Censorship over the last few years has changed the scene a lot. It is now very hard to tell a political intrigue story for instance, and gay themes are apparently heavily censored. This has been really sad to see, and I can't see many of my favourites (even fantasy/sci-fi classic 'release that witch', which is quite pro-chinese but essentially about a rebellion in the first half) being written today.
Nationalistic themes seem to be encourage, and there are rumours authors are told to include them so that the censors accept other parts of their story. These range from racist diatribes to chapters just showing how bad life is in america or japan. People say they are equivalent to every fantasy japanese protagonist showing their new world how great japanese cooking is, but it's really not the same thing at all - less pro, more anti. I think this will be the biggest barrier to popularity in the west.
Tencent has a massive amount of IP in this area, and an anime studio, and I had expected Chinese pop culture to be exported in much the same way as manga finally really saturated the west in the late 2000s. After the changes of the last few years, I don't see that happening.
1. Publishers are definitely interested in the foreign market. The issue is that many of them are very conservative about making lots of content available via subscription. They’re used to a traditional a-la-carte model for print and ebooks, and it’s taken years of advocacy from overseas publishers and services to start to convince them that there’s an untapped market that subscriptions can tap into.
2. That leads to the issue of, as you said, comprehensive platforms. chocolatkey is right that getting this is very challenging, for the reasons above. The big publishers are very conservative, and no one wants to be the licensing person who gave away the farm to a foreign startup. That said, we’ve had success with smaller publishers who are more nimble and willing to experiment. We plan to use these partnerships to prove out the model and level up to larger publishers.
3. Non-Japanese comics are on our radar for sure, but like chocolatkey said, that market is very concentrated at the moment so it would be challenging to compete with the big players head-on. Manhwa and webtoons are huge right now, but anime and manga have withstood decades of potential competitors and continue to grow. Fans still want to read Japanese comics and experience the unique stories and perspectives they offer, even if they’re part of a diet of other types of comics.
What is the risk to them? Don't they get paid no matter who they license to? Or is this about fear of cannibalizing the print business?
1. Absolutely, Japanese publishers are interested, but maybe not for the reasons you think. They have realized that the Korean (webtoons) and Chinese (webcomics) markets are expanding rapidly into the international market, and webtoon services are crushing manga services. Even a lot of the manga audience itself is moving towards reading webtoons. The most scary example for the Japanese publishers is probably Piccoma, a Japan-only (for now) manga/webtoon service launched by Korean webtoon giant Kakao. They entered the Japanese market fairly recently and now are now top on the Japanese app stores, and offer webtoon content as well as all manga. The Japanese publishers have realized, perhaps a bit too late, that they need to spread their content quickly, and that there is a lot of potential in doing so. I can't speak too much about what's happening behind the scenes, but Japanese publishers have woken up and most of them are no longer sleeping under a rock. They're even making webtoons themselves now... But licensing is still very difficult for Japanese content compared to e.g. Chinese content, and it takes a long time for deals to go through. I hope that answers your question.
2. Comikey is working very hard towards that goal, as I am sure Azuki is too. It's been our goal since day one to become a replacement for aggregator sites, but that is extremely challenging. Some of the biggest titles are made exclusively available to Japanese subsidiaries of the major publishers, other publishers are convinced that making their own app with only their own content is the way to go. Our only way to convince them otherwise is to show them the appeal of a platform like ours (especially in terms of sales), but even then, some content is simply never going to be available to a company like Comikey or Azuki unless you become the size of e.g. Amazon. Note that the bulk of Azuki's content comes from Kodansha's USA subsidiary, which happily licenses its content to many platforms out there. They are an exception to the rule.
