Here is a “partial” transcription of the Kodansha Comics panel that happened at the Kinokunya Bookstore in New York City during the Holiday Anime and Manga Day event. I am not a professional transcriber, however, I have done transcriptions for an Oral History class. Even though the panel was about 30 minutes in length, it took me a while to do the transcription. Unfortunately, I can not hear everything in the audio, so “?” are placed in certain areas with brackets.
I left out some parts of the panel, because the information is provided in the press release. For reading purposes, I grouped the Q & A's and placed dividers and headings to separate the content, but the information is in chronological order. Unless otherwise stated, all answers (A) and statements are from the spoken words of Dallas Middaugh. Questions (Q) are from the audience, however, a few were shortened and repeated by Middaugh.
Enjoy!
Transcript:
Kodansha is one of the largest publishers in Japan and one of the three largest publishers of manga. We started Del Rey Manga back in 2003 with our first books coming out in 2004. So, I, myself, been working with manga for ten years, but specifically with Kodansha for about 7. A couple years, Kodansha came to us at Del Rey and ask us to give them some assistance in setting up Kodansha Comics. We launched that program in 200. The first books in 2009: those were Akira and Ghost in the Shell. As part of our discussion, what we came to realized was that Kodansha wanted really to take more control of their publishing in the United States, so Random House and Kodansha got together. We agreed that we wanted to continue working together, but we had to restructure the relationship. So, what we done is, we essentially, for the most part really struck down Del Rey Manga and shifted over our attention to Kodansha Comics. So that Kodansha has more of a foothold and more of a presence here in the United States.
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Fairy Tail volume 13 is also very dear to my heart, because I met Mashima a few years ago and this is the volume where I actually appear as a character.
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Now one of things you may have notice here is that we're stepping up our release schedule and a lot of these books were most of these have been coming out every 3 to 4 months. Where the books are available to us, they're be coming out on a bi-monthly schedule here, starting this summer, we're getting a lot of our stuff starting in May and June.
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Arisa by Natsumi Ando
For those of you who are interested in such things, manga in the US very often what happens is you release the first volume. First several volumes go up, go down. They do what they do and then you see a slow decline. We kind of lose readers, we try to bring them back, but there's kind of a stable maybe a slight decline as the book sales go on. Kitchen Princess was a completely fought that trend. By the time we hit volume 3 we were now seeing an increase of sales with every volume that we put out right up to the tenth and final volume that we did. When Natsumi Ando, we discovered that she had a new series coming, really, we didn't hesitate to sign that off. We published the first volume under Del Rey a month ago...We're very excited to be able to continue the series.
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Negima! omnibus
When we first started doing Negima, it was literally one of the first four books that we did at Del Rey. It came out and there was a little bit of controversy over it. Because, quite frankly, this is really my fault and I am very embarrassed by it, we made some mistakes. We made some, speaking very bluntly, horrendous translation mistakes. That's all I am going to say, I am not going to list them, but god they use to keep me awake at night. So, this represents an opportunity for us and for me personally, to reissue this work with new more accurate translation...It will be $19.99 for the 3.
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Until the Full Moon by Sanami Matoh
This is a two volume series that was back out in 2005 from the now defunct Broccoli Books. With Sanami Matoh doing new work, we wanted to reintroduce this work...Sanami Matoh has some new work coming out that we will announce for our fall list. In the mean time, we would just want to get this really cool and funny work back out into the market.
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Gon by Masashi Tanaka
Gon returns to the US market...With Gon, you know Gon has been in the market a couple times before. This is a fantastic manga, if you haven't seen it. Not that I want to discourage you from buying our volume. I want you to buy our volume, but this is a wordless manga, so you can actually buy the Japanese version to read it as well...We're bringing this back out into the market because Kodansha is working with Daewon Animation to develop an animated series around this.
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Q - Do you have any plans to publish Sailor Moon?
A - The only answer I can give is that, that is not a title that I can discuss today. [smile] I'm sorry.
Q - When you bring the series over, how much are you keeping the Del Rey covers?
A - The Del Rey spines, if you look at them on the shelves, you'll see they have what we call a “swoosh” on the top and bottom. On the top is Del Rey spelled in Katakana and on the bottom is the Del Rey logo. Now of course these books aren't going to be Del Rey anymore, so we can't, we're not gonna have Del Rey branding. But as somebody who collects these myself, I recognize how obnoxious it is to have a book where you got 20 volumes and then suddenly volume 21 just looks completely different. We're not going to make radical changes to these spines. The Del Rey logo is going be replaced by the Kodansha Comics logo, of course, but when you put it on the shelf it's gonna look pretty much the same. Now that's not really necessarily going to be the case on the spine of the new series. With the new series, we are trying to more establish a brand identity for Kodansha, and in some cases really we may stick with the design of the original Japanese volume. At this point, I am just rambling on, because we haven't actually decided on what we're going to do for those yet. As far as the covers go, the front covers, 99 times out of 100 we take the Japanese cover and just change the logo as we need to. Sometimes we don't even have to do that. As you see in the upcoming covers, some of the logos are already in English and there's very few changes we have to make.
