Tokyopop to Close North American Division

Yepp. Basically what the title says.

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2011-04-15/tokyopop-to-close-north-american-publishing-division



I have to admit, I don’t really read manga, I only really really watch anime, and ocasionally buy the DVDs whenever it’s a title I really enjoyed.

Still, this means a ton of manga will be left half-translated...

Half of my manga collection is tokyopop you will be missed tokyopop I wonder who's going to replace them

I didn't watch or read manga either, but this really sucks. I read on another post it was because of internet piracy and torrenters, hence why I stopped and began buying all my stuff.

Damn I honestly feel guilty about this. I started reading manga on the net so I thought," why bother buying the stuff when I can get it off the internet?" I remember the first manga I read was Love Hina. That manga was serialized by Tokyopop in the US...

Most stuff is going digital and web... i read a bunch of japanese manga off a website from the artist and publishers.

That's kinda sad but I foresaw it with the rise of people reading it online and the fact that the only series I would actually dispense money on were stopped cold for months on end. :/ thats upsetting...but not the end of the world. Just wish I could get the last few Volumes of Loveless and Toribura :(

Tokyopop is going in to this safe mode there shuting down site to save money. That's what the staff told me.Also there web site is being gutted so we can't do any there on the website anymore sense it dose not help them make a profit.

Part of the problem could be because bookstores don't really keep their bookshelves well shelved. I usually go to a bookstore and check out the manga, its rather likely that the shelves isn't updated even when there a bunch of manga already published.

Regrettable.

I must admit I only read fan-translated or scanned manga off of the internet regardless of whether I download it or not. I don't actually own any manga to speak of anymore. Hard to really sympathize, or at least unfair for me to do as such, since I and many others are part of the problem.

That said, still that is unfortunate news.

I'm baffled that they didn't go down sooner. Not only were the titles they licensed the worse of the worst, their actual work was horrendous. The printing and binding was trash, the editing was pathetic, the translation was unintelligible quite frequently, and so on.
They were so bad it's unreal.

I don't particularly want to defend Tokyopop, but that's pretty harsh.

Well, it is sad but that said in japan lots of people buy manga, when not as much here. What I mean by lots of people meaning not just kid but adult as well. But I did hear that Tokyopop treated the artist badly, artist they hired in America not the one in japan. For example the artist they hired get paid unfairly and their creation would be taken away and owned by the company instead.

I officially lost what little respect I had for Tokyo-pop when that “America’s Greatest Otaku” thing was announced. It seems rather silly to glorify American “otaku” culture; especially when the term “American otaku” is a contradiction in and of itself.

So, as much as I enjoyed a few of their contributions to the comic industry(Looking at you Keroro Gunso and GTO), I’m not sad to see them go. Out with the old, in with the new, as they say.

I haven't been buying that much manga lately, but I did often. I enjoyed reading my copies of my favorites over and over, I also enjoyed having an actual tangible copy. I have a few series that are incomplete and I always kept saying, once I have enough money saved up I'll buy the rest, well shucks this kinda sucks, I mean its not the end but still, this does upset me some.

EDIT: AWW CRAP Yubisaki Milk Tea is Tokyopop and there was only 1 volume left, and I've been reading/buying it since like 2007 or when ever it first came out. Damn.

Chobits was the first manga series I read back in the day and Tokyopop was the publisher. From there, my tastes expanded, and I got into a lot of different series. They also published Fruits Basket, which is still one of my favorite series to date. I'm a bit sad that Tokyopop is disappearing, since it helped me get into so many series, but with how they changed their marketing and the like over the last few years, and the economy/borders shutdowns, I'm not too surprised. I'm hoping that some of the titles that they had will be picked up by other publishers.

I'm not proud to say it either, as I own a few of their licensed titles. But it shames me how poorly they treat their work, and I regret every single manga I bought from them.