By Julie Opipari
DC Comics announced that they are shuttering CMX, effective July 1, 2010. What awful news! CMX was one of my favorite publishers, and they offered a wonderful variety of titles. Some of my favorite series are CMX titles. Nari Kusakawa is a must buy artist, and now I sob at the thought of the premature end to all of the CMX books that I have come to love. They will never receive the ending they deserve here, and that makes me very unhappy. More importantly, I am very sorry about the lost jobs that this announcement brings. CMX employees were always so wonderful to work with, and I wish them luck in the future. My heart goes out to them.
This news has really got me down. First, Viz eliminated 40% of their work force last week. Now DC Comics is completely shuttering the CMX offices. I am terribly worried about the future of manga. So many companies have closed up shop, and each is a loss to the industry that I love. With fewer companies publishing manga, there are fewer choices on bookstore shelves, and publishers will be very, very hesitant to license anything remotely chancy. All of the little gems that don’t get much buzz will remain buried, like undiscovered treasure. Last week I was looking for a silver lining. Today I am looking for my tissues, to blot away my tears. This is a bitter pill to swallow, and I wonder where it will end?
With CMX out of the picture, the manga landscape looks pretty bleak. Sure, Viz releases many series that I enjoy, but they are, for the most part, just variations on the same theme. We have the fighting manga and the high school romance manga, and until Viz gathered up a little courage and started giving us the Viz Signature and Ikki imprints, that was about it. I love Bleach and Vampire Knight, but there are times that I want to read something a little more cutting edge or intended for an older audience. Something that I can relate to, something that speaks to me.
Now here’s the scary thing – what other publishers are in a hurt box, and weighing the same decision. To keep trying to make a buck in this challenging economic environment, or to call it quits and give up. CMX had DC’s might behind them, but they have always been treated like the red-headed step-child in that house. Not much effort went into trumpeting their books. Worse, book store availability has always been an issue. I personally have never had an issue buying their titles, but I purchase 99.9% of my books online. It takes a raging fire to get me into the not-so-local Borders, and the disorganization of the shelves always sets my teeth on edge.
So, Dark Horse, DMP, Vertical, TOKYOPOP, and Yen Press, what are you doing to make sure you aren’t the next victim in the manga publisher bloodbath? DMP has slowed output way down, and has tried to shift their focus more to online offerings. If Apple and Adobe were friends and my iPad ran Flash, I would be all over DMP’s eManga.com website. Dark Horse and Vertical seem very cautious with licensing decisions, and they only release a few choice selections every month. TOKYOPOP discovered the danger of flooding the market with too many releases each month; there are only so many dollars to go around, and when a company is sniping it’s own sales, life gets difficult very quickly. Yen Press has an interesting catalog, and they aren’t afraid to adapt some high profile titles into a graphic novel format. They did axe Yen Plus magazine. And I wonder how profitable the Twilight GN really was for them.
So here we are, and I am feeling more pessimistic about the future of manga in the US than I have in a long, long time. Like every other hobby, strained leisure spending is taking its toll on an industry that was flying high just a few short years ago. Or was that all smoke and mirrors, much like the financial markets that have brought this once mighty economic machine to its knees? How much worse are things going to get, before they finally do get better?
When Julie Opipari isn’t mucking around the barn, she can be found trying to make a dent in the massive pile of manga that keeps following her home from the bookstore. Not wiling to admit she has a problem, she blissfully continues to anticipate the latest releases despite the cries of agony from her credit card. She cheerfully blames her addiction on the stresses of college and post traumatic work disorder, and is grateful that her family grumbles only occasionally about the amount of time she spends buried in her books. In addition to reading Your Manga Minute every Wednesday, you can read more of Julie’s work on her blog, Manga Maniac Cafe.
May 19th, 2010 at 11:36 am
I feel for the creative teams on these books, good luck to all!
May 19th, 2010 at 11:42 am
I suspect Bleach and Naruto will about the only titles left after this contraction. Manga would appear to have been more fad than fashion.
