Tokyopop Closes its Doors May 31st

Well, this happened. It’s been a year, and I still haven’t recovered from CMX closing. And as surprising as it was when CMX went down with no signs of flagging, in retrospect, as well-loved as they were it’s easy to see that their releases were overlooked. This year, Tokyopop was showing some warning signs, with employee layoffs and some admitted hardships concerning the Borders closing and the money they were owed. But they’ve pulled through tough times before. I figured we’d have to tighten our belts again and wait just a little longer for some series. Not this time. The closing of Borders really is devastating for manga, and especially a company the size of Tokyopop. When you can’t collect on a bill from one of your largest clients… well. It’s deadly.

This is devastating. Tokyopop certainly had its share of critics, but I can’t complain when a company is giving me what I want so consistently. I’ve been a reader of their books for twelve years, and am pleased with everything I’ve bought. I have a lot of memories. I started with Sailor Moon, of course, but picked up the Mixx editions of Magic Knight Rayearth not long after, and diving into the Chixx Comix version of Cardcaptor Sakura not long after that. I remember when they switched over to the monthly volumes, trying to decide if I wanted to buy Peach Girl, looking over their website (the old, old version, not the nice old version) over and over again, seeing the same handful of titles and trying to decide which ones I could afford. I remember when all the short CLAMP series started coming out, when they switched to 100% Authentic Manga, when GetBackers was licensed after I loved the anime so much, finding gems like Immortal Rain and Tramps Like Us and being just thrilled… getting a little worried when they stopped publishing a couple years ago and when all their Kodansha licenses got pulled, then happy when I saw that they had settled into a system that worked for them, and were putting out some really solid but low-profile series.

They were always right up there with Viz. It’s not the same sort of… I don’t know, personal loss for me that CMX was (because CMX was so overlooked, I tended to read more of their stuff and talk it up in an attempt to make more people more aware, whereas everyone knows Tokyopop), but it’s still a shock, and the English manga world is just a little sadder now that one of the major players has stepped down. I’ll miss Tokyopop, and my thoughts go out to all the employees.

In what is looking to be a sad tradition, I want to share some of my many favorites published by Tokyopop over the years. Just so you know, I’m, like, the only person on the internet that doesn’t like Fruits Basket. I’m sorry. Other than that, hold on, because this list is long. I’m digging deep and mostly obscure for this one.

Mitsukazu Mihara, specifically IC in a Sunflower (1 volume), The Embalmer (4 volumes, unfinished), and Haunted House (1 volume) – Doll was Tokyopop’s flagship title for Mihara, but they published a good number of one-shots by her as well, and I think a lot of people missed them. I was never Doll’s biggest fan, but I LOVED IC in a Sunflower. It’s hard to find a really good collection of manga short stories, and IC in a Sunflower, along with Short Program (by Mitsuru Adachi) and Ohikkoshi (by Hiroaki Samura) are the three that have made the strongest impression on me, in one way or other. IC in a Sunflower is Mihara at her absolute best, and I’ll just point you to my review for more (though it’s an old and very embarrassing one). Haunted House is worth reading for its sense of black humor, a good Addams Family-type one-shot for Halloween. And The Embalmer is, to date, the only manga that features Pittsburgh (and one of only three I can think of that deals in forensics), so I had to mention it. Tokyopop published four volumes of the Embalmer, but Mihara published more much later, so that one is incomplete.

Alice in the Country of Hearts (5 volumes, unfinished) – Rats! I just found out that this series is six volumes long. We were so close to the ending. I started this one reluctant to read yet another tired adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, but this turned out to be one of my favorites after only two volumes. The eponymous Alice is in a very bizarre wonderland, populated by male versions of classic characters that all adore her, with some new faces and murdering shenanigans thrown in for good measure. It never falls into any harem series traps, and its mysterious characters and just-out-of-reach memories for Alice make for a maddening read as, from volume to volume, it gives you just enough to open up the mystery and keep you begging for more.

Immortal Rain (8 volumes, unfinished) – This is the type of obscure gem that your good friend has to tell you about, otherwise you’d never even know it existed. The story of bounty hunter Machika and the immortal Rain turns from a simple chase comedy into a beautiful romance after a handful of volumes. The early dynamics hooked me due to the similarities between Rain and Vash the Stampede from Trigun, but after awhile, it becomes clear that the pursuer Machika is slowly falling in love with Rain, and there’s a sad backstory for Rain along with the theme that living for 1,000 years is a difficult thing. This is another that Tokyopop had published all the volumes of at the time, but it has since finished in Japan.

