Deb Aoki reports from the Dark Horse panel at last weekend’s Sakura-Con, where manga editor Carl Horn was candid about the disappointing sales of horror/suspense series The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service and Mail, and the samurai epic Satsuma Gishiden:
In the case of Satsuma Gishiden, Horn explained, “Hiroshi Hirata has created one of the best samurai manga, ever. But we couldn’t continue publishing it after volume 3, because it wasn’t selling.”
According to Horn, shrink-wrapping adult content was another factor that contributes to slow sales. “Some bookstores just won’t order our manga that is shrink-wrapped, so we often hear from readers that they can’t find Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service.”
I’ve not read Satsuma Gishiden — yes, I’m part of the problem — but Kurosagi and Mail are two of my favorite titles. I find the low sales of the smart, quirky and creepy books disappointing and a bit puzzling.
Blogger John Jakala shares my surprise, and bangs the drum for Eiji Otsuka and Housui Yamazaki’s Kurosagi: “C’mon, people! This is a great horror / mystery / humor manga that appeals to everyone from noted mangaphiles like David Welsh and Shaenon K. Garrity to manga neophytes such as Valerie D’Orazio and Chris Sims! Don’t pull another great manga horror series out from under me.”
April 1st, 2008 at 10:12 am
Personally, there are several Dark Horse manga that I’d love to try. But for whatever reason, Dark Horse feels the need to price their manga anywhere from 3 to 5 dollars higher than companies like Tokyopop, Viz, Shonen Jump, etc.
There are a lot of great titles out there, and if I can try another title I’ve heard recommended for several dollars less than another, then that’s what I’m going to do.
Has Dark Horse ever issued any kind of reasoning as to why its manga is priced like it is?
April 1st, 2008 at 10:42 am
Part of the problem for me in trying these titles is that I haven’t been able to find any Dark Horse titles at any comic shops or bookstores. These have been titles that I’ve been on the lookout for but whenever I check out Borders or Barnes & Noble, I can’t find any DH titles amid all of the Tokyopop and Viz books.
April 1st, 2008 at 10:43 am
Dark Horse also uses an undersize format which makes everything very tiny. Not interested.
April 1st, 2008 at 11:13 am
The reasons that I don’t think Dark Horse Manga do as well as other Manga seem to have already been noted, but they are worth restating – their price point is too high is the biggest. I don’t understand how they think they can compete with other publishers when they are charging a few bucks more for equivalent products.
Their undersize format is also a problem. While they don’t utilize it for all of their books, they use it for a large portion of them. It makes all of the pages too small and uncomfortable to read.
April 1st, 2008 at 11:56 am
Neophyte? Brother, I’ve been through the whole cycle of being new to manga, loving it, reading a bunch, being burnt out on it, hating it, hating its fans, and then finally settling on reading Yotsuba&!.
April 1st, 2008 at 12:15 pm
$11 is now “too much” for manga? I remember when manga trades cost $16 to $20. Plus, Dark Horse uses much nicer paper, with better reproduction of the art than, say, Tokyopop, making that extra buck worth it.
April 1st, 2008 at 12:16 pm
It’s a very heavy investment. The complete Lone Wolf and Cub series cost me $280. Though I would have paid double that for a larger-size format.
April 1st, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Dorian –
The $11.00 price point for Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, Mail, and MPD Psycho seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Most of their standard sized Manga seems to be between thirteen and fifteen dollars, and their stupid, headache-inducing digest size still costs more than per volume than books from Viz or Tokyopop. They’ve got a bunch of great titles, but I have a really difficult time understanding what their justification is in their price point.
For the most part it’s not ‘an extra buck’. A lot of the time it’s anywhere from 140% to 150% the cost of the equivalent product. That is a significant price bump and I doubt that a majority of readers care enough about nicer paper and better reproduction to make it worth it. Add to that the shrink-wrapped element (which I wasn’t aware of) that prevents browsing and I just don’t see how they expect these books to sell at any kind of serious volume.
April 1st, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Yeah, I know some DH manga books are over ten bucks, but it always seems to be worth it. Kurosagi has nice, heavy cardstock covers with a distinctive look & feel — plus some of the best endnotes in the biz. (Carl Horn’s commentary is both illuminating and entertaining, a rare feat.) And the other books that come to mind (Museum of Terror, Scary Book) are all longer than the average Viz or Tokyopop book. (OK, School Zone was $13 for around 200 pages, but I imagine DH knew it was going to be a slow seller, so they priced it accordingly to balance things out.) Not to mention DH’s translations and adaptations are uniformly stellar, so I do think a big part of it is a question of being willing to pay a little bit more for a higher quality product.