May 19th, 2010 at 12:25 pm
Karma for Tenjho Tenge. They were total douchebags to the manga/anime fans right after they released TenTen volume 1, then when they saw the massive backlash eevrywhere, they scurried to please the fanbase. Buncha two-faced DC losers.
Good riddance.
May 19th, 2010 at 5:16 pm
People are just getting tired of dealing with late and amateurish translations with arbitrary censorship , when they can get the real deal done well by dedicated and loving fans in scans .
Like said above , it’s karma for what they did to Tenjho tenge .
As for tokyopop , they didnt just flooded the market … they tried to con people into buying fake mangas done in-house at an horrible and amateurish level .
It’s no wonder they got wiped
May 19th, 2010 at 8:16 pm
Jack F., Congratulations, you just placed your schadenfreude on THE WRONG PEOPLE. The ones responsible for the Tenjo Tenge fiasco were no longer running CMX by 2006. The ones affected by this were only guilty of bringing out off-beat, quality products that don’t get enough attention. It’s time to lay aside the grudges from six years ago, and show a little human sympathy for good people who just lost their jobs to recession and illegal competition.
May 19th, 2010 at 10:21 pm
Time to celebrate. I am so happy that CMX is dead. I have been praying for this moment since its inception. Yay!!!!
May 20th, 2010 at 1:51 pm
Oh, please. The problem for manga was the combination of price and frequency of release. If you only buy 1 or 2 manga titles, you wouldn’t feel the hurt but too many of the titles were coming out every 2 or 3 months. When Ranma 1/2 (from Viz) switched from the monthly comic format to the TPB-only format in 2003, readers went from spending $8.85 every 3 months to spending $9.95 every 3 months. Yes, there was generally twice as much material in the TPBs making the overall cost less but the page size was about 1/3 as large as the monthly while the paper stock was of slightly lesser quality. I preferred the monthly installments and had considered quitting the series rather than go to the TPBs but, as it was the only manga title I was getting at the time (and I absolutely loved the series), I kept on getting it.
Admittedly, I did get into the bishojo and yaoi styles but only a couple of the series were really worth the money. No matter the genre form (horror, rom/com, historical, fantasy), too many of the stories went beyond the level of formula (light-haired femmish boy seduced by dark-haired butch boy; “straight” jock inexplicably falls for “gay” nerd; “straight” employee realizes he’s gay after falling for or being seduced by the “gay” boss) and nearly every character was virtually interchangeable–only the hair color and a few accessories (usually glasses) could be used as identifying characteristics. (Anyone making fun of US comics artists who only have a limited range of physical types for characters really needs to look at manga, especially the shojo/bishojo and yaoi styles.)
Basically, manga is just as limited as US comics and people are now learning just how limited the form is. Sturgeon’s Law seems to be just as applicable to manga as everything else.
May 20th, 2010 at 2:34 pm
@William Flanagan
Tenjho tenge is just one case of mishapes among gazillions from pretty much every publishing house . And from everyone , incuding the article’s author’s admission , DC wasnt that much involved into making CMX a success and marketed brand .
Again people are tired of buying product that are clearly inferior to amateur work . Hell its make one wonders who’s the amateur and who is the pro .
It is a bit the same in europe with comics … we finally got tired of paying more for sloppy translation for stuff between 2 years to 6 months .
Every year people ask Marvel to propose a non abusive way to deliver digital comics , and instead we get scraps , just so they would protect retailers monopoly .
Again we are tired of dealing with midle management and extra people at an extra cost … both are medium that are delivery weekly , so they need to be priced and accessible accordingly
May 20th, 2010 at 6:44 pm
Tenjo Tenge is an extreme example of a company that licensed a manga that it shouldn’t have licensed because it does not fit with the company’s policies. It was their first batch of licenses, and they didn’t know better. CMX was punished for it in sales and bad reputation. And the company wised up afterward with the addition of Asako Suzuki, and licensed a lot of good books that didn’t need censorship to begin with and were well received by those who bothered to read them. The reason why I replied to Jack F and not to you, is that your problem isn’t with CMX in the first place, is it?
