Baki
January 14th, 2008, 05:04 PM
Gantz, Blood + and a number of other manga's have been licensed by Dark Horse Comics. This was announced at Anime Expo.
This comes as great news to many. Anime on DVD had a Q&A with Dark Horse.
The interview is in the forum here:
After the announcements at Anime Expo 2007 by Dark Horse Comics, we posed a few questions to them regarding the state of their books, a few titles and particular and where they see things going with Michael Gombos, Director of Asian Licensing,
AnimeOnDVD: Dark Horse had some of the more interesting mature titles announced this weekend for the manga market. A lot of what the company has been focusing on in the last year is in this area. Are the mature titles holding up well enough in sales across the board or is it just a couple of titles that are pulling in the numbers and the hope is that the rest are as well?
Michael Gombos: Actually, we're doing quite well with the non-mature titles as well. For example, Bride of the Water God, a Korean Sunjeong (Shoujo) Manhwa is generating tremendous interest, and Oh My Goddess! keeps trucking on as the longest continuing manga series published in English. However, Dark Horse does lead the English-speaking world in Seinen Manga titles: From Akira and Ghost in the Shell, to Hellsing and Berserk, the mature titles are there and they are running strong. Since I have been at Dark Horse, there has been one title that both fans and bookstores alike have shown interest in, and that’s GANTZ.
As is the case with any publisher, you have your bread-and-butter titles, and others of equal artistic merit that might not bring in as much as the bread-and-butter titles. This isn’t an anomaly at Dark Horse at all; indeed, these “staple” titles allow a publisher some freedom in doing titles that might seem a little more financially risky, but by any other reasoning, absolutely justifiable.
Oftentimes, series also take time to build up steam. As much as we’d love to sell out of a first printing of forty thousand copies for everything we publish, that doesn’t happen—anywhere. Things take time.
AoD: With the acquisition of so much Blood+ material in both manga and novel form, will there be consistency (if needed) with the anime version? I’m sure that it’s still early on in the planning phase but can fans expect some sort of unified approach in bringing these releases out that will give it a larger feeling than just a book here and there?
MG: While there is a lot of BLOOD+ material coming out (basically, all prose and manga series from Japan), we’re going to do our best to make the series move harmoniously with the anime. The last episode is scheduled to run on Cartoon Network sometime around February, so we’re aiming to bring out the first book of the BLOOD+ (staple series) manga before that, which is much like what happened with Trigun during the first manga release.
Also, although it might look like a lot of material, the combined amount of books across the board (both manga and prose) for BLOOD+ is still under fifteen volumes. Blood the Last Vampire is a property that Dark Horse has championed in English for a while now, and we’re happy to be able to continue the amazing mythos here; it’s the perfect home for it.
AoD: GANTZ has long been desired but considered an incredibly hard title to sell even with a strong anime tie-in. Fears of censoring are large as well as the potential for low sales if the title is shrinkwrapped or stores avoid it. As the series features both sex and violence, and we’ve seen that violence is okay but sex isn’t when it comes to what can be sold, are there additional hurdles for GANTZ to achieve release here?
MG: First off, GANTZ will not be censored; if you have read Berserk or MPD-PSYCHO, or any other title that has been picked up in the last five years, I am sure that you will realize this is our policy. MPD-PSYCHO also features a cavalcade of both sex and violence (and often both at the same time—mutilated nude corpses, etc.), and I personally think that GANTZ isn’t as rough as MPD-PSYCHO by a longshot.
I’d be interested to hear where you heard it would be a hard sell from. Given that the anime was a huge success, I think that GANTZ could be easily likened to Berserk.
AoD: With word that EDEN: It’s An Endless World! is apparently on the verge of cancellation and several of these titles fall into the same category, what kind of commitment level does Dark Horse have to finishing out books? It’s obviously impractical to publish books that lose money continually but what kind of approach will the company try in order to get more of these mature titles out there and raise the awareness level?
MG: There has been a lot of talk generated since our publicist, Jeremy Atkins, casually brought up EDEN at the Press Conference at Anime Expo. He simply stated something along the lines of, “If you like this series and want to see if continue to come out, please pick up a copy; we have them in our booth and would be more than happy to talk to you about it.” This seemed to be interpreted as “EDEN is being canceled.” We're not sure what source this report originally stemmed from, but I agree with Jeremy in all respects. We hear time and time again that fans love the series, but when asked what volume they’ve read up to, a lot of fans reply that they haven’t picked up any volume but the first. As we’ve said before, supporting a series requires more than saying you love it; if you want to see volume after volume of a series that you love, please go and pick it up. We realize that there are/were and the only way to tell DH, the publisher and the creators how much you love the series is to go out and buy it!
We plan on staying committed to a series as long as possible when we license it; there have been instances in the past where a series is not making money, but we have stuck to it because its very existence warrants its release in English.