Happy Mania (11 volumes) – This was my introduction to Moyoco Anno, and to the josei genre as well, so it’s a real game-changer for me. Happy Mania is not a favorite in either category, but it’s still one of the most memorable series I’ve read. I hated early volumes, but I began to sympathize with the manic Shigeta, her bad taste in men, and her search for a happy life. The men in this series are still some of the worst boyfriends ever (many are at best callous and insensitive, and at worst abusive and possessive), and Shigeta is also the postergirl for bad decisions, but I still like that this was a manga simply about living life, with no particular goals or aspirations for the main character aside from finding a boyfriend. Once I got that, the rest of the series was a lot of fun, and I loved the ending. I still think Flowers and Bees is a better and very similar series (sort of like Happy Mania from a guy’s perspective), but Happy Mania came first.

Cardcaptor Sakura (12 volumes) – Dark Horse is currently publishing a very definitive edition of this, but Tokyopop showed me its wonders first. This is one of my very favorite series, and has been among my top five ever since I first read it. I’ll talk more about it at a later date, but it’s still impressive to me that something that seems so girly and juvenile theme-wise could resonate with me so much. Cardcaptor Sakura is something special, and I’m happy that Tokyopop introduced me so early in my manga-reading career. The volumes started coming out not long after I first got into manga, and I was happy to have anything girly at the time.

Paradise Kiss (5 volumes) – Unlike Cardcaptor Sakura, I don’t think any other company would have published this if Tokyopop hadn’t. While I love Cardcaptor Sakura, this is the most perfect shoujo romance I will ever lay my hands on. At five volumes, it’s easy for me to re-read again and again, and I still tear up every time I finish it. I’ve written about it before, and also about how personal it is for me. Every manga publisher has a stand-out title. For most, Tokyopop will always mean Fruits Basket and Sailor Moon, but for me, their gift to me now and forever will be Paradise Kiss.

Confidential Confessions (6 volumes, plus a 2-volume followup called Confidential Confessions: Deai) – These volumes are a unique collection of one-shot “after-school special”-type stories that tackle themes such as bullying, sexual harassment, et cetera, and show how students can overcome them. They’re good books, although they might be a little too skeevy and creepy to really give to teens despite their mostly positive endings. I liked them when I read them, and the Deai two-volume spinoff that came out later still haunts me. This one gets a mention, though, for being one of the only manga my mother read. She read the story about the tennis coach that sexually harassed students and never really picked up another manga after that.

+ Anima (10 volumes) – This is still one of the best all-ages manga I can think of. It’s the story of an enthusiastic boy named Cooro and a handful of other orphan children who can partially transform into animals and use their powers to go on adventures together. The stories are serious, sweet, funny, charming, and a little bit meandering. The characters are wonderful, the content is never too heavy, the setting and fantasy world are well-constructed, and the final story arc ends the series on a great note. It’s also one of the few all-ages series that is truly all ages. I couldn’t wait to read each volume as it came out.

CLAMP no Kiseki (12 volumes) – What other publisher would’ve taken such a huge risk on something like this? This was a series of CLAMP ‘zines, a sort of character guide, plot summary, and walk-through for every book they had published at the time, along with comics, interviews, and all sorts of other interesting content. Plus, every volume came with chess pieces that you could assemble into your own set. I suspect Tokyopop took a huge loss on this one, because I’ve seen the first several volumes wash up in various remainder pallets at work over the years. The books were re-formatted halfway through, and I was worried Tokyopop wouldn’t be able to finish it, but they did. This, more than anything else, bought my loyalty forever.

Duklyon: CLAMP School Defenders (2 volumes) – This series, while CLAMP-tastic and very much in the vein of their older, sillier series, introduced me to the sentai genre of manga. Sentai manga have a very special brand of humor centered around how inherently ridiculous sentai heroes are, and CLAMP School Defenders does the genre justice with CLAMP flavor. It still makes me laugh to this day with its over-the-top happy and grumpy heroes and the ridiculous sheep villains they fight.

