To all of you who said that Tom Brevoort didn’t take notice of Manga when he called comics a two-party system, well, he agrees with you:
Certainly, most manga publishers aren’t competing over the same talent that we and the guys uptown are using. And from what I can tell, they’re not directly competing for the same dollars in most cases, in terms of the readership and the retail community (both in the direct market and in bookstores.) Where there’s a pretty direct relationship between the sales levels of the titles at the “big two”–when Marvel numbers go up overall, the other guys’ numbers tend to fall, and vice versa–there hasn’t yet been much of an affect on the numbers from the manga outfits… But at least at the moment, the manga publishers aren’t direct competitors in our marketplace–they’re indirect competitors at most, and what they bring to the marketplace is additive.