You seem to have a rather common narrative in mind that, in fact, has nothing to do with reality. The fact is that amateur translations contain far more mistakes than professional translations. Do you know how I know? Because every professional manga/anime translator was first a fan translator (most were scanslations or fansub translators). So the vast majority of professional have as much “love” as the amateurs but have more experience than the vast majority of amateurs, and in translation, experience means fewer mistakes. However the scanslation/fansub supporters constantly point out faults and perceived faults (not all “translation mistakes” are actually mistakes — just differences in interpretation) while glossing over the glaring errors of the amateurs. They cherry pick the best of the amateur offerings while ignoring the worst, and pounce on professional product for any perceived slight because it helps them feel better about themselves.
But the reason I know that every professional translator loves what they do is because industry weeds out anyone who doesn’t love manga and anime enough to sacrifice for it. They do that by simply paying some of the lowest rates in the entire translation industry. If one isn’t a fan, one will find far more lucrative ways of exploiting one’s bilingual skills than doing translation in this industry, like, for example, translating business letters. I’ve also met a large number of professional manga/anime translators, and I haven’t met one who isn’t a big fan of the media. Not one.
And the part of the narrative that is always left out by illegal uploaded translation supporters is the fact that the creators get no benefit from their activity. You can rehash the old tired arguments, but they don’t bear out in reality. There are more manga readers and anime viewers than ever, and the industry is contracting both here and in Japan. When there are more customers and less things bought, even the recession isn’t to blame.
Where did Marvel enter into this? They haven’t touched manga since the late 80s?
As I see it, you’re not tired of “middle management” unless your “exhaustion” has lasted half a decade. You want your manga when you want it (whether it’s possible in a legal manner or not) at the price you want it (free?), and if you don’t get it, you’ll step on creators rights and just take it illegally. You’re killing what you love, but I’m sure you’ve made up excuses and rationalizations to protect your pride from that reality.
May 20th, 2010 at 7:19 pm
First Viz Manga lays off about 50 workers, and now this. I know that all entertainment has been hit hard by the economy, but I wonder how much more we can take.
“If you only buy 1 or 2 manga titles, you wouldn’t feel the hurt but too many of the titles were coming out every 2 or 3 months. When Ranma 1/2 (from Viz) switched from the monthly comic format to the TPB-only format in 2003, readers went from spending $8.85 every 3 months to spending $9.95 every 3 months. Yes, there was generally twice as much material in the TPBs . . . ”
This is perhaps the most nonsensical argument here. Sorry. I’ll let pass the assertion that fan translations are possibly providing advertising and training for future pro translators, but this argument that getting more releases for less money per page is bad because someone can’t control his or her own spending is just silly. We want an entire series to be available ASAP. That’s a good thing, not a bad thing. Nothing keeps you from holding back and reading at your own pace.
May 20th, 2010 at 7:54 pm
Jack F., Congratulations, you just placed your schadenfreude on THE WRONG PEOPLE. The ones responsible for the Tenjo Tenge fiasco were no longer running CMX by 2006. The ones affected by this were only guilty of bringing out off-beat, quality products that don’t get enough attention.
That may have been true with the licensing of several titles that were deserving of wider recognization. But there was NO interaction between the publisher & the fans that let us know that. Not to mention that most of the titles they had were deemed subpar simply because they were from CMX. It got to be so that I could detect whether a random Manga volume on the shelf was a Viz, TokyoPop or CMX title just by looking at the cover alone. Most of the time, my guesses were right on.
However, this shakeup may turn out to be a silver lining. Chances are people may be wanting to snatch up several titles before they’re no longer available, leading to the first INCREASE in sales in years. Not to mention that if they decide to let their licenses lapse, other companies could snap up certain titles deserving of a wider audience. One that comes to mind is Chikyu Misaki. Just look at how Yotsuba burned up the charts once it switched from ADV to Yen Press.