The Demon Ororon (4 volumes, or 1 omnibus volume) – I bought the omnibus volume of this, and was completely blown away by how much I liked it. I couldn’t put it down. It’s the dramatic love story of Chiaki and Ororon, the Prince of Demons, full of tragedy and action and romance and just about everything else you could want in a shoujo manga. It’s flawed, and there’s a lot of sitting around and pondering the meaning of life and all sorts of other gothic reflection. And while I did like the very stylized art, it was sometimes hard to tell the characters from one another. But it makes up for it in spades with its ridiculously addictive drama. I highly recommend it to any shoujo fan, though.

Demon Sacred (4 volumes, suspended) – This was another current title and new favorite for me, from the author of Jyu-Oh-Sei. I could say a lot about it, but all you need to know is that it involves demons, unicorns, and a disease that ages people backwards until they turn into babies and then cease to exist. Nothing I say can really do proper justice to a plot like that.

Dragon Head (10 volumes) – Tokyopop dabbled in a little bit of everything, and always found a stand-out title when they did. Dragon Head is about some sort of disaster sweeping through Japan and how humanity reacts post-apocalypse, specifically following the story of two teens who were trapped in a subway car during the mysterious incident and their eventual escape and slow trek back to Tokyo. Post-apocalypse fiction at its best, complete with conspiracies, crazies, monsters, and just about everything else you could want in a story like this. The volume where they escape from the subway is one of the scariest volumes of manga I’ve ever read.

Future Diary (10 volumes, suspended) – More horror, and another current series that I enjoyed, this one about a supernatural tournament where cell phone users with different types of “diaries” work to eliminate one another in an effort to be the king of the universe. While the premise is far-fetched, the stories are pretty scary stuff, with the main character sucked into the tournament against his will and fending off the other murderous contestants and the truly twisted traps they come up with. He has one ally, but she’s the most unbalanced and crazy of them all.

GetBackers (27 volumes, suspended) – GetBackers is long, and is best described as an action series with many overlapping plotlines where the main characters, Ban and Ginji, save various people and artifacts using their special powers (Ban is super-strong, Ginji has lightening powers). It’s a buddy cop-kinda series, and most of the cases bring in an increasingly large number of side characters tied to either Ban or Ginji. It has its ups and downs, and is fairly standard as far as action series go, but Ban and Ginji are great front men, and even when I was slogging through a long and boring story, the good one that came next always made reading the series more than worth it for me. This was the one I wanted Kodansha to license request more than any other.

Jyu-Oh-Sei (3 volumes) – Planet of the Beast King! While not as crazy as Demon Sacred, Natsumi Itsuki’s other series is just as good, and is a short 3-volume affair about a rich boy getting trapped in a feral prison world with a well-established and dangerous caste system. He grows up and learns to adapt to the harsh environment, then, of course, it becomes about overthrowing the prison system as a whole. One of my favorite sci-fi manga series.

Ratman (4 volumes, suspended) – More sentai, and at two series, that makes Tokyopop the publisher with the most sentai manga in English. This is a silly one about a kid who… well, hero-worshipped the masked superheroes that kept his town safe. When he gets the chance to don a costume of his own and make a difference, he snaps it up fast, only to find out later he’s working for the bad guys. But good and evil aren’t so clear cut, and the number of jokes and bizarre situations that he finds himself in are priceless. Funny stuff, and easy to like.

Mad Love Chase (5 volumes) - On the surface, this is a fairly mediocre shoujo series, with over-the-top comedy, jokes that often fall flat, and episodic stories about transfer students and class trips. The plot of the series is that the prince of demons is hiding out in the human world and pretending to be a student, so a lot of the stories are also about demon agents trying to figure out if Kaito is really the prince and Kaito almost completely oblivious to the fact he is being hunted. But Kaito and his best friend, Taiki, are so endearing and charming that it makes up for all the other weaknesses. Kaito and Taiki have a wonderful dynamic, and they also manage to save a lot of the humor as well. Also, I will read any series with demons in it.

Fake (7 volumes) - More action/comedy/drama, this time it concerns a pair of New York cops and the wacky hijinx that surround them. For as goofy as Ryo and Dee are as characters, the cases they investigate are usually pretty heavy stuff. This is also a pseudo-BL series, with Dee hitting on Ryo throughout the entire thing and hints of romance between the two popping up frequently. It’s rough at the beginning, but Ryo and Dee grow on you, and the resolution between the two is pretty great. It’s a BL classic.

