With the success of the wildly popular Naruto and Death Note, Viz Media is at the head of the game in manga publishing. Viz titles regularly dominate graphic novel bestseller lists. The house also releases anime based on many of its bestselling series, and broadcast, cable and broadband transmissions of Viz Anime have become a key factor in the growth of its print sales. One of the early manga and anime distributors in the U.S., Viz was present in the early 1980s when the market was a small cult of hobbyists and hardcore fans, and has seen it grow—manga sales in 2006 were about $175 million-$200 million according to pop culture news site ICv2.com—into the beginnings of a real mass market category available in chain stores and national retailers. Alvin Lu, v-p, publishing at Viz Media, spoke with PWCW during the recent New York Comic-con and afterward, sharing his views on manga and the broad category of graphic novels and the changing U.S. marketplace for them. In a sign of how much the market for manga in the U.S. has changed, Lu managed to use “manga” and “Ernest Hemingway” in the same sentence.
PW Comics Week: How many books will Viz publish this year.
Alvin Lu: For 2007 so far, we’re coming in with 350 books, but we’ll probably be closer to 400 by the end of the year. There are still a few things we’re ironing out.
PWCW: What kind of new genres is Viz introducing the American audience to?
AL: Recently, the strongest statement we’ve made is in the shojo [girls’ manga] category. It’s nothing especially new, but it’s a category that Viz is pretty committed to with the Shojo Beat line. We’ve had a strong showing with series like Vampire Knight and Gentlemen’s Alliance. It’s moving really well and showing healthy growth. The strength of the numbers in these books is encouraging.
We’re looking to continue in other areas as well, like the Viz Signature line [a new line for older and more adventurous manga readers]. We’re looking to continue pushing that, and we’re looking to acquire titles this year and next. We’ve got Uzumaki and Gyo by Junji Ito and we’re excited about that. We’ve also got a new title this fall—a repackaging of Black and White [by Taiyo Matsumoto]. That’s the old title. The new title is Tekkon Concrete, which is [also] the title of the anime that will be coming out. That’s being released by Sony. It’s making the festival circuit now and will be released on DVD by fall.
We’ve had a good reaction to the Signature titles that we’ve put out so far—especially with Monster. We’re looking to grow [this line]—next year especially. Then there are these titles that we look at as sort of signs—Yakitate Japan, for example, which is about bread baking in Japan. That one’s been doing well. It’s a new genre out there [in the U.S.]: food manga. There’s a lot of good food manga [in Japan]. It’s one thing we’re looking at. Also mystery titles like Case Closed. Some of our titles out there, in our midlist, point the way to new directions that we can move in. We’re also doing a one-shot, Portis, which is a video game horror manga. It’s like The Ring, but with a video game [instead of a video cassette]. Beyond that, the shonen [boys’] action titles have been our bread and butter for the last few years.
PWCW: Can you speak more broadly about the Shojo Beat imprint? Viz’s top-selling manga are Naruto (shonen) and Death Note (seinen, or older boys) series that are also popular with girls and young women.
AL: It is true that our bestselling Shonen Jump [boy-aimed] titles do get a strong female crossover audience, but that’s healthy for manga overall. Looking at the [Shonen Jump] imprint as a whole is useful to identify what titles can draw a strong female audience.
We’re looking at a number of strategies to expand that audience. Shojo manga from Japan is created for the female audience there. Some of those titles need to be handled differently here. One of the principle challenges with shojo manga is that we don’t have a lot of merchandising or tie-ins. In terms of multimedia expansion, we’re more constricted that way. But it does allow the Shojo Beat magazine to become a primary vehicle for introducing readers to the imprint, to the genre. There is some pressure to expose as much shojo as possible through the magazine. Shojo is a huge field with many subgenres—some with fantastic settings, some with realistic settings. There’s a mandate for the magazine to show the whole world of shojo manga.
PWCW: Is the strong female crossover audience important to the growth of manga overall?
