Like everything in life, getting published is a learning experience. Not everyone is gonna come out the gates with a smash. It takes time and effort to achieve real success in this business.

Contracts are made to be negotiated.. if you don’t like the deal then don’t sign them. Nobody is putting a gun to your head.

Mixx’s Sailor Moon manga was the first manga I ever bought back in 1998-2000.

I remember when Tokyopop released some of the first Authentic Manga like Cowboy Bebop, GTO, Samurai Girl, etc. It really made the manga market change things at the time. They truly are innovators.

Despite all this recent news, I still have happy memories of buying my first manga, reading novels of my favorite anime, and being moved to tears while reading my favorite manga – all thanks to Tokyopop.

Lianne, thanks for that nice post.

I tried to show a few of the questionable business practices they’ve rectified so that there’s more reason to give them a break than just the fact that they treat some of their employees very well (myself included). And yes, I think those are all reasons to cut the company a break. You still don’t have to like them, but I think they deserve a break.

Regarding OEL: I would challenge you to poll a fair segment of the OEL creators and ask them if publishing their book(s) through Tokyopop was overall a good or a bad experience for them. Even though a lot of the contracts weren’t good, the company still gave them a chance at national publishing when no one else would. And some of the ones who really succeeded, such as Svetlana (Dramacon), moved on to bigger and better things as soon as the Tokyopop contract ran out. There is NO DOUBT IN MY MIND that the other major manga companies are going to start publishing OEL, offering better contracts and picking up the more seasoned creators and, in general, learning from Tokyopop’s mistakes in order to do something better and more discerning. This is the way the manga industry largely works. Tokyopop stakes a huge amount of money on pushing a relatively new experiment, and then the other companies learn from Tokyopop’s mistakes and follow suit. The reason manga is $10, in its current size, and unflipped is because Tokyopop was willing to do a huge marketing push to do their manga that way (not that they invented the ideas–they just did them wide-scale).

So these days, AND in the future, when creators get better contracts elsewhere and people are complaining about “how crappy Tokyopop was to OEL,” ask yourself: would there be more than a tiny niche market for OEL at all if not for Tokyopop? Tokyopop is the reason the OEL market EXISTS as more than a handful of titles.

And Princess Ai is practically the crux of Tokyopop’s licensing business. It’s published in a Japanese magazine before it comes here, and they’ve been talking about doing all sorts of visual media with it. It also sold a ton of books. The fact that some people thought Tokyopop would drop it is nothing short of ridiculous. You don’t have to like Princess Ai to realize how important it is to the company. Sorry, but the fact that they didn’t drop it only proves that they’re not stupid or going bankrupt. Princess Ai is never going anywhere, and for good reason.

Personally, I don’t think they’re evil.
I don’t think Stu Levy kills puppies or locks his grandmother in the basement. However, I do think they have done OEL manga creators a great disservice and have harmed the image of OEL manga in general with their appalling and cynical marketing practices.

Sending out cute Xmas cards is standard practice in business and doesn’t mean he’s a nice guy, he certainly hasn’t been nice to a heap of his creators and editors.

Is there any suprise that Princess Ai hasn’t been dropped? Sorry, I really can’t respect this company anymore. They deserve the scorn they are getting. I can only imagine what the axed creators must be going through right now.