A short article on Tokyopop’s pre-iphone phone manga app, which started with Princess Ai and a few OELs.
Via Anime Insider: US Phone Manga (June 2006)
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Tag Archives: Manga
20 Million Copies of Ace of the Diamond in Print
The dust jacket around Ace of the Diamond’s 41st volume* reports that it presently has 20 million copies in print:
Via Anime Insider: Manga Magazines (March 2006)
An article about manga magazines. While it doesn’t contain any information that’s new to me, it’s a nice, basic overview of a couple different ones, so I thought I’d include it.
Fun With Numbers: The Non-Cancellation of Popular Manga Post-Anime
One of the most fundamental issues I take with English-language discussion of anime is the degree to which many people simply ignore manga outright. From a demographic perspective, this makes sense; Japan spends roughly 5 billion dollars on manga every year, and in France, the annual income in dollars of the manga industry (~125 million) exceeds the number of people living in the country (~66 million), but the average United States citizen spends about 38 cents per year (120 million per year market, 318 million people) on manga while pirating or illegally streaming approximately 6 gazillion episodes of anime. Ok, I made that last figure up, but I did plug in the 2 sites that “free streaming anime episodes” pulled up for me on google into a web value calculator, and those sites, gogoanime and kissanime, have a combined estimated pageview total of 1.5 billion per year, and they’re hardly the only ones out there that do what they do.*
It’s worth noting that I’m not at all unbiased about this; manga is kind my favorite thing. And that’s why I fall into the devil’s advocate role when people try to build anime-centric narratives surrounding manga. One of the most common permutations of this phenomenon pops up when a manga series ends soon after an anime adaptation of it. I’ve seen it argued in different places that poor anime performances killed off C3-bu, Daily Lives of High School Boys, and Binbougami ga. The most oft-cited piece of evidence in these cases is the timing of the ending of the series; if the franchise became more popular, it wouldn’t make sense to end it in the middle of that boom. The issue with that line of reasoning, though, is that authors can and have quit on extremely popular series at multiple times in the past. Inoue Takehiko ended 100,000,000+ seller Slam Dunk in the middle of a major tournament, and Hiroyuki Takei ended Shaman King early for health reasons. At the very least, author burnout is an alternate hypothesis that needs to be addressed, either with additional evidence for the “cancelled” argument or a direct quote from the author. Since the latter is only available on a case-by-case basis, I’ll be taking a look at the first question; does a lack of a visible sales boost increase the odds that a manga will end a year or so after the anime adaptation?
Via Anime Insider: Early-Age Phone Manga (November 2005)
A short article talking about manga available on phones in the pre-smartphone era.
Via Anime Insider: Tokyopop’s Partial Bookstore Withdrawl (November 2006)
A short article about Tokyopop’s decision to make a number of titles web exclusive.
They give the official reason that shelves are crowded, but the biggest issue is likely that the books just weren’t selling – some of the titles that were pulled never finished getting US releases (including the pictured Dragon Voice, which released 10 volumes out of 11 before they abruptly threw in the towel).
Fun With Numbers: Various Case Studies of Oricon Manga Charts Versus Copies in Print
Oricon manga reports tend to fall well, well short of the “actual” values reported by publishers. I’ve written before about one of the most extreme cases (Yuruyuri’s one million copies with 0 weeks in the charts), but there are plenty of others out there. This isn’t a comprehensive look at it (and these series may or may not represent “average” cases of underreporting); it’s just me picking a couple confirmations and counting up the total (i.e. total on weekly charts from last week a volume appeared) Oricon reported sales up to the point when the publisher reported a given number.
Some of these may simply be unsold copies, another part may represent copies sold at a 10k/week rate in the long-tail shadow of the charts, and a few may come from the overseas sales Oricon chooses not to count. How to separate those three is anybody’s guess. I’m not trying to do that, just give some idea of how big these gaps can be.
Via Anime Insider: Kouta Hirano and Yasuyuki Ueda (September 2005)
Author Kouta Hirano and Yasuyuki Ueda talk about rebooting the Hellsing franchise with different goals and Hirano’s inspiration as an author, and various other things.
Fun With Numbers: Print Boosts’ Effect on Sequel Odds
It’s been well-established that an anime adaptation of a manga or light novel can be a huge boon to the source material. What’s a bit less obvious is whether or not boosting print material can fuel the production of a second season of said anime.There are at least a few reasons why it shouldn’t; for a manga get adaptation boosts primarily from the first season – afterwards, their sales tend to plateau or drop off (even if the series does get a second season). It makes sense on an intuitive level that there would be some sort of diminishing returns on subsequent seasons of anime; sequels tend to sell between 0% and 50% fewer disks, and people don’t tend to start watching anime from the second season onward. But whether or not those diminishing returns carry over to print sales, and if so to what extent, is a somewhat separate question.
In this post, I’ll be exploring that question, comparing the rate of shows getting sequels with and without print sales boosts over different ranges of disk sales, to get an idea of whether or not print sales boosts actually “matter” towards a show’s sequel odds.*
Via Anime Insider: Manga in School Libraries (August 2005)
Short piece on the rising popularity of manga in US school libraries.
Animetics 