AL: That’s part of it. The core mission for Viz Media is to make manga a universal medium. I definitely don’t see manga as a genre. It’s a medium the way TV is a medium and not a genre. In that sense, the core mission is to see manga here as it is received in Japan: as a mass market medium. So it’s useful to identify the titles that have a universal audience. When you have titles that have the capability to cross over to readers of all kinds, that strong base will expand manga to the mainstream—to an effectively universal audience in North America. Which is not to say that everything we publish is supposed to appeal to everyone. But for every field to break out of its niche category, it’s important to have certain flagship titles that have a wide appeal. I think that’s true in any kind of business.
PWCW: How has Viz changed as a company since you’ve been there?
AL: I’m coming up on eight years—I started in 1999. It’s changed quite a lot; I think it’s grown six times in size. When I started, it was still a small company publishing pamphlet comics. We were just starting to reap the benefits of collecting comics into graphic novels. Back then it was about $15.95-$18.95 for 200 pages. And it was considered a lot to be publishing 10 different series at the same time. For the [manga] fan base, there wasn’t much to choose from.
Tokyopop wasn’t Tokyopop, it was Mixx Media. Viz and Dark Horse were the primary players in the market. So from that perspective, the market has changed tremendously. Readers say the manga section at their libraries has flourished overnight, or that their apartments are so full of it they can’t move around. There’s been an explosion of pure product available to them and a range of material.
Now, readers are also used to a certain speed in publishing [U.S. fans expect Japanese hits to be published in English right away]. This was a big change. When I started, it was considered fast to pick up a title five or six years old. There was a slow boat from Japan with material coming over and getting translated. Obviously, the Internet has changed all that, too. Fans are aware of what’s popular in Japan. We’re not that far behind. With Vagabond [a series by manga-ka Takehiko Inoue], we’re almost publishing simultaneously or a month after [publication in Japan.]
PWCW: Viz is the American arm of two of Japan’s largest manga publishers [Shueisha and Shogakukan]. Everyone talks about the advantages American publishers like Viz and Del Rey [Del Rey’s parent, Random House, has an exclusive copublishing agreement with Kodansha] have over companies without ties to a large publisher. Can you give a few examples of the advantages? Are there any disadvantages?
AL: I think everyone can guess what the advantages and disadvantages are [laughs]. The primary advantage is you have this library that you have first-look rights on. Given that Shueisha and Shogakukan are two of the biggest manga publishers in Japan, that’s a pretty vast library. The quality of the content is also going to be quite high. We still have to make a pitch on every single acquisition—we don’t have some birthright to everything. But having access to a library of material made to be as accessible to a wide audience as possible—and of really high quality—that’s a huge advantage.
But on the other hand, I don’t know how many manga publishers there are in Japan, but there’s definitely more than two. So a lot of matter is not covered by those three. We have less flexibility to go in a lot of different directions. Tokyopop is taking advantage of that flexibility. It’s hard to say. This is a very trend-driven bus. Manga in Japan is like the music industry. You don’t know where the next hit is going to come from. Sometimes the hot new thing can come from a small publisher. Full Metal Alchemist [a huge bestseller in Japan and the U.S.] came from a small publisher, Square Ennix.
PWCW: How has Viz’s distribution partnership with Simon & Schuster influenced the growth of the company—and the growth of manga?
AL: It’s been a great partnership so far, from where I’m sitting, and I don’t deal with the day-to-day back and forth with the sales. It was a very smooth transition, and the results have been win-win, growth and growth since they’ve taken on distribution and sales. When you have those kinds of results, everyone is happy. S&S has a fantastic sales force. They get it out to a very wide audience. They have the muscle and the expertise to get into a number of different places. For manga there’s been a lot of people who think the superstores are the destination points, but there are a lot of other places to get into—Naruto's [success in] Wal-Mart, for example.
PWCW: What about distribution? One thing that we talked about at New York Comic-con was the sheer speed at which manga circulates within Japan and then over to countries like Taiwan. But those two countries are quite small compared to the U.S.
AL: It’s something we need to discuss with our licensors. The size of America is mentally difficult to process, not just for the Japanese but for Europeans as well. It’s mentally difficult to get around the logistics of transporting product, the logistics of distributing books. We have to explain the publishing game here, why we need to solicit [books] so far in advance, the time it takes to move pallets of books around the country.
