Viz Media Forum

Quick background: back in summer 2008, VIZ announced that it would be establishing a line of original manga, helmed by Shonen Jump editor and then VP of Original Publishing Marc Weidenbaum. Then back in February it was announced that Weidenbaum was leaving VIZ Media for undisclosed reasons, and the status of the original line was left hanging. Most people were left with the inevitable feeling that the original manga line wouldn't happen in the foreseeable future.

But MangaBlog points us to the Opinion Prone blog, which notes that VIZ attended Editor's Day, a small event at the Savannah College of Art and Design (not exactly down the street from VIZ's San Francisco office). Kiriska notes that VIZ had cancelled, but apparently un-cancelled.

Eric Searleman, a senior editor who had worked with Weidenbaum on the planned original line, attended for VIZ. Kiriska goes on to talk about the panel and also to ponder whether VIZ will aim only at “manga style” works or a more broad spectrum, and which is really the better choice.

I do have to disagree slightly on one point: Kiriska defends American manga style artists from accusations that they're merely ripping off, and yes, for the most part I agree, especially nowadays. On the other hand, I went through that phase of the fandom where anything with the word “manga” attached was supposed to be gold and a lot of artists who don't normally work in the manga style-- were possibly not even familiar with or interested in the style in some cases --were doing so. THAT, in my opinion, was ripping off.

But we're now at a point where manga has been around in the US long and significantly enough that many of these artists have naturally grown up into the style or worked with it more extensively, so accusations of manga'sploitation have mostly died down.

(Mostly.)

What do you think?

Well, I do think you're right about a lot of people/companies doing "rip-offs" in the earlier days -- it's very obvious when you go to the store and see the piles of crappy "How to Draw Manga" books by people who have obviously not been submerged in the style or medium for very long (did this just the other day, actually; most of them seem to have been published around the turn of the century). But these days, the artists that are wanting to break into the business with manga-style art really don't feel like wannabes anymore. They've been drawing manga for ten or more years. At the very least, I have a good number of impressive American classmates. <_<

As for Viz, Searleman seemed nervous about saying too much about their original stuff. Even though they attended Editors' Day, he made a point to mention to every artist whose portfolio he reviewed that Viz wasn't accepting submissions for project ideas yet. I might try and do a formal interview with him after I get out of classes, but the idea kind of makes me nervous. This journalism thing was supposed to be a hobby! XD

@JediAutobot, I think you're right to some extent, though there are a few OEL titles that have done all right despite long gaps between volumes, and really with things the way they are now, there are some over-the-border/translated manga that are on the same kind of delayed release schedule. I wonder if publishers would consider US-style issues and trades for manga, perhaps in slightly longer "issues" though, to account for the BW rather than color style. Would you buy manga-style BW issues at 40-60 pages and then a huge collected trade when the story's done?