AoD: The arrival of GANTZ in the U.S. is seen as a sign that more Shueisha/Shogakukan titles may be available from other publishers in the future. How is the relationship with the company and does it seem as if their library is more accessible now?
MG: I can't speak on behalf of Shueisha or Shogakukan. I would imagine that our relationship is good, given that they’re licensing GANTZ to us. Also, as you know, they’re the parent companies of VIZ, and we simply came very specifically to them with our offer to license GANTZ. We are very, very thankful that Shueisha is allowing GANTZ to come to the English-speaking world through Dark Horse—a place we thought would be a natural home for it—but aren’t about to overstep our boundaries.
AoD: Not unlike the comic book market in general, the manga market seems to have found a general range of titles that are considered mainstream and will sell in decent numbers. How does Dark Horse view the past few years of growth in the market in terms of what kinds of titles sell and how do you view things changing or staying the same in the future?
MG: I think that it has been confirmed many times that titles with anime sell better, and this has held true all along. However—and I am sorry if I have said this in the past a lot—companies that sell titles that fit their company “concept” will find that those titles sell better. It is a business, and businesses need to make money to stay around, but if fans look at a certain property coming out from a certain publisher, they might think that it is an opportunistic cash-grab, and that could potentially hurt sales. So say, for example, a publisher called “Flowers, Puppies, and Cinnamon” comes out with an anticipated title, Varkon the Fanged’s Bile-Soaked Bloodbath in the 9th Plane of the Abyss, it might not do as well as if the company “Goresplatter Vilevomit Publishing,” whose portfolio is filled with such titles, were to come out with it. (Note: I made both of those up; they’re not supposed to be actual companies or titles.)
I can’t speak on the behalf of other companies about how things might change or stay the same (and quoting RUSH, “The more that things change, the more they stay the same”), but you can expect Dark Horse to continue to bring you classics and highly demanded manga and manhwa—which is just that, manga and manhwa. All the stuff we sell as manga and manhwa were created by Japanese/Korean creators, published by Japanese/Korean publishers, for Japanese/Korean audiences. This is the beauty of actual manga; while it wasn’t created for English audiences, it’s a great thing that people happen to like it so much. Indeed, that’s a part of manga being considered authentic.
In my opinion this is a long time coming, I mean Gantz is one of the best Seinen manga's right now. Its up there with Berserk, I'm surprised it took so long for Dark Horse Comics to license this.
Edit: it's kinda old news, but this is for those who didn't know.
This comes as great news to many. Anime on DVD had a Q&A with Dark Horse.
The interview is in the forum here:
After the announcements at Anime Expo 2007 by Dark Horse Comics, we posed a few questions to them regarding the state of their books, a few titles and particular and where they see things going with Michael Gombos, Director of Asian Licensing,
AnimeOnDVD: Dark Horse had some of the more interesting mature titles announced this weekend for the manga market. A lot of what the company has been focusing on in the last year is in this area. Are the mature titles holding up well enough in sales across the board or is it just a couple of titles that are pulling in the numbers and the hope is that the rest are as well?
Michael Gombos: Actually, we're doing quite well with the non-mature titles as well. For example, Bride of the Water God, a Korean Sunjeong (Shoujo) Manhwa is generating tremendous interest, and Oh My Goddess! keeps trucking on as the longest continuing manga series published in English. However, Dark Horse does lead the English-speaking world in Seinen Manga titles: From Akira and Ghost in the Shell, to Hellsing and Berserk, the mature titles are there and they are running strong. Since I have been at Dark Horse, there has been one title that both fans and bookstores alike have shown interest in, and that’s GANTZ.
As is the case with any publisher, you have your bread-and-butter titles, and others of equal artistic merit that might not bring in as much as the bread-and-butter titles. This isn’t an anomaly at Dark Horse at all; indeed, these “staple” titles allow a publisher some freedom in doing titles that might seem a little more financially risky, but by any other reasoning, absolutely justifiable.
Oftentimes, series also take time to build up steam. As much as we’d love to sell out of a first printing of forty thousand copies for everything we publish, that doesn’t happen—anywhere. Things take time.
AoD: With the acquisition of so much Blood+ material in both manga and novel form, will there be consistency (if needed) with the anime version? I’m sure that it’s still early on in the planning phase but can fans expect some sort of unified approach in bringing these releases out that will give it a larger feeling than just a book here and there?
MG: While there is a lot of BLOOD+ material coming out (basically, all prose and manga series from Japan), we’re going to do our best to make the series move harmoniously with the anime. The last episode is scheduled to run on Cartoon Network sometime around February, so we’re aiming to bring out the first book of the BLOOD+ (staple series) manga before that, which is much like what happened with Trigun during the first manga release.