3. You are correct that webtoons (Korean manwha or Chinese manhua) were born in the digital generation, and there are huge advantages they have over the Japanese manga culture/industry and its focus on physical releases. Take for example a fun insider fact - many of the original files for manga are basically held hostage by the printing companies, and the printing company must be paid money in order for us to receive a copy of the files for localization. File organization in general appears to be very poor, sometimes files are simply "lost". Something important to realize though is that companies like Azuki and Comikey cannot easily license most good/popular webtoons. There is a huge webtoon duopoly in Korea, most content is held up (exclusively) by either Naver or Kakao, and they sublicense it to English platforms they have a stake in. As you mentioned, Japanese manga fans are also shifting towards reading webtoons, even some of our own co-founders admit to doing so ;). Go to an anime convention and look at a few home screens, you'll see the average person has webtoon apps installed, not manga apps.
Overall, it's been intense so far, and the industry is evolving at a scary (for us) rate. It will be interesting to see where we are a few years from now. Personally, I hope manga survives
Why? What's the downside of licensing content to smaller publishers? Licensing doesn't cost the producers anything right?
1. Are Japanese producers interested in the foreign market now? How does this affect you?
Piracy has been a phenomenon in the foreign market for a looong time, and for the longest time the Japanese weren't interested in the foreign market at all. Even as recent as circa 2010 (by which time anime fan subs had been a big thing for nearly a decade), Japanese producers were expressing surprise upon learning about this phenomenon, as if they had been sleeping under a rock. Has this changed?
I am not merely interested in this as a trivia, because it has practical implications. Until relatively recently — and relatively late — the anime industry lacked a legal streaming service with comprehensive content library. (It's still suboptimal: why the heck is Dragon Ball Super not available to Europeans on Crunchyroll!? Why can't I get Fate/Grand Order anywhere?! But I digress) The reason why it was so late was because Japanese producers weren't interested in foreign markets and weren't cooperative.
The manga industry is in a much worse state. Are they beginning to change their minds now about the importance of the foreign market? How (dis)interested are they, how does that affect you, and how do you deal with that?
2. How interested is the Japanese industry in building a comprehensive digital distribution platform?
The #1 advantage that piracy manga reading sites have over legal sites, is breadth. I find it ridiculous that in 2022, when the value of digital reading should be obvious, and when the foreign market has shown for more than a decade that demand exists, that the Japanese manga industry still hasn't standardized on ways to let people read all their manga quickly and easily.
You have little islands like Viz and Shounen Jump, but people don't want islands, they want continents: everything together instead of scattered in hundreds of places.
How interested are they in the vision of a "continent"? Do they see the value in this? What do they think of piracy sites (other than that they're illegal)? Does the industry recognize that those sites fill a certain demand, and does the industry recognize that they've failed to meet demand, i.e. that the proliferation of piracy sites is part of their own making?
3. Do you have any plans regarding non-Japanese manga?
Korean manhwa has been up and coming for years now. Titles like The Gamer, Noblesse, The Great Mage Returns In 4000 Years, etc. have attracted quite a lot of fans, and have proven that Koreans are capable of making high-quality, competitive works with styles that are either very similar to or strongly influenced by Japanese manga. More and more Japanese manga fans are reading Korean manhwa.
Unlike the Japanese, which seem to be strangely conservative w.r.t business models and distribution media/channels, the Koreans are much more progressive: manhwa are typically drawn to be read on a digital screen and are produced to be distributed in digital format first. They are very open to distribute through more Internet channels.
To a lesser extend, all of the above also applies to Chinese manhua. Their quality is lagging behind Korean ones, which impedes their adoption somewhat, but that will change in the future as Chinese talent develops. But the one big competitive advantage Chinese manhua has is the sheer production volume of them. On many non-legal manga reading sites, Chinese manhua has been dominating the front pages (which list new releases). Chinese manhua not only have more titles, but also release much more quickly. Quantity is a quality all on its own.
This phenomenon (of Chinese manhua) has not escaped the eyes of other legal manga reading parties. INKR Comics (formerly MangaRock, now they are going legal) is distributing a lot of Chinese comics, presumably so they can easily beef up their library volume.
In some ways, manhwa and manhua compete with manga for attention. And for me (and many others), they have succeeded, taking a significant amount of "market share" in the stuff that I read.
What is your opinion about the phenomenon of manhwa and manhua? Do you plan to do anything with them?