Tokyopop’s Demise Spurs Deep Thinking, Memories of Favorite Series I’ll Miss

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While it’s horrible that Tokyopop is closing, at least folks remembering both the good times and bad have resulted in some thought-provoking reading.

Tokyopop Changed the Industry For the Worse…

Matt Thorn blames Stu Levy for depressing the page rate for translators to the point where professionals couldn’t do the job any more:

The point being, there were standards, and even a rookie was guaranteed a decent rate…. Mind you, there was no shortage of enthusiastic otaku willing to work for peanuts. It’s just that no respectable publisher ever seriously considered hiring such people unless they proved themselves, and even then they were paid a decent wage. TokyoPop changed that. Why pay six bucks a page when there’s this kid here who will do something vaguely resembling a “translation” for five bucks a page? Or four? Or even three? I was stunned when I first heard that there were kids at TokyoPop working for three bucks a page. That’s not even close to a living wage.

In comments to a post about Thorn’s post (link no longer available), translator William Flanagan confirms the low wages: “there’s no place for me to go because nearly all of the manga publishers are unwilling to pay professional rates to professionals. And Matt is right that TokyoPop caused the race to the bottom (although the scanslators working for free was another factor).”

That’s a problem in any entertainment field — too many youngsters willing to do ANYTHING to get in, not realizing that companies that rely too much on cheap and free “talent” will create a world where there’s nowhere to go once they are in. Once they need a living wage, to settle down or live like an adult, they won’t get it — they’ll just get replaced by the next kid. That’s why reputable companies don’t staff themselves solely with interns and freelancers.

… And the Better

More importantly, in response to those eager to declare manga dead with Tokyopop’s passing, Brigid Alverson writes the definitive history of the changes Tokyopop brought to comics, concluding “manga did transform the comics world. It took comics out of the hands of fanboys, collectors, and hipsters and made them a truly mass medium.”

Tokyopop Manga I Loved

As for my library, Tokyopop titles account for 170 of the 529 volumes of manga in my database, 32%, surpassed only by Viz (with 217). That count does include their OEL titles, of which my favorites were Dramacon, Steady Beat, and Kat & Mouse. All created by women, which perhaps isn’t surprising, but I didn’t realize until now that Tokyopop worked with so many female artists in their English-language line.

Speaking of which, I will always be grateful to them for publishing josei that wasn’t just drawn Harlequins or smut, titles such as Tramps Like Us (although I would have preferred something closer to the original “You’re My Pet”), Paradise Kiss, Suppli, and Happy Mania. Thoughtful, beautiful books like Aria and The Voices of a Distant Star made my best-of lists over the years. I was consistently entertained by good genre work from The Kindaichi Case Files and Planetes.

Tokyopop, in fact, published some of the earliest manga series I ever picked up — books like Love Hina and Chobits (before I knew the difference between shonen and shojo or who CLAMP was). I found myself involved in long girls’ romances, with Mars and Marmalade Boy (the first time I found out how a successful anime can drag out a manga series beyond the point it should have stopped), and piquant short ones that I weren’t even sure were love stories, with Suki. I’ve bought INVU twice now, giving it up when volume 4 took four years to appear and then rebuying it when volume 5 came out two years after that. (It’s still not done, either here or in its native Korea.)

The five volumes of Rising Stars of Manga I picked up cheap are part of my collection because of their historical significance. Once again, I’m reminded that Tokyopop was the manga publisher that took the most risks, trying things no one else would. I’ll remember them best for that.



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