Tokyopop

With Toykopop hovering somewhere between somethingness and nothingness, one thing is certain: owner Stu Levy will never give the creators back their books as long as he might be able to leverage them in...

Well, it turns out that Tokyopop wasn't really dead...it was just resting. Since the manga pioneer closed up its LA office nearly two years ago, there have been eyelid flickers like a POD program...

As we've been noting, of late the ashes of Tokyopop have been stirring, and several volumes that were thought lost are actually coming out in one shape or another. BIZENGHAST #8 by M. Alice "Marty" LeGrow is the latest book to find a new life as a print-to-order book via The Right Stuf and digitally through Graphicly. BIZENGHAST was one of the most successful of all Tokyopop's homegrown manga (as making it to volume 8 would indicate) and it's been spun off into an art book, coloring book, novelization, animated shorts, merchandise, and a tabletop role-playing game, according to ICv2.

After hinting at it on their Facebook page for a while, Tokyopop's surviving member, Stuart Levy, announced a little wee return...as a licensing entity, anyway. The Right Stuff, in conjunction with Genosha Comics, will republish three volumes of Himaruya Hidekaz's HETALIA: AXIS POWERS, including the first two—which came out from Toykopop before it imploded last year—and the never-before-in-English third book, which was in production when Tpop went away.

Listen to Heidi MacDonald, The Beat herself, discuss 2011 in comics on a special year-end edition of More To Come, the PW Comics World podcast! As you may or may not know, Heidi has been one of the hosts of our bi-weekly comics news podcast for the past several months. In this episode, Heidi MacDonald and her co-hosts PW Comics World editor Calvin Reid and I discuss the biggest trends and events of the past year, including...

GeekChicDaily, the daily nerd news email, is launching an edition for New York, and also teaming with the Tokyopop brand for a special edition spotlighting Japanese culture trends and news. The New York edition will cover the Big Apple's lively offerings in geek culture, following localized versions for LA and a national edition. GeekChicDaily also added Microsoft's Mich Mathews to its board of directors.

When last we saw former Tokyopop owner and publisher Stu Levy, he was in Japan, sleeping in a truck on his way to deliver food to the victims of the March 11th Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that left parts of the country devastated. At the same time that Toykopop was shutting down for good, Levy announced his intention to spend a year making a documentary about the disaster and the survivor's heroic efforts to help others through the tough times. Well, now there's a trailer for this documentary and a Kickstarter page looking to raise $20,000 for post (color grading, etc) and marketing for the film, whose purpose he explains thusly:

A couple of updates on the dispersion of various Tokyopop books, print and digital.

Tokyopop is closing down its manga line. Not long ago, this company and others like it were sometimes pointed to as the future of comics publishing. I suppose they still might be.

Via The Comics Journal

Although the news coming on a Friday afternoon news dump did dampen response a bit, there has been a ton of reaction to Toykopop shutting down its US publishing activities. On the America's Greatest Otaku website, Tpop publisher Stuart Levy recently wrote about his plans to move to Japan and make a documentary, surely not the thoughts of a man looking to revitalize his publishing plan.

The comics publishing culling of 2011 claimed its most prominent victim as it was announced today that Tokyopop is shutting down its US operations, as of May 31. The German office will stay open to handle publishing rights and the film division will continue. Founded in 1997, Tokyopop and its founder Stu Levy were at the forefront of the manga revolution in the US, introducing such hits as SAILOR MOON, CHOBITS, and LOVE HINA to the US market in the "unflipped" format for the first time. Sales surged as the manga bookstore revolution took over in the early part of the last decade. An ambitious program of publishing original manga by creators from around the world -- many of them barely out of the teenaged readership years themselves -- proved controversial and ultimately saw only a handful of successful franchises but introduced a new generation of creators to the comics scene.

Following up on yesterday's new about Tokyopop laying off at least three editors, the scuttlebutt has continued to flow. Some sources are telling us that there are only 7 people left on staff, including founder Stuart Levy and president Mike Kiley -- the rest of the duties of getting out a line of manga being assigned to freelancers. Brigid Alverson is about as calm and rational a person as we have ever met, so tosee her unload as she does in this post about Tpop's history is a fearsome thing. The layoffs, the OEL rights disasters, the silly detours into movies and Web-TV, and over it all the seeming cluelessness of Levy -- Brigid nails it all: