Manga Plans For World Domination: Non-Tokyopop Edition
(With a little bit of Tokopop World
Domination at the very end)
Franklin
Harris
and
Kevin
Melrose have already posted links to these stories, but I think
they bear repeating:
- Simon & Schuster will
be the domestic
distributor for Viz manga.
- Two manga collections from Viz, Naruto vol. 3 and Rurouni
Kenshin vol. 4, have become the first
graphic novels to crack USA Today's Top 150 books list. I
found that claim difficult to believe, but searching USA
Today's Top 150 books list for other likely candidates such as
"Chobits," "Ghost World," "American Splendor," and "League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen" didn't turn up anything, so I guess the claim
is true. It may call into question the usefulness of USA Today's
list, but that's a separate issue. (An earlier volume of Rurouni
Kenshin (vol. 3) has made the list before, but Viz didn't
mention this in their press release.)
EDIT: Well, at least one other graphic novel has appeared
on the USA Today list before (can't believe that I didn't think of this
one earlier) -- Neil Gaiman's Sandman: Endless Nights,
which was on the chart for two weeks and made it as high as spot no.
113. (In comparison, Naruto and Rurouni
Kenshin have only made it as high as 131 and 125, respectively.)
Also, be sure to check out
Franklin's
article about Tokyopop's cable TV ad campaign.
