On the Market for Manga, Why Digital Isn’t as Big Here, Tokyopop’s Bestsellers, Present and Future, More
We caught up with TOKOPOP CEO Stu Levy to talk about the market and TOKYOPOP. In Part 1 of this two-part interview, we talk about the U.S. manga market, why digital isn’t as big here,, and TOKYOPOP’s bestsellers, present and future. In Part 2, we talk about the company’s ongoing equity raise, that big 2025 loss, and plans for the future.
ICv2: We always like to start out these interviews with people that have good visibility to the market with an overview. What’s your view of the status of the U.S. manga market, and since you’re also in Europe, the status of the world manga market?
Stu Levy: I think the U.S. market is actually pretty healthy, unlike Europe. Europe is going through a tough time. I think about it, and I wonder if perhaps in the U.S. we went through our post-COVID adjustment pretty early, and we’re out of that period, and now we’ve stabilized and there’s even a little bit of growth back again on the U.S. side.
Whereas in Europe, they’re in the doldrums, and this is across the main markets in Europe, so Italy, France, Spain, Germany-type markets. Less about Eastern Europe, because there’s some interesting growth markets in Europe, but they’re much smaller.
[laughs] You and I and some of the readers have been through Manga 1.0. We saw the time when there was too much product in the market too fast. We had nothing to do with that. [laughs]. Sarcasm alert. Spoiler.
Back then, obviously, there was a lot of heat in the market. A lot of titles came out. Japan has a tremendous amount of supply, and there are a lot of titles, and the market wasn’t ready for it in the States back then. We had various reasons why the market crashed. Piracy being one of them, the overall economic position being another.
Nowadays, it’s been heating up a lot. I think there are quite a lot of titles coming to market. I think there is a challenge in terms of retail on how those titles will be shelved.
In the end, what’s interesting in the U.S. market is the demand. The audience for manga has grown significantly. It’s grown both vertically and horizontally.
Horizontally, meaning the range of people who might be reading a manga across the same generation. Vertically, I mean multi-generationally. You have your first crop of parents now, who grew up reading manga, with children who are the age of being able to read manga. We didn’t have that in that first wave, which was already 20-plus years ago. You have a deeper bench when it comes to readership.
I also think that, as a result, what you’re starting to see in the U.S. market is the strength of independent bookstores and comic book shops, so independent stores that curate.
Even the big guys like Barnes & Noble, it’s more about curation, as you know. A Barnes & Noble in one city won’t be the same as a Barnes & Noble in another city. Whereas back in the day, when we were around the first wave, it was a cookie cutter with pure central buying. That’s all shifted.
Having a local bookstore and a local manager’s taste, a local salesperson’s taste curating titles is really healthy. It means that you might have a different manga selection in one store compared to another. It’s not all going to be the top 20 titles, all Shonen Jump.
I do think that this is a diversification of the market, which is very healthy for the market. It also means, though, that a lot of titles can’t do the numbers that make them as profitable. How will that affect the publishers that are publishing them? How do we as publishers survive when costs have gone up so much?
We have to raise our prices. Nobody likes that. We are all getting squeezed from a margin perspective. How that will shake out is something that I would say would be a concern.
One of the big differences between the Japanese market and the U.S. market is the share of the market that’s held by digital. There was a huge surge in the importance of digital in Japan (see “Digital Captures 73% Share“). That really hasn’t followed in the same way here, and not for lack of trying. We had a column on the site yesterday. The writer did a census of the Japanese-owned digital manga platforms in the United States, and there’s 14, which is a lot (see “Japanese-Run Manga Platforms Are Multiplying“). We’re not saying digital hasn’t grown, it has; but print is still the majority of the business. Why do you think those differences exist? Where do you see that going?
That’s a great question, as usual. This is a topic that I love to discuss. You’re throwing me a softball here, whether people agree with me or not.
I think that there’s a few reasons. First, let me say that, for instance, TOKYOPOP’s digital sales are up 60 percent year on year. Digital not being relevant, for us, is not the case at all. I don’t know if that’s a different, unique aspect to us compared to other publishers, but certainly, for us digital is becoming more and more important.
I personally think it’s very much about discovery and always felt like, in Japan, the role of the magazine had been about discovery. When I started our businesses, if you recall, I started with the magazine strategy: MixxZine. I learned the hard way that doing a magazine in the U.S., even back then, when magazines were a bigger thing, is extremely hard financially. We couldn’t pull it off. Even VIZ couldn’t ultimately pull it off with Shonen Jump. Even Shonen Jump in Japan now is under a million units. It’s a market where discovery is shifting rapidly. Digital’s great for it. People have their phones with them all the time. They can sample all kinds of things, as we know they do.
I think that, ultimately, in the U.S. market, there’s two things that are preventing digital from becoming the percentage of the market that it is in Japan currently. One thing is the platforms themselves don’t have the full extent of content that they do in Japan. In particular, you don’t have the Jump titles, the Shueisha titles on these platforms (in other words, in the U.S., the VIZ Media titles). That has held back the market. As a result, you see a significant amount of piracy.
Actually, there’s more than just two, because these are components of my first point. If you look at digital in general, there’s still quite a lot of users in the U.S. and in English-language markets that use piracy because they want to discover titles and there’s lesser ways to do it than there are in Japan.
Another thing is, in Japan, WEBTOON is part of Line Manga because they’re owned by Naver, the same Korean company. Line Manga has webtoon titles and manga, Japanese manga, on the same platform. It’s the same with Piccoma, which is owned by Kakao, which in the U.S. owns Tapas.
Here in the U.S., it’s fragmented. You as a reader don’t get to go to one platform for all your graphic reading. You have to go to different platforms. It’s a pain in the butt.
