Well, panic now.
Clearly, Tokyopop's misfortune is largely its own doing. Dumb licenses, too many licenses and the whole Ameri-manga fiasco...I could go on. Still, it's sad for the U.S. manga market as a whole because it will likely discourage other companies from going into the market or expanding their market plans. Also, people that were reading TP titles won't get to legally support the industry/the creators.ANN wrote:ANN has confirmed with Tokyopop Senior Vice President Mike Kiley that the company will shutter its Los Angeles-based North American publishing operations on May 31. The company's film and European operations will be unaffected by this closure, and its office in Hamburg, Germany will continue to handle global rights sales for the company.
In a post on the website for Tokyopop's America's Greatest Otaku reality web series, the company's CEO, Stu Levy, announced that he will spend the next year in the Japanese prefecture of Miyagi, making a documentary about the effects of the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake disaster (Higashi Nihon Daishinsai) of March 11. The proceeds of the documentary will go to support the victims. He also posted a farewell message on the official Tokyopop website.
May 31 is less than three weeks after the first major feature film based on a Tokyopop property, Priest, will open in American theaters.
Levy founded the company, originally called Mixx, in 1997 and published manga in serial form in its Mixxzine magazine. The company's titles included Naoko Takeuchi's popular Sailor Moon magical girl manga, Hitoshi Iwaaki's Parasyte science-fiction/horror manga, and CLAMP's Magic Knight Rayearth fantasy manga.
Tokyopop later pioneered the publication of "unflopped" manga (shown in its original right-to-left reading format) and launched divisions in the U.K. and Germany, as well as an imprint devoted to Boys Love manga called Blu. Other Tokyopop endeavors have included a light novel line, the Rising Stars of Manga program, and more recently, digital and print-on-demand manga.
In 2006 the company announced that it had negotiated the rights to a live-action adaptation of Min-Woo Hyung's Korean manhwa Priest, which opens later this year. In 2008, the company underwent a major restructuring that split the company into the publishing division and a new media and films division. The company also toured the U.S. throughout the summer of 2010, shooting the America's Greatest Otaku web series.
In 2009, Tokyopop confirmed that all of its Kodansha licenses would lapse. Last month, Levy commented that the February bankruptcy of the Borders bookstore chain had played a significant role in its decision to lay off a number of the company's employees.
I was looking forward to reading the rest of that series.