Also, although it might look like a lot of material, the combined amount of books across the board (both manga and prose) for BLOOD+ is still under fifteen volumes. Blood the Last Vampire is a property that Dark Horse has championed in English for a while now, and we’re happy to be able to continue the amazing mythos here; it’s the perfect home for it.
AoD: GANTZ has long been desired but considered an incredibly hard title to sell even with a strong anime tie-in. Fears of censoring are large as well as the potential for low sales if the title is shrinkwrapped or stores avoid it. As the series features both sex and violence, and we’ve seen that violence is okay but sex isn’t when it comes to what can be sold, are there additional hurdles for GANTZ to achieve release here?
MG: First off, GANTZ will not be censored; if you have read Berserk or MPD-PSYCHO, or any other title that has been picked up in the last five years, I am sure that you will realize this is our policy. MPD-PSYCHO also features a cavalcade of both sex and violence (and often both at the same time—mutilated nude corpses, etc.), and I personally think that GANTZ isn’t as rough as MPD-PSYCHO by a longshot.
I’d be interested to hear where you heard it would be a hard sell from. Given that the anime was a huge success, I think that GANTZ could be easily likened to Berserk.
AoD: With word that EDEN: It’s An Endless World! is apparently on the verge of cancellation and several of these titles fall into the same category, what kind of commitment level does Dark Horse have to finishing out books? It’s obviously impractical to publish books that lose money continually but what kind of approach will the company try in order to get more of these mature titles out there and raise the awareness level?
MG: There has been a lot of talk generated since our publicist, Jeremy Atkins, casually brought up EDEN at the Press Conference at Anime Expo. He simply stated something along the lines of, “If you like this series and want to see if continue to come out, please pick up a copy; we have them in our booth and would be more than happy to talk to you about it.” This seemed to be interpreted as “EDEN is being canceled.” We're not sure what source this report originally stemmed from, but I agree with Jeremy in all respects. We hear time and time again that fans love the series, but when asked what volume they’ve read up to, a lot of fans reply that they haven’t picked up any volume but the first. As we’ve said before, supporting a series requires more than saying you love it; if you want to see volume after volume of a series that you love, please go and pick it up. We realize that there are/were and the only way to tell DH, the publisher and the creators how much you love the series is to go out and buy it!
We plan on staying committed to a series as long as possible when we license it; there have been instances in the past where a series is not making money, but we have stuck to it because its very existence warrants its release in English.
AoD: The arrival of GANTZ in the U.S. is seen as a sign that more Shueisha/Shogakukan titles may be available from other publishers in the future. How is the relationship with the company and does it seem as if their library is more accessible now?
MG: I can't speak on behalf of Shueisha or Shogakukan. I would imagine that our relationship is good, given that they’re licensing GANTZ to us. Also, as you know, they’re the parent companies of VIZ, and we simply came very specifically to them with our offer to license GANTZ. We are very, very thankful that Shueisha is allowing GANTZ to come to the English-speaking world through Dark Horse—a place we thought would be a natural home for it—but aren’t about to overstep our boundaries.
AoD: Not unlike the comic book market in general, the manga market seems to have found a general range of titles that are considered mainstream and will sell in decent numbers. How does Dark Horse view the past few years of growth in the market in terms of what kinds of titles sell and how do you view things changing or staying the same in the future?
MG: I think that it has been confirmed many times that titles with anime sell better, and this has held true all along. However—and I am sorry if I have said this in the past a lot—companies that sell titles that fit their company “concept” will find that those titles sell better. It is a business, and businesses need to make money to stay around, but if fans look at a certain property coming out from a certain publisher, they might think that it is an opportunistic cash-grab, and that could potentially hurt sales. So say, for example, a publisher called “Flowers, Puppies, and Cinnamon” comes out with an anticipated title, Varkon the Fanged’s Bile-Soaked Bloodbath in the 9th Plane of the Abyss, it might not do as well as if the company “Goresplatter Vilevomit Publishing,” whose portfolio is filled with such titles, were to come out with it. (Note: I made both of those up; they’re not supposed to be actual companies or titles.)
I can’t speak on the behalf of other companies about how things might change or stay the same (and quoting RUSH, “The more that things change, the more they stay the same”), but you can expect Dark Horse to continue to bring you classics and highly demanded manga and manhwa—which is just that, manga and manhwa. All the stuff we sell as manga and manhwa were created by Japanese/Korean creators, published by Japanese/Korean publishers, for Japanese/Korean audiences. This is the beauty of actual manga; while it wasn’t created for English audiences, it’s a great thing that people happen to like it so much. Indeed, that’s a part of manga being considered authentic.
In my opinion this is a long time coming, I mean Gantz is one of the best Seinen manga's right now. Its up there with Berserk, I'm surprised it took so long for Dark Horse Comics to license this.
Edit: it's kinda old news, but this is for those who didn't know.