Of course, that would require a Manga company willing to take the risk of publishing Old-School Shojo Mangas such as Swan & From Erotica with Love. Maybe Fantagraphics could take them? They’re going to publish some Moto Hagio Manga later this fall, & Dirk Deppey expressed some dismay at their discontinuance.
May 21st, 2010 at 6:08 am
@William Flanagan
I knew you’d try going through the little windows i’ve left there …
But FYI i’m actually in direct support of the manga industry … why ?
Because i’ve dealt away with “middle management” a long time ago , after being tired of buy various editions of some manga (the worst being the japanese > english > various european languages translation , and yes but to this day it still happens) , sullied with translations errors . And i’ve actually been tired of it for more than a decade of european publications , on tops of the us ones .
How ? I buy the original japanese manga (since i happen to know and pratice quite a bit of the language) … yet not pretending to be a master yet , i use the help of scans .
But feel free to as expected just call people thieves and freeloaders .
“Because every professional manga/anime translator was first a fan translator (most were scanslations or fansub translators).”
Hardly the truth … quite a few i’ve met werent at all into the medium , and treated it as a normal job .. with the universal and common mistake (aside from plain erroneous translations , wich are common too) , that is often the roots of evil for games/anime/manga translation :
that exagerated need to translate and adapt everything , to dumb it down for an audience .
Between the midst of a huge chunk of translators , GTO who would have been striped of any pop culture , and cultural references , and injected with western equivalents , like we’ve seen with other titles .
Thankfully , the versions i’ve seen felt , of their own admission , the need to compete with scanlations , and instead did a simple and great job of translation the text and the story … explaining the obscure references via glossary and lexicons .
it would have been insulting and patronizing to do otherwise , and assume that people are too dumb to seek for references , or might not be culturally informed enough to get it .
Of course amateurs makes errors too , hell amidst the underbelly of anime and manga fans , we often have a laugh at the expense of contextual errors , grammar mistakes , simply bad translations , babelfish/google translations .
We always do , but when the same criterias are applied to the professional world … aie .
hell even if both were somehow tied , ther eis still the one issue that one side is , at the end of the day , still paid for it .
My comment about Marvel ? it was about translation too . I’ve decades of mediocre foreign marvel stuff ,with the “great” highlight of it being overpriced and late , and without extra …
Wich again applies to both world …
when the translations takes obviously extra times , extra costs , and isnt really better … and you’ve got online alternatives that Both the manga and comics publishers refused for so long to embrace , it’s obvious that piracy will win .
Be it online and on paper (or for animes) , many of us just wanted quickly released chapters and volumes from the original publishers themselves , instead of subcontracting to firms that wont care as much as they do .
Instead we had for so long censored , dumbified , costly and late versions of stuff we love , and with condescending rebutals (cmx for tenten , among others , cn network for their awful job on anime , etc etc ) . It’s no wonder not everyone would remain honest .
May 21st, 2010 at 4:57 pm
@Baka-Akab
“Hardly the truth … quite a few i’ve met werent at all into the medium , and treated it as a normal job .. with the universal and common mistake (aside from plain erroneous translations , wich are common too) , that is often the roots of evil for games/anime/manga translation”
Who? Which professional manga translators have you met who are not into manga?
May 21st, 2010 at 8:46 pm
If you buy tankobon of everything you read online, then I’ve got no problem with you. But you must realize that the number of people who both read online scans and buy the tankobon is infinitesimally small. The majority of the readers of illegal scans never buy any printed version of the product. Even the minority that do buy some printed volumes don’t buy them for all the series they follow regularly.
Let’s leave the European publishers and translation practices out of this please? They may have left a deep psychological impact on you, but they don’t really bear on a conversation about CMX and the broader English-language translated-manga industry. Nor would they be relevant to most of the readers of this blog.
