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Friday, September 3, 2010
Fat and Happy
The manga shelves at the local bookstore used to be a fairly homogenous landscape… lots of uniformly sized paperbacks lined up in an orderly fashion, roughly the same thickness with only a few trim sizes standing out from the pack. In the last year or so, that landscape is becoming a little more disorderly.
We’ve entered the age of the omnibus, with fat editions containing multiple volumes of long-running series, or even entire titles collected in a single package. Some of these collections offer value-priced introductory points for buzz books. Others handsomely repackaged beloved series or offered easy entry points for completed stories.
It’s a rare instance in which specialists in licensed Japanese comics seem to have borrowed a trick from publishers of home-grown material. Marvel has its paperback Essential line of collections, which DC mirrored in the last year with its Showcase editions of classic super-hero fare. DC’s Absolute editions offer high-end, hardcover collections of the publisher’s most critically acclaimed work (Sandman, Watchmen, and so on). Jeff Smith made a mighty blow for the omnibus with the publication of his Bone: One Volume Edition, offering all 1,300 pages of his beloved fantasy series for just under $40.
So why is manga adopting these practices now, and where is the trend heading? I checked with some manga publishing honchos via e-mail to check the pulse of the big, fat book.
Dallas Middaugh, Associate Publisher of Del Rey Manga, neatly summarized the benefits of the multi-volume collection for publishers: “All manga publishers share the problem of shelf-space constraints, and publishing omnibus editions is a great way to address that problem,” he said. “It’s a lot easier to sell one backlist title to Barnes & Noble than it is to sell three. It’s also very useful for keeping interest in a series that has no new volumes coming out. A new volume usually bumps sales on previous volumes, even if it’s not a huge amount. Once a series is done, it’s way too easy for retailers to not restock it on the shelves when there are so many new manga coming in.”
“I enjoy these books as a fan, too,” Middaugh added. “I read a fair amount of manga, but there are series I miss sometimes. Like most fans, I find omnibus editions are a less-expensive way to try out new material.”
Tokyopop is approaching the issue from multiple fronts, with hardcover collector’s or “Ultimate Editions” of books like the ongoing Fruits Basket and the completed Battle Royale, and budget versions of the long-running Sgt. Frog and finished series like The Demon Ororon. According to Tokyopop Sales Director Holly Smith, the driving factor is demand.
“Basically we know this about our fans – they love to collect new editions of their favorite series and they are always looking to find a new series to love,” Smith said.
With Tokyopop’s ultimate editions, they were intent on adding value to previously released material. “We really strove with these books to include lots of new content never before seen that avid fans would treasure,” Smith said.
“In the case of WarCraft, that meant including a brand-new never before seen 8-page color prequel to the original trilogy. Other extras like poster art, Upper Deck trading cards and a foreword from Chris Metzen of Blizzard Entertainment round out the package,” Smith said. “We did a similar treatment with Battle Royale and included some really cool Q&A pieces with a psychologist and emergency room doctor musing on how characters would really respond (mentally and physically) to what they experience in the books.”
The rest of Tokyopop’s omnibus program is targeted at “readers who are looking to discover a cool, ‘new to them’ series,” and “to repackage series… which have been completed for some time and can be hard to find these days in bookstore,” Smith explained.
Results have been satisfying, according to Smith. “Sales on all of our editions have been great,” she said. “The ultimate editions predictably did very well during the holiday season and our various discounted bind-ups have been selling fantastically before, during, and after the holidays. We did work closely with retail while developing all of these. They, like us, are looking for ways to engage fans in new manga series and to offer existing fans of a series something new and special.”
Del Rey’s Middaugh sees the potential in the strategy but notes that Del Rey isn’t quite ready to commit fully to the reprint strategy.
“We experimented with omnibus editions ourselves last year, with three exclusive books that were sold at Barnes & Noble. This was a deal done with B&N’s special sales group, and the books weren’t stocked in the manga section. They performed well, but I think it was a little too soon for us to be pushing omnibus editions for Del Rey Manga titles,” he said.