And sorry about that, Chris. Originally that line was going to be “manga neophytes such as Valerie D’Orazio and Mike Sterling” but when I went back and found the reference I was thinking of, it turned out I’d misremembered and the Mikester was only planning on reading Kurosagi, so I quickly substituted your name and review in. So hopefully once Mr. Sterling does read Kurosagi and posts his review, sales will immediately go through the roof and the book will be saved. Yay!
April 1st, 2008 at 4:49 pm
Dorian: Excellent point, especially when you take into consideration the fact that Tokyopop is now raising the price on their mature readers titles to.. $11.
Basically, with DH, there have three stages in their pricing of manga. The older unflipped material was in the mid to high teens (older editions of Oh! My Goddess, Gunsmith Cats, etc).
Then they moved away from Studio Proteus and worked with DMP, most of the releases from this period where in the lower teens (early Trigun volumes, Berserk, The Ring series, Reiko the Zombie Shop).
Now the majority of their titles, with a few hold overs from the earlier pricing periods (Berserk, Blade of the Immortal), omnibus/wideban collections (Crying Freeman, Museum of Terror), Shirows stuff, and the odd title (Gantz, Color of Rage), are $11.
At any rate the fact that DH publishes my favorite manga series and most of them are in danger is disheartening to say the least. First Eden and now news of KCDS? Ugh.
Personally I don’t think the problem is the price so much as the current state of manga fandom. The folks driving the sales are teens and DH manga tends to skew towards the older reader.
April 1st, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Ken –
I hadn’t heard about Tokyopop’s upcoming price increase. I’ll be curious to see how that plays out. It’s also good to know that Dark Horse seems to be putting out the majority of their new product at $11.00.
I’ve only recently been putting any kind of serious effort into getting into reading Manga so I don’t know the ins and outs of the upcoming events, price-adjustments, etc. I do know that it annoyed the hell out of me a couple months ago when I was picking up Death Note and Eden at the same time and was paying $8.00 a volume for Death Note and $13.00 a volume for Eden. I got similarly annoyed when I picked up the early volumes of Bleach and KCDS and was paying $8.00 for Bleach and $11.00 for KCDS. Neither time did the production value impress me enough to make me feel like the price diferential was justified. It also seemed like a significant enough price differential as I was buying those that I suspected it would impact sales.
I’m glad that things look like they are coming closer to something like a common/universal price structure.
Now if Dark Horse could just stop publishing the digest sized editions so that I could read Lone Wolf and Cub without getting a headache.
April 1st, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Saw these posts and had to respond. First, most of Dark Horse manga sells extremely well. While it is true that the horror line did not sell as well as expected, and that quality titles such as Eden and MPD Psycho are below expectations, most of our titles do quite nicely. Berserk. Ghost In the Shell, Blade of the Immortal, Trigun, Hellsing and others have all been big sellers and all of our manga continues to sell on backlist. The Lone Wolf & Cub series, by the way, has sold over 1 million copies to date.
With regard to size, the vast majority of our manga titles are sized the same as the common format used by the other publishers mentioned. Lone Wolf & Cub’s smaller size was actually Koike’s preferred size, mimicking the Japanese bunko format. Dark Horse, as opposed to some other publishers, works directly with a number of our Japanese creators rather than simply licensing a series and jamming it into a standard format.
Many of the titles mentioned as being priced too high are, indeed, several dollars higher than the competition. Much of that has to do with paper, design time and sales projections, but we are aware of the problem and are constantly looking at our pricing. I would mentioned though that we also have a number of books priced very competitively. Koike’s samurai books, for instance, offer around 350 pages for $10. Not a bad deal.
As far as finding our books, if your retail store does not carry them, they are easily found on Amazon.com.
And yes, many of our titles are aimed at older readers, but I’d point out that Dark Horse, just as with our overall line of books, publishes a variety of manga for a variety of tastes. OH My Goddess, it might be noted, is the longest running manga series in America, with Blade of the Immortal not far behind. The books coming from our new partnership with Clamp will certainly underline our diversity.
In the end, Dark Horse has published manga almost from our first year. We did it because we love the work that comes from Japan, and as a result we try to take care with each and every book in a series, For us, it is not a matter of turning out as many titles as possible each month, something we had ample opportunity to do long before most of the current manga publishers entered the market. Our goal is, and has always been, to publish work by the best Japanese artists in the best formats possible. We try our best to listen to the fans and we’ll certainly take these notes into consideration.
April 1st, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Mike –
Thanks for the input.
I respect the choice to go for the smaller size out of deference to the creators preference. I wish it weren’t the case because I really, really don’t like reading it but I totally get why it is that way now.