Q – Holic?
A - There are a few books that are actually going to be staying with Del Rey Manga. Tsubasa and Holic are staying with Del Rey Manga. I don't actually have a date when the next volume is going to be coming out...Short answer is Holic is continuing.
Q - Are there any manga that Kodansha will do that Del Rey might not have done? Will that change the process? Will there be more opportunities along that line?
A - I don't see it as there being more opportunities. It's more just the decision process has changed a bit. When I was at Del Rey Manga, you know, ultimately, the decision on whether or not to do a book was mine. While I'm still part of that process now, [totally now?] the decision is Kodansha. I would say in the long term yes, there is the potential to maybe see some different books that Del Rey would have done. But I actually think that it has more to do with simply with that there are more different people in the process than any kind of philosophical difference between Del Rey and Kodansha in terms on the type of books we would do.
Q - Do you guys have any digital manga initiatives?
A - I can not discuss that at this time. [smile] Laughs.
Q - Can you talk a little bit more about what would be staying with Del Rey?
A - As this point, the only things that we know for sure that is staying with Del Rey, um, well that's a little bit complicated. The on going books that are going to stay with Del Rey, at this point, are just Tsubasa and Clamp. But in terms of the back list, we have contracts on those books at Del Rey that run out over the course of the next one to two years. A lot of the back list, we actually published over 500 manga in the 7 years that we have been running. A substantial number of those are going to stay with Del Rey until such time comes as the contract expires, and then the books will essentially go out.
Q - Do you know which manga is being discontinued?
A - Well, I knew I would get that question. I don't like using the term “discontinued,” because anything that I am not putting on the list, does not guarantee that we'll never publish it. However, all I can say is to you in that regard that if I have not announced it at this time, it's probably not going to be part of our summer 2011 list.
Q - Will Kodansha Comics have any reprints rights to series that Dey Rel has already completed?
A - Yes, we are actually still working that out, but the answer is yes. There will be some series that when the contract expires over at Del Rey, we will move them over to Kodansha.
Q - [?]
A - No no. Those were decisions that were made specifically for those books. They are flagship titles for Kodansha in Japan and in the US. I can tell you that of all the books that I just discussed, most of them, if not all of them, are going to be in the standard 5 x 7.5 trim. Maybe with a slight variant, like a half an inch here and there, but at this point, no, the decision to do those books in that size was not part of a trend...of larger trim size. We just make a decision based on the book itself.
Q - Is pricing still going to be $10.95 for standard books? [sic]
A - Yes, $10.99 is still going to be our standard pricing. Obviously, the omnibus is going to be more. Anything with really an exceptional page [?] going to be a bit more.
Q - Is there a number that you are hitting for the number of books you are going to put out? A figure? A X amount of titles for the year?
A - Yeah, but we are still trying to figure that out. We lock down the summer list, but we haven't locked down the fall list. I think in a couple of months, we'll be ready to announce the fall list and then we'll be able to talk about exactly how many books we are going to do.
Q - For the books transferring, are the same translators going to be used?
A - You know that actually variant from books to books. In some cases, we are working with the same translators and in some cases we are not. But I will say that one of the nice things about keeping this within Random House, when we made this shift, is that while there are certainly a few changes that are happening, for the most part, we been able to work with a lot of the same people that we worked with in the past to do our translations, to do our layout, to do our cover designs and things like that. But you know, it's a change. There are some changes, the answer is some yes, some no.
A (David Yoo, Editor from Kodansha Comics) – Some books might have new translators, but they're all the same translators that Del Rey Manga used. Nothing new coming in.
A - Some new translators on some books, but all translators from our existing pool of translators.
Q - Your policy to not edit anything? [No covers to be change from Del Rey?]?
A - Yes, well, god that always makes me nervous when I say that, but yeah that's always my intention. My intention, when there's a book that I have a hand in acquiring to the US market, is is it something that we can publish as it is? If it's not, then it's probably not something we should publish, cause we really don't want to go in and mess with the artist's work. Now having said that, I'm going to out myself on the one change that we are making. It's actually the cover to Animal Land. The Japanese cover of the first volume is an outstanding image, but it's an image that works much more effectively in Japan than it works here. So, we're pulling a piece of color art from the interior of the book, we're gonna use that as the cover. Obviously, with the author's permission and we discussed it with them. But if you are asking if we are going through and change art and put more clothes on people or something like that, then, no we don't work that way.
© 2011 Linda Thai
Photography by Linda Thai
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