Okay, that said… What year are you taking about here? GTO predated Ten-ten. That was circa 2002, right? Is that when you met the translators you mentioned? Of the non-fan translators you met, how many are still in the business now? In 2004, when I went from Viz back to freelance translating, the rates would have been tempting to non-fan translators. Since then, the rates have plunged. My guess is that any non-fan translators have either turned into fans (the only reason to stay in the industry) or gotten out. I’m on the verge of being pushed out myself by the low rates and lack of business.
When you say, “People are just getting tired of dealing with late and amateurish translations with arbitrary censorship , when they can get the real deal done well by dedicated and loving fans in scans.” You are stating that fan translations are better than professional translations. In that case, it’s only fair to compare them on the same level and discover that, on the whole, professional translations are more accurate that fan translations (also, on the whole — no cherry picking here). Now if you expect zero errors from any translation, pro or amateur, then you are expecting too much. Even aside from the differences in interpretation, it is nearly impossible to obtain a 100% accurate translation. Translators are human and make human errors, and translation is an interpretive craft — a far cry from science. So accept that there will be errors, and also accept that professionals make fewer of them than amateurs.
About Marvel, again I have no idea what is going on in Europe. I can’t speak to that.
“Be it online and on paper (or for animes) , many of us just wanted quickly released chapters and volumes from the original publishers themselves , instead of subcontracting to firms that wont care as much as they do.”
What makes you think that the original publishers care more than the subcontractors? Is that opinion nearly a decade out of date also? Viz is directly owned and controlled by two of the top-three original publishers. And Kodansha simply used subcontractor’s translations for their releases so far. I’m not trying to say that the original publishers don’t care, simply that the American licensees care just as much. In fact, they care just as much about their translations as the fans do. It’s simply that their priorities are not your priorities. And your priorities are not necessarily the “fan community’s priorities. When you poll the fan community, you will find that everybody’s priorities are all over the map. There are very few consensus points on what makes a good translation and what doesn’t, and those few consensus points have been adopted by just about all the current manga publishers. (Again, I’m talking today’s world. Not the world of even half a decade ago.)
So the censored and dubified arguments are outdated (with relation to the American industry). It may be costly, but far less costly than it was a decade ago (how many things can you say that about?) You can expect argumentative rebuttals in the face of argumentative demands. And NONE of that has anything to do with the huge stampede of people away from legal venues and toward illegal downloading. The word “Free” has everything to do with it — no matter how much the creators’ rights are trampled by it.
If you had advocated buying the Japanese tankobon as much as you advocated illegal and harmful downloads, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
May 24th, 2010 at 1:34 pm
To anyone whose still against buying the english versions of any manga check these links:
http://matt-thorn.com/wordpress/?p=407
http://www.sarahpin.com/2009/11/30/matt-thorn-is-harsh/
You may be choosing right. Both these guys do some serious hair splitting on translations.
May 26th, 2010 at 6:44 am
Риспект. Также можно купить недвижимость франции и взять в аренду виллу во Франции.
Respect!!! Взгляни сюда: поможет построить дом качественно…
January 17th, 2011 at 12:59 pm
Thanks for taking a few minutes to discuss this, I highly about it and really enjoy studying more on this niche. If possible, while you obtain information, would you allow me updating your web site with other info? Extremely valuable for us.
January 17th, 2011 at 9:16 pm
Robert Reich~ In Washington its dog eat dog. In academia its exactly the opposite.
February 25th, 2011 at 10:36 am
I recently find a new manga website,there you can read free manga,mobile manga
March 23rd, 2011 at 9:35 pm
Additionally , you will observe that generally, when you will note a Television advert regarding new makeup, there will be models who’re wearing false lashes to advertise that product. In actual life, it simply takes a very simple exercise of logic in addition to thoughts, to find out that if there would be a business that may provide you with such type of an item that can be found which would brag out these great outcome, that will be the just company to attain success and there would-be not place left for your rivals on the market, so “first come, first served” as they speak.