It’s more efficient in Japan. The primary market is Tokyo, [with] a distribution center where they can move books in a car and they can move stuff by foot. Books can probably get to where they need to go in a day or two. Here, you’re dropping off at a distribution center in Nevada or something and from there it can take weeks for it to get to where it needs to go. And with books, you’re dealing with heavy products. Reaching your customers is more of a logistical challenge. You probably don’t anything comparable unless you’re looking at the European Union as a whole. Maybe China, but China behaves very differently.
PWCW: At New York Comic-con, you had interesting stories about meeting with Simon & Schuster.
AL: I got to go to a few of the first meetings, and there I was, a kid from the West Coast, working at a funny side industry next to this giant behemoth. And to be able to go into those offices where there are pictures of Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway, to be in that environment talking about manga and growing manga. They took us very seriously. They recognized that something is going on. It was a neat experience and continues to be a neat one.
PWCW: What kind of challenges is Viz faced with now that it’s a leader in this category?
AL: One thing I keep in mind is that you’re dealing with a teenage fan base, and teens are fickle. It can change pretty quickly. But through all the kinds of changes that Viz has gone through, I’ve been impressed by how focused we’ve been. We’re very rooted in manga. That’s where the heart of the company is. And we’re wary of any publishing that takes us away from manga. One thing we do is look at the manga field as a whole. And I think all the different [manga] publishers are viewing it together as well. Insofar as Viz is commanding the market so far and our responsibility to broadening the market, we want the manga field to develop as a whole. We don’t want to be 100% of the market. All the publishers are playing a part in growing it. We just see ourselves playing a part in that.
PWCW: In addition to releasing manga, Viz also offers anime, live-action movies and prose novels. What’s next from Viz?
AL: We’re looking at continuing to grow the publishing side of the business. I still see a lot of growth in bringing in new readers. We’re also looking into new ways of presenting the content. Manga has been standardized into the tankobon format [digest-sized paperback] so it can be pretty intimidating for a new reader to see shelves and shelves of books all the same size and shape. We’re looking for different ways to present it and bring it to new readers. We’ll probably have a major announcement about that coming up.
In terms of business, obviously digital delivery is something we’re exploring. We’re venturing into that with the Death Note anime download-to-own. We’re looking into that for publishing, too, but everyone is trying to figure that out. Can we get book content to be read in digital format? That’s a potentially gigantic change for [all] publishing. Whether graphic novels fit into that is a big question. This year and next year there’s going to be a lot going on. Although Viz has been around as a comics publisher for a while, Viz Media is a relatively new company. You mentioned anime and prose novels, but Viz is also involved in merchandise licensing. We want to be that company that can actually work together on all these things, like with Naruto [which has extensive licensing based on it]. As a company we’re going to get better at that sort of thing. I don’t think we’ve hit our stride as a media company that can look at a property and make it work on all different levels. That’s more of a business and strategic challenge.
PWCW: Where do you think the American manga market is heading?
AL: When I first started in this business, there was a conventional sensibility that certain kinds of titles in Japan would appeal to an American market, but not necessarily the [most] popular manga titles. In the 1980s and ’90s, [it was believed] sci-fi would translate better in the American market. Back then, there was a devoted fan base from anime primarily picking up books [manga] in comic book shops. Now you see more of the big hits in Japan going on to have a pretty good audience here. But as much as the field here has widened, our market is not as demographically wide as in Japan. There are still genres and demographics that our market can’t address right now. The numbers aren’t there.
Although Viz has changed over the years, the focus hasn’t. Even when we were a much smaller company, the goal was always to bring manga to a mass audience as much as possible, replicating the readership in Japan with the one in America. I don’t know if that differentiates us from the other [manga publishers], but we have not wavered in our core mission. It’s made our business strategy straightforward. We want to bring to the U.S. a library of manga that is created for every walk of life.
In the graphic novels market here, there has been a huge opening with manga. The manga market is addressing a wider audience, but the success that manga has seen—the American comics market has responded to that. The audience will continue to grow and to widen, but at the same time, the Japanese titles will still pick up a new audience. We’ll see the American comics market respond with a greater convergence of what we call “comics” and what we call “manga.” I don’t know how long using those terms [as separate categories] will be applicable to differentiate between the two.
