Future Diary 1
Posted: November 30, 2009 Filed under: Future Diary 4 Comments »Sakae Esuno – Tokyopop – 2009 – 9+ volumes
I reviewed this volume for Manga Recon, so you can check out my review over there.
Actually, I reviewed this back in June. I can’t believe I forgot to link it over here. I didn’t realize it until I saw there was no Future Diary category. Anyway, blah blah blah, I liked volume one way more than I thought I would, interesting premise, let’s see where it goes from here. Coming up next: volume 2.
Also, volume nine has a completely insane cover in the context of the series (and, yeah, possible spoilers, I guess, though I can’t make heads or tails out of it). I have no idea how that bodes for the future, but I like it.
I would like the series a great deal more if it didn’t have such a loser protagonist. Also doesn’t help that the TP version of this may have the worst paper quality I’ve ever seen in manga and that says a lot. If you can nearly see the other side of the page on the various white (more like gray) areas of a page, you have a some atrocious quality. I also liked that this release coincided with TP raises all their standard price a dollar while lowering their quality even more.
At least they changed back to their previous paper stock after a couple of months but it wasn’t too good to begin with. With the folding of various manga companies over the years, it kills me to no end that TP is like a horror movie villain that no matter what it does to kill itself somehow finds a way to go on. If it’s not lower book quality, Kodansha pulling their licenses, flooding the market with a ton of terrible titles during the manga boom (probably the #1 reason for all the manga related business fail that transpired over the years), their strange refusal to use original covers, plastering their damn logo banner along the side of the front of the book, etc. so and and so forth. But since they never censored a nipple or something no one really makes much of an outcry about them. Censoring the smallest, most minute thing is like blood to piranhas for the average manga customer.
Back to FD a bit, I’m probably one of the few people who don’t heavily use a cell phone as I find it so annoying to watch people text or play with their phones at places. I think this subconsciously makes me like the series a little less.
Haha, I’m not much of a cellphone user myself, but I was the opposite. I was completely fascinated with the way people kept using their phones for everything here.
I’ve always liked Tokyopop. I’m not one to get up in arms about censorship (Tenjho Tenge is one of my favorite series, and it’s a damn shame it was never forgiven that first volume), so I like them for other reasons. They were the first ones to bring the price down on graphic novels and try a straight-to-graphic novel format for manga, and were largely responsible for the manga boom in the first place for that reason. Their early list was amazing, and there was several years where I probably wanted to read about 70% of everything they published. They were also one of the first publishers to give manhwa a try, and they’ve published a lot of it over the years. Don’t get me wrong, they’ve published some awful stuff over the years, but so has Viz and everyone else. They never pulled a… well, an ADV, who licensed about 50 series of middling-to-bad quality, released two volumes of all of them, and then cancelled almost everything. ADV published some terrible stuff. And Tokyopop isn’t any more or less responsible for the glut of titles that were on the market two or three years ago than any other publisher, because again, even Viz and Dark Horse and others publishing manga had their bad titles they published with their good. But I think it was more an issue of all the awesome titles flooding in from so many publishers outstripping demand for the books. It’s a shame the market didn’t grow further, because we lost a lot of great series from many different places the past couple years.
I do like Tokyopop’s cover designs. The only series I’ve noticed the change in artwork myself are ones with really dated or terrible cover art (GetBackers, Boys Be, Futari H). And I like the consistency of that spine logo, since they’ve kept it up for so many years. It’s pretty consistent with how certain Japanese publishers brand their books, too, except they use strange frames. Actually, that might only be true of one large shoujo imprint, but even so, Japanese publishers usually do have some strong branding on their covers like that. Similarly, I like the huge branding logos DMP started using on all their imprints. They’re very pretty, and tell me right away what to expect from the book.
And I liked that Tokyopop listened to what fans have to say and switched their paper out after only a couple months worth of books like the ones you mentioned. It wasn’t the worst paper I’ve ever seen in a manga, and it was also not the worst paper I’ve seen from Tokyopop (that would be a strange run of pocket manga that use newsprint paper so thin that the books look like they’re 80 pages long). Prior to their restructuring, they also occasionally went to great lengths to finish unpopular series. They stopped CLAMP no Kiseki mid-run when it was losing a ton of money to re-configure the packaging so that they could finish it up for fans.
They have censored a series or two in their time, and they’ve also taken a lot of grief for their rewrites (Battle Royale, Initial D, and GTO, I think, and their early series also all had hilarious adaptations). Tokyopop has never done wrong by me, really, and while I was pretty upset that they cut off almost everything I read from them when they restructured and pretty much… well, I don’t know what they were focusing on for a while there, but it wasn’t stuff for me. But I’m happy that I’m slowly getting back into their titles, like Future Diary and Alice in the Country of Hearts. I hope they do recover and can keep doing what they’ve been doing. Well… maybe what they were doing about four years ago.
Yeah, I think it’s Hana to Yume is the one jp magazine that I most familiar with seeing the small picture on front with the large frame all around it, taking up most of the page. I always thought that method looked bad for both the jp and english publishers.
On TP, I don’t know, pretty much everything they do just rubs me the wrong way. When they had their big push for original series, they had to push them as OEL MANGA, MANGA MADE BY AMERICANS, etc. instead of just releasing them as western comics or whatever. Defining manga could be different for everyone, but to me it’s just comics being serialized in Japanese magazines, not something that reads right to left and has anime influenced art style.
Another thing was the whole Princess Ai franchise. It wouldn’t shock me to find numbers that support it as a good seller for them, but I’d attribute that to the cart pushing the horse as there were more ads for that series in their books than any other by far.
As for the paper quality, I got to disagree at least on the FD 1 front and can’t call it anything less than terrible. Any paper where you can easily see what’s on the other side is just terrible, that and the fact that the first volume has more pages than follow up volumes and is noticeably slimmer is some kind of cognitive dissonance.
Anyone who buys licensed manga has no doubt been burned by dropped series but I do believe I have at least 2 or 3 series TP released that were dropped with one volume left, which is probably the highest among all publishers for me. Dark Horse may have the highest ratio of canceled titles but at least they save me from buying 95% of a series only to come one short by canceling their titles early.
Will add me one more thing to end on a positive note. One of their new series Deadman Wonderland has the first 8 or so pages in color, which is always a surprise. Only downside is that about half of them are in “flashback gray” and makes me think the artist was cutting corners a bit there. Either way, I’ll take my color pages whenever I can get them.