… unexpected book returns, distributor turmoil, and the near-complete dominance of shelfspace by shonen/shojou manga that effectively make them the “spandex” of the book market.

Whether talking about the direct market or the book market, each system has its own unique up- and downsides.  But the root of all problems that face indy and self publishers is the same… the fact that they’re small.  The inherent difficulties of being understaffed and underfunded don’t disappear when one format or one market supplants another.  If anything, the less-than optimal direct market, and the pamphlets it’s built upon, is still a better gateway for many comics publishers than the book market.  The trade-off between the stabillity of non-returnables for higher sales at higher risk is not ideal for everyone.

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I’m not sure how ComiPress found this news item on CBR; I don’t even see it on CBR’s front page.  But despite how this was buried (also mentioned at ICv2, but was so low-key that I missed it there as well), this is pretty big, I think… this press release from Diamond Book Distributors reveals the existence of Aurora Publishing, a new manga publisher backed by a Japanese parent company.

Well… maybe not “new.”   Aurora has been around since March 2006, and is a subsidiary of Ohzora Publishing, publisher of the Harlequin manga adaptations in Japan, as well as the “Project X” series of biographical manga.  I do remember hearing the name a while ago, but can’t seem to find any books published under their name, so I assume this company has until now focused solely on licensing or co-publishing books.  If that’s right, then their signing on to Diamond Book Distributors means they’re undertaking the task of publishing themselves.

How this may affect Dark Horse (which currently publishes had published Harlequin?) and DMP (Project X) is unknown… but maybe not much at all.  Ohzora describes itself as “the number one publishing house in Japan in terms of number of female manga franchises and number of publications,” and a quick browse of their website reveals a catalogue of mainstream (re: not aimed at otaku) comics for older men and women.  If there are manga genres that haven’t had any real representation in the West, those are it.  That alone could make Aurora a pretty exciting new entry in the U.S. manga market.