Tor Books, Seven Seas Ink Joint Manga Venture

[Peter Ahlstrom]

Publisher's Weekly article

Science fiction and fantasy publisher Tor Books announced plans to enter the U.S manga market by creating a new manga imprint with Seven Seas Entertainment, an independent publisher of original and licensed manga, manga-inspired prose titles and illustrated juvenile fiction based in Los Angeles. The new venture will release original manga titles, but also plans to compete for top Japanese manga licenses

(Linked from ANN.)

Well, dang. Maybe we'll see a Mistborn manga sooner than we thought.

This isn't the first time something of this sort has been announced. A few years ago Penguin Putnam/Ace announced a deal with Digital Manga Publishing. However, that deal fell through (with no public announcement) once the Penguin Putnam folks realized what Japanese licensing contracts looked like (the Japanese companies reserve the right to pull their license at any time if they get offended by something you do, and they want royalties paid when the books are printed, not when they're sold [though, I doubt any U.S. company has ever actually accepted this contract stipulation, since it's insane]).

[Jhaeli]

I find the idea rather interesting. Will they be taking Western fantasy and science-fiction stories to make Japanese manga, as well as distributing Japanese titles?

To be honest, I prefer text; better chance to use your own imagination right? I don't think I'm the only one to do this, but when I read, I like to imagine what I'm seeing and I use the imagery in the book to create that picture in my mind. However, my younger sister used to be a big fan of Japanese manga and they can be a lot of fun to read sometimes. I'm a little divided! I like a lot of Tor books, but I'm unsure if I'd want to read them in Manga form.

[Peter Ahlstrom]

They have not announced any plans to make original manga versions of existing Tor SF/F books, but it seems like a foregone conclusion to me. (Del Rey, which started a manga line a few years ago, is doing a Dean Koontz manga.)