Dallas Middaugh is excited. The associate publisher of Del Rey Manga has got a license from Japan that is going to double-team manga readers the instant it’s released.
“We’ve had a lot of successful books: Wall Flower, AirGear, Kitchen Princess are catching on,” said Middaugh. “But we haven’t launched something this big since we [started publishing manga] in 2004.”
That “something” is Hiro Mashima’s Fairy Tail, an irreverent story filled with silly, slapstick humor about young wizards. FairyTail has just been released in the U.S., and to show everyone how excited they are about this property, Del Rey is taking a page from Japanese manga publishing’s playbook by releasing the first two volumes simultaneously.
According to Middaugh, Japanese publishers will often release the first two collections of a long-running series—or one that they predict will be immensely popular—at the same time. The move familiarizes readers with the foundation for the story while immediately providing the real meat in later volumes. “It gets all of that introductory stuff out of the way quickly,” explained Middaugh, who added that mangaka Mashima does a good job of that in volume one of FairyTail. For Del Rey, the simultaneous release was “our way of saying ‘take a look at this one, this one is special.’ ”
Mutsumi Miyazaki, Del Rey Manga director of licensing and acquisitions, pointed out that Mashima’s visual style and storytelling are influenced by Akira Toriyama, creator of the famed Dragon Ball franchise. Fairy Tail has drawn comparisons with another very successful manga series, Eiichiro Oda’s One-Piece. But whereas One-Piece and Mashima's previous hit, Rave Master, are geared to a very specific young male demographic, Fairy Tail comes in a easily recognized genre while reaching far beyond the typical shonen reader to a wider audience.
In Fairy Tail, young wizard Lucy teams up with another young wizard, dirt poor, motion-sickness prone, fire-breathing Natsu, who she hopes will help her become worthy as a member of the wizards guild. Fairy Tail is a guild made up of delinquent wizards whose methods are questionable, but whose hearts are in the right place. Colorful characters abound: womanizing Loke; drunken Cana Alberona who’s never far from a barrel of booze; nudist Gray Fullbuster who is either falling out of his clothes (when he remembers to put them on) or carrying on in his underwear. There is over-the-top slapstick humor, Looney Toons-style violence, juvenile irreverence and sibling-type rivalry—all set in a world of magic that is anchored in familiar experiences.
Mashima sprinkles small signifiers into the story so that his imaginary world feels like home for his readers. Loke is ranked as “The Wizard I’d Like to Be My Boyfriend” in Weekly Sorcerer Magazine. Cana drinks 15 kegs of liquor and then expenses it to the guild. As Del Rey editor Tricia Narwani explained, “Mashima takes elements of western fantasy and role playing games and transforms them. There are new and original surprises on every page.”
Fairy Tail began serialization a year and a half ago in Kodansha’s Weekly Shonen, a manga magazine with a circulation of two million copies per week. The title was an immediate hit. Mashima had a huge success in the U.S. and Japan with his previous series, Rave (licensed in the U.S. by Tokyopop and retitled Rave Master). Given his popularity and the success of Rave Master, Miyazaki said that licensing Fairy Tail was “a no-brainer. Mashima always makes great-looking manga.”
Outside of omnibus editions, simultaneous releases aren’t a common practice in U.S. publishing. But Middaugh said that there was no confusion among buyers. “Because Mashima has a track record here, all we had to do was show buyers a copy of the Japanese book and they were on board. They know it will be a strong seller.” Del Rey has given Fairy Tail a 13+ rating, but "it’s got a huge amount of potential for broad appeal,” Middaugh said.