Your & My Secret (7 volumes, suspended) – Dammit, Ai Morinaga. Why doesn’t everyone love you like I do? Her series, along with anything originally published by Akita Shoten, just kill companies. She’s had several published in English, but only the two-volume Strawberry-chan series was ever finished. And soon after, ADV folded. Del Rey, ADV, and Tokyopop all have taken a stab at her work. She’s a favorite of mine, and writes genuinely hilarious comedies, and this one about body-swapping is a great example of why she’s awesome. She is not to everyone’s taste, though.

Lupin III (14 volumes) – One of the oldest manga published in English also comes to us courtesy of Tokyopop. This classic isn’t often spoken of, but it’s hard not to love the ladykiller gentleman thief Lupin and his gang of merry men, including henchmen Jigen, stoic swordsman Goemon, friend-and-foe evil dame Fujiko, and Inspector Zenigata, the Clouseau to Lupin’s Phantom. Monkey Punch’s art is looks a lot like the work of Sergio Aragones, and the one-shot stories with a humorous twist at the end would be very comfortable in the early, genre-centric issues of Mad Magazine.

Peach Girl (18 volumes) – Oh, my heart will always belong to this one, my first really trashy shoujo manga. Momo is misunderstood at school, her dark tan and light hair give her a bad reputation, and her “best friend” Sae takes pleasure in spreading nasty rumors about her. Momo’s crush, hot guy Tohji, eventually falls for Sae’s lies, but second hot guy Kiley swoops in to console her, revealing that he’s always loved Momo ever since she saved his life. Rape, pregnancy, blackmail, and about a thousand back-and-forth mood swings take place between the characters before the dust settles at the end of volume 18. I enjoyed every page of it.

Tramps Like Us (14 volumes) – Whereas Peach Girl is trashy shoujo, Tramps Like Us (originally titled “You’re a Pet”) is trashy josei, or starts off that way when office lady Sumire finds down-and-out Momo living in a cardboard box and agrees to take him in if he acts like her pet. This doesn’t go down the kinky road it ought to, and instead turns into a story of the life of Momo and Sumire, with lots of one-shot chapters that touch on the nuances of what makes the two of them… well, Momo and Sumire. Sumire dates a handsome crush for most of the series, and Momo is there for her through the ups and downs of that relationship, just as she’s there to help him as he becomes a professional dancer and sort out some of the rougher pieces of his life. It’s wonderfully written, with nice touches of humor and just enough technique to make it seem like, somewhere, this could be someone’s life. Wonderful and absolutely memorable.

KOREAN MANHWA CORNER: One of the other great things that Tokyopop did was publish a metric ton of manhwa. I’ve probably only read half of it, and I read a LOT of manhwa. But much like Yen Press is great at choosing exactly my flavor of cutie Korean romance, Tokyopop once upon a time was good at choosing slightly hipper romances with a twist. Of what came out, the standout stuff was the work of Hee Jung Park, especially Hotel Africa (2 volumes, unfinished) and Martin & John (1 volume, unfinished). Both were sensitive romance titles aimed at older audiences, both were pseudo-short story collections centered around a theme. In Hotel Africa, it was stories about guests at the hotel along with the lives of the family that maintained it, and in Martin & John, the first volume was BL-flavored short stories in a few genres about men named Martin and John.

A lot of the other manhwa I’ve read from Tokyopop was aimed at a younger audience, though. An early and truly bizarre series was Kill Me, Kiss Me (5 volumes), which cycles through about three different types of story, each with a different main character, before settling into a longer plot for the last three volumes. That makes it sound iffy, but every change brought about a more interesting story. Admittedly, it’s been a long time since I’ve read that one, though. Queens (4 volumes) was a cute but middle-of-the-road story about a boy who wants to be a manga artist surrounded by older, bossy women who dominate his life. Bird Kiss (5 volumes) has an awful main character, but is still a really successful girls’ romance comic, and my favorite after Hee Jung Park’s series. I.N.V.U. (5 volumes, suspended) is probably the better romance series, a well-written romantic triangle with lots of drama, and the first manhwa I ever read (well-chosen, I have to say, because it’s indistinguishable from a Japanese shoujo manga). And last, but not least, Forget About Love only has one volume available, but it was a promising first volume, and more girls’ comic hijinx with a trendy flavor.

There are a lot of series I passed over for this list, but these are my favorites, and even this list is too long. I’ve enjoyed Tokyopop’s manga immensely over the years, and… well, as you can see, they were a big part of the English-language manga publishing world and its history. Tokyopop’s absence will leave a void for quite some time to come.