As reported Monday, the Japanese publisher Kodansha is planning to set up a U.S. subsidiary to sell manga directly on these shores.
Reaction to the announcement, as expected, was swift. MangaBlog and Simon Jones over at Icarus Publishing have the best roundups.
There are a few items worth noting, however, the most significant being that Dallas Middaugh, Del Rey Manga Associate Publisher, has declared that this will not affect their publishing schedule (Del Rey having served as Kodansha’s principal licensor for awhile now):
Well, it’s business as usual at Del Rey Manga. We’re continuing to license manga from Kodansha, and as has been stated elsewhere, we’ve just about wrapped up our licenses for 2009 and are now starting to work on 2010. In a few weeks at the San Diego Comic-Con we’ll be announcing some of those new licenses, and we’ve got some really exciting new manga series planned. Then we’ll have a few more announcements at the New York Anime Festival in September… pretty much like we’ve always done. Also, we will continue to publish all of our manga. Kodansha has not pulled any licenses back from us.
Writing for The Comics Reporter, David Welsh received back-up confirmation of this from other sources.
Chris Butcher, however, says that Dark Horse no longer has the license for Akira and that Tokyopop has cancelled Volumes 13 and 14 of Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad, thought the latter could be due to TP’s recent troubles.
Lots of people, meanwhile, are speculating on what this could mean for American manga fans or setting up their own wish lists. Better get started on yours.
July 2nd, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Kodansha does an amazing job with their Japanese language resource books, like dictionaries, grammar books, etc, and, while I haven’t read too much on this, if they start taking an active role in manga translations and distribution in North America, that would be the best manga news I’ve heard in a while.