My new Life in Comics column is up. It explores the risks of depending on personality to drive your business.
Coincidentally, there is a profile of Tokyopop founder Stu Levy by Calvin Reid in the same issue of Comics Week. I’d like to unpack his claim that “There was no such thing as original English manga until we created it,” but as I noted in my last post, I’m trying to concentrate on my writing work now.
I’ll note, briefly, that it seems to me that OEL is just a name for manga-influence graphic novel length comics in paperback format, and I don’t think that Tokyopop invented that, though I do give them credit for popularizing it. Popularizing it and then flooding the marketplace so that practically no one could succeed with it, including themselves. Much of their OEL, too, was by artists who don’t work in an overtly manga-esque style, such as Ross Campbell and Beck Cloonan.
