| 10 Years of TOKYOPOP--Manga Manga Manga |
| Friday, 18 May 2007 09:37 | |||
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Watch our interview with TOKYOPOP Publisher Mike Kiley and CEO and Founder Stu Levy.  TOKYOPOP CEO and founder Stu Levy.   These pages-packed comics--with bindings more than inch thick in some cases--were more like books with a variety of ongoing series running form months and years targeted to all ages. The stories ranged from tales of baseball heroes to teen romance to perverse sex, and everybody read them--businessmen on the subways, teen girls, housewives--everyone had comic targeted to them. Back then few of them had English translations and were distributed anywhere in the U.S., especially in New York. Kodansha has released the "Wolf and Cub" and "Gogol-13" series but did little if nothing to promote them. And then there was Frederik L. Schodt's 1983 book, "Manga! Manga!--The World of Japanese Comics," a fabulous introduction to the whole scene that hasn't yet been paralleled. When I got back from Japan, trying to transport here stacks of the comics I found thrown away, I went to the Kinokuniya book store in Manhattan (10 W 49th St) to research the comics further and found this book. Thankfully it has been updated and is still available. But way before it became cool to be an "otaku" (obsessive fan), I wrote an article for Spin magazine in 1984 that was as far as I knew was the first about manga; and since I had been an editor at the graphic story magazine Heavy Metal a couple of years before, I went to the publisher with the idea that he should release these comics in English translations like they did with European comics. Well, it fell on deaf ears with the editor not quite getting the connection between the work of Katsuhiro Otomo--the creator of "Akira"--and a French innovator like Moebius. Sigh, I tried to find backing at the time to do my own publishing company and release some of the stories I found--hey, I wanted to get them translated and read them myself--but nobody got it. Well, to my chagrin or pleasure, about 10 years later publishers like TOKYOPOP started appearing and got my opportunity to read these tales--even if I didn't profit from them. Well, with the growing dominance of the San Diego Comic Con (which just recently finished up at the end of July) and this year's New York Comic Con, graphic stories and manga are the driving force not for cult favorites but huge mainstream successes in film and animation. There is even talk of the first anime con this December in the Javits Center this coming December. Luckily, I caught up with Stu Levy, CEO, Chief Creative Officer and founder of TOKYOPOP at the New York Comic Con where we spoke quickly--in between bites of birthday cake--about his decade in business. Related Video:{moslink}903{/moslink}
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