“We’ve been publishing since May 2004, which means we’re just coming up on our fourth anniversary in a few months,” Middaugh explained. “We have very few long-running series that have concluded their runs at this point, and the first three volumes of Negima, Tsubasa and xxxHOLiC continue to be strong sellers for us. But while we don’t have a lot of incentive to reissue old series as omnibuses right now, I can certainly see that potential for us in the future.”
Like Tokyopop, Viz has taken a few different omnibus routes as well, with a done-in-one collection of critically acclaimed, unconventional Tekkonkinkreet, which the publisher had previously released in single volumes, and the promise of VIZBIG, a line of value-priced collections of multiple volumes of successful series like Dragon Ball Z and Vagabond.
Viz Vice President of Publishing Alvin Lu explained the strategy behind the VIZBIG initiative: “There are a number of factors, that have been much speculated about in the blogs, all of them valid, really, but the main one was, how do you reach new readers?”
“Because we know the content is that good: as well as some of these series have sold previously, we know there’s way more people out there who will love it,” Lu said. “It’s just getting them through the door. It’s about presenting the material in a new way that will convince certain readers—who for whatever reason may have thought about but not got into a particular series—to jump in. Getting a bigger chunk of the narrative between two covers, in a premium presentation, at a great price, just might win them over.”
The Tekkonkinkreet collection is owed to what Lu describes as a “confluence of factors. We had been discussing the idea of doing omnibuses for a while. Tekkonkinkreet—and Taiyo Matsumoto’s work in general--has long been a favorite at VIZ Media, going back to when it was known as Black & White. Then, with the anime being released, it was good timing to put it all together. Not just as an excuse to publish it, but to do it in such a way, at such a time, when it would have its best chance to find its audience.”
“Everything came together as we hoped it would for Tekkonkinkreet,” Lu enthused. “When we released it as Black & White, years ago, we knew it had an audience — which would not be your typical manga reader — but it never reached its potential. Whatever it was — the format, the price point, the anime, the critical reaction (which was tremendous), all of it together — we hit it. The numbers we are seeing changes the game as far doing this kind of ‘arthouse’ manga goes.”
So can readers expect more new treatments of beloved but perhaps underperforming Viz titles of days gone by? Possibly: “We’re looking at our backlist as well as new acquisitions,” Lu said. “Sometimes it makes sense to repackage material that has already been published, especially if we think an opportunity may have previously been lost. But more exciting, I would think, is to publish new material, and do it in such as way that it best reaches its potential audience.”
Viz has introduced series in single-volume collections before, most notably Iou Kuroda’s sublime Sexy Voice and Robo, and the publisher is using its Signature imprint to re-offer previously published series like Gyo and Uzumaki from horror master Junji Ito. Vertical made a critical splash with the single-volume release of Osamu Tezuka’s Ode to Kirihito, offering over 800 pages of experimental craziness from the manga master. In the last year, they repeated the process with Tezuka’s MW and Apollo’s Song.
That approach – introducing series in omnibus format – is one that Del Rey is ready to embrace.
“We’re using the omnibus model with some new series,” he said. “Like I said, there’s a lot of competition for shelf space these days. With two new series, Me and the Devil Blues (by Akira Hiramoto) and Mao-Chan (by Ken Akamatsu and RAN), we’re going to publish in a two-volumes-in-one omnibus format right from the beginning. We want to try this with a few different types of series (and I don’t think you could get two manga series more different from each other) and see how the audience responds. The first volume of Mao-Chan will be out in August, and it will be about 400 pages for $14.95. Me and the Devil Blues also will be in stores in July, and it will have a larger trim, 544 pages, and a price of $19.95.”
Even as the omnibus market cements its presence on the manga shelves, it continues to evolve as it targets bargain hunters, keepsake collectors and everyone in between. It will be fascinating to see the shapes the omnibus takes next.
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April 22, 2008:
February 4, 2008:
November 20, 2006:
A Comic-Con without the Captain