The monetization models are different, how you have to pay. Westerners tend to prefer subscription. Japan and Korea don’t really like subscription. At least the companies don’t, so they’ve created this more gamified coin-based system. The U.S. can deal with it, but it’s not quite as easy, there’s more friction.
Let me say about the Shueisha titles, the VIZ titles. Whether this was controlled by Shueisha or a VIZ U.S. thing, I don’t know, but they really wanted to build up their Shonen Jump app. The goal there was “Let’s put our Shonen Jump titles only on that app so we can have a huge readership from the app and not send them out to other stores.” There’s exclusivity, which drives the user to that platform, which makes sense. It’s a logical way to do it.
The Shonen Jump app has grown pretty significantly, but what it’s done as a result is it has not allowed any other platform to become the Spotify or the Apple Music of manga and graphic novels in general. Whether it’s GlobalComix or anyone, other than Kindle, you can’t really find every single kind of sequential art title. I think that’s been holding it back.
I feel like that’s changing now. I don’t know how long it will take, but in the next couple years, if it finally gets to the point where every publisher is really selling across a bunch of different platforms, I think digital will become much, much bigger.
Then the second main point of what’s different is (we all know this) we in the States, we have bigger shelves. There’s this sort of TikTok thing of showing your manga collection. There’s something about having the print book, whether it’s to physically read it because you like the smell of paper and this and that or, frankly, to decorate your shelves. In general, decorating shelves is something that everybody in the world likes to do. In the U.S., we have more space and we have more shelves to do it.
Having a cool manga collection, having some beautiful books, that’s something that I think is easier in the U.S. than in Asia, where space is at a premium and people are sleeping on the floor between stacks of manga. At some point, that’s not necessarily sustainable.
Those would be the two main reasons, I’d say. I think the future model is discovery in an affordable way, whether that’s digitally or similar, and then when you find the thing you’re passionate about, collect, buy something special, buy something ideally unique, and show that as a badge for who you are. That’s an identity, really, and being part of a group that’s limited to a certain amount of people that really only know about this particular title, this particular author, and having that be something that you’re supporting in a very special way. That bifurcated model, it’s looking more and more like the future of the business.
Digging into TOKYOPOP, what have been your big hits in publishing this year in the U.S. market, and what do you see as your key releases between now and the end of the year?
We do a range of big IP; we think it’s important to be involved with big IP. The big IP holders like to work with us because we’re creative, we bring something fresh to their brands. Those are great retail products for us, shops love it. We also do well in book clubs and other places. We like big IP, but we also, as always, do adaptations and licensing from Japan, from Korea, from China, and then creator-originated work.
Across those, our biggest product so far, our biggest book to date was Alien Stage. We have this deluxe gorgeous hardcover art book based on the Korean YouTube show, which has just taken off like crazy. That thing sold out the minute it shipped, so we’re hustling to get a reprint done in China on that.
We’ve had very strong success with Honkai, which is not related, but from the same company in China who does Genshin Impact, if you’re familiar with those games. That’s a HoYoverse, and so the Chinese company who does those games has a series of comics and we’ve put out Honkai, which has done really well for us.
We’ve, of course, done great with high-end versions of our Disney titles, so Nightmare Before Christmas, Stitch, Pirates of the Caribbean, those types.
Our boys’ love line and our girls’ love line, overall, TOKYOPOP LoveLove, our romance, is doing great. Bride of Ignat has been one of our most popular ones. Touch Within the Abyss. We’re coming out with the Vassalord Deluxe Edition, which is going to be super.
We’ve got some really cool horror novels coming out. An amazing lesbian horror novel from Japan called Ugly Girls is coming out later this year. That’s going to be a fun one. We have an anthology Japanese horror title called Six. That’s also a novel. We’ve got some horror manga coming out.
Then, I would mention our kids line. We have TOKYOPOP Kids and TOKYOPOP Learning. Manga Quest, series of manga-based educational stories: science, math, history. They’re story-driven, they’re all manga, and you can learn with that. That’s aimed at schools and parents who want their children to learn, libraries.
Then, we have the TOKYOPOP Kids, which is more entertainment-oriented, but with strong messaging. We have Nightmare Library, which is a full-color story like a Hardy Boys-type mystery series from Japan. We’ve got Wild Paws, which is, again, full color, like self-discovery.
We are publishing a lot of these kids books in both English and Spanish in the North American market. Libraries are asking for more Spanish. We’re putting out Spanish titles.
On the publishing side, it’s a pretty wide range. We’ve been lucky to have these titles that have done really well for us, as well as Masters of the Universe, which shipped together with the movie, and that thing, it’s done great. The second issue is coming out really soon. We do single issues on that one and then we’ll be doing the graphic novel.
And Far Cry, let me mention the graphic novel is coming out later this year, too. That was a mouthful, right?
To put a bow on it for our retailer audience, your books are distributed through PRH, is that right?
They’re distributed through PRH. The lovely people over at PRH, they’ll be able to supply not only booksellers but also comic book shops in the direct market. They have a fantastic direct market program. If you are a comic book shop and you want to try some of these things, like the kids titles (you probably have families coming into your store), don’t be shy.
Of course, there are big IP where we’re doing single issue. PRH will will service you for all of that stuff, and they’ll probably do a little better job than their predecessor. [laughs]
The merch, how do retailers get that?
You could buy it through Alliance Entertainment. You could buy it through PRH. We’re also looking at extending out to different wholesalers. I think because merch is less centralized than books, pretty soon the merch will hopefully be accessible through a wider range of wholesalers. Right now, if you’re a comic book shop, for instance, and you’re buying through either Alliance Entertainment or PRH, you can access the merch.
For Part 2 of this two-part interview, click here.
For more ICv2 Manga Week – Fall 2026 coverage, click here.
Source: ICv2