I also appreciate the efforts you’ve made in price point. Until participating in this thread I thought that the average price for your Manga releases was $13.00 (still getting caught up on what’s available so I have no real conception of what the ‘current’ pricing of most Manga publishers are, I just know what I paid for titles x, y, and z when I picked them up of the shelf – not knowing their publication date.)
Like I said above – you’ve got a great catalog of titles and whenever I see a great catalog of titles I want them to do well. Price point is something I think about a lot with regard to comics and frequently seems (to me) be the biggest barrier to people becoming regular comics readers.
April 1st, 2008 at 11:35 pm
Mr. Richardson -
On the product pages for Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, it mentions that “A U.S. live-action film based on The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is now in development.” Originally it said that the film was due out in 2007. Can you provide any more detail on this? Would this be something coming out from Universal and Dark Horse Entertainment?
April 2nd, 2008 at 12:20 am
Del Rey’s manga is regularly priced at $10.95. ADV’s titles vary – Yotsuba&! is $9.99, and Cromartie High School is $10.95. I haven’t found Dark Horse’s prices to be out of line.
I personally would like to see more adult manga titles that aren’t horror. Club Nine was delightful, sassy fun; I figure it just didn’t sell well enough. I have tried to promote the adult manga titles through my work as a graphic novel selector for a book distributor and for an online graphic novel core collection database (available for libraries, through subscription only) – to at least encourage libraries to pick up more books. But libraries also have to look at circulation figures, just as retail establishments have to look at sales.
April 2nd, 2008 at 2:46 am
I’m following Oh My Goddess, Blade of the Immortal, Eden, and MPD Psycho- all of them are of great quality and don’t disappoint. Spending a few extra dollars for guaranteed quality doesn’t bother me at all. I should note that I usually pay around $11-12 CAD for my DH books, which isn’t bad.
It’s a bigger waste of money purchasing a North American release that has been butchered from its original design. A third of my collection is TokyoPop and it is one of my biggest regrets. After purchasing more DarkHorse and Infinity Studios titles, the difference in quality of translation and paper is huge! What do you get for a $10 from TP? Horrible translation, mixed up or missing text, paper that resembles toilet paper, and an ugly red label reminds you of your bad choices. They have GREAT titles, but each one is sorely butchered. ADV is similar to TP with quality and have a manga department that barely exists. Aside from that, some of their titles (*cough* Gunslinger Girl Yotsuba& *cough*) go on hiatus and disappear from release lists for a few years.
Use Amazon or Chapters to purchase DH books. They usually have a discounted price of 10-20%. It makes a big difference when purchasing large quantities.
April 2nd, 2008 at 8:26 am
Anyone who can’t recognize that a volume of Eden or KCDS or Berserk is many, many dollars better than a volume of Bleach or Death Note is part of the problem. i would gladly pay twenty bucks per for new volumes of eden.
April 3rd, 2008 at 10:53 am
As the largest multi-territorial publisher of manga in Europe, and having several of DH titles in our own line-up (Eden, Berserk, LW&C, MPD Psycho and Kurosagi) I have to agree with Mike. These titles are “seinen” – “mangas for grown-ups”and therefore appeal to a subset of the “core” manga readers. On the other hand, they appeal to non-manga readers, most notably those who follow our editions of US-comics. They cannot and shouldn’t be compared to shonen titles or shojo, which skew much younger and therefore can (often, but not always) have higher sales.
Marco Lupoi
Publishing director-Panini Comics
April 3rd, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Marco,
Thank you for the information as well.
As a new reader of the variety of available manga titles out there I am not aware of the numerous subdivisions and categories. They are all shelved together in the places I shop and all seem to be competing for the same dollar. That basically means that at this moment I’m buying entirely based on the information I get off the shelf. I’m sure I’ll learn more as I read more and get more interested in the world of Manga.
Until then, I’m sure I’ll get frustrated by things that make perfect sense to long-time readers/fans. I appreciate that so much information has been made available to me just in this thread.
April 3rd, 2008 at 4:33 pm
I would just like to say that I grew up reading american comics, but the quality of selection and packaging of Dark Horse’s manga offerings has led me to become a regular reader of many DH manga titles.
What started with Lone Wolf & Cub, led to Samurai Executioner, then Path of Assassins. I’ve also began catching up on things like Eden (which I love) and even Gunsmith Cats (I think the new omnibus editions are terrific).
I’ll also echo that I think stylistically the dark horse packaging is the best – even if too small for some readers. The paper quality is top notch. I hope to do my part to help Dark Horse manga continue!
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