Pop Gone Flat
Apr. 19th, 2011 06:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerRight as I was getting ready to go in for a weekend of night shifts, I saw news the manga publisher Tokyopop had shut down. To a lot of people, this didn't seem a surprise, but I suppose it was a bit of a shock for me, news of the company laying off most of its regular employees having been followed by news of it at least bothering to redesign its online site. In the time I had to reflect on it before leaving, though, I did have to admit nothing new in its catalogue had managed to grab me and make me buy it for quite a while, and the shock might have faded a bit on that.
I can think back, though, to when I bought my first volume of manga from Tokyopop. I'd been buying manga volumes before I started buying anime DVDs, and had just perhaps settled into thinking of manga as "poor man's anime"; when Tokyopop started cutting prices by printing smaller-sized volumes and making a virtue of not reversing the art to make it look like comics drawn on this side of the Pacific, my thought might have been that much easier to come to mind. Certainly, while I still have that first volume, I'm aware I bought it because it was an adaptation of an anime I was mostly interested in because other people were dismissing it as an underdone "Evangelion rival"; since then, I've also become aware of how often manga made from anime (as opposed to the other way around) is flat-out dismissed as the definition of "diffident."
Whether I would have moved to prioritizing manga over anime, though, is just a question from the past now. The controversy whipped up online over one company or another drawing over revealing artwork to make it "safer" over here made me share in the indignation (although I can wonder if seeing it on a message board dedicated first of all to anime was somehow a subtle strategy to keep people interested in it instead of manga). I wound up not buying any releases at all from particular companies; Tokyopop wasn't among them, but I do have to admit I skipped several titles from them because people would complain about their translation being too "exaggerated." Then, though, the major Japanese publisher Tokyopop was getting its biggest titles from started favouring other companies, and I wound up just sort of ignoring what they were publishing...
There are plenty of reasons being tossed around for how it all came to this, and what reason people pick does seem to reflect what axes they're grinding. Thinking back on it, it might be the title with the Tokyopop logo on it I'll remember with the most fondness will still be Planetes. Still, thoughts of "the end of an era" do come to mind.
I can think back, though, to when I bought my first volume of manga from Tokyopop. I'd been buying manga volumes before I started buying anime DVDs, and had just perhaps settled into thinking of manga as "poor man's anime"; when Tokyopop started cutting prices by printing smaller-sized volumes and making a virtue of not reversing the art to make it look like comics drawn on this side of the Pacific, my thought might have been that much easier to come to mind. Certainly, while I still have that first volume, I'm aware I bought it because it was an adaptation of an anime I was mostly interested in because other people were dismissing it as an underdone "Evangelion rival"; since then, I've also become aware of how often manga made from anime (as opposed to the other way around) is flat-out dismissed as the definition of "diffident."
Whether I would have moved to prioritizing manga over anime, though, is just a question from the past now. The controversy whipped up online over one company or another drawing over revealing artwork to make it "safer" over here made me share in the indignation (although I can wonder if seeing it on a message board dedicated first of all to anime was somehow a subtle strategy to keep people interested in it instead of manga). I wound up not buying any releases at all from particular companies; Tokyopop wasn't among them, but I do have to admit I skipped several titles from them because people would complain about their translation being too "exaggerated." Then, though, the major Japanese publisher Tokyopop was getting its biggest titles from started favouring other companies, and I wound up just sort of ignoring what they were publishing...
There are plenty of reasons being tossed around for how it all came to this, and what reason people pick does seem to reflect what axes they're grinding. Thinking back on it, it might be the title with the Tokyopop logo on it I'll remember with the most fondness will still be Planetes. Still, thoughts of "the end of an era" do come to mind.