Tokyopop

There's definitely a flurry of activity over at TokyoPop and they're playing The Mouse Card.  Headlining this are a couple of Nightmare Before Christmas...

A few more notes on things we're seeing from orbit on monitor duty in The Beat's Watchtower: The may have cancelled the Walking Dead panel,...

As I noted a few weeks back, Tokyopop, the company that came in changed comics and then crashed and burned, suspending publication for the most part back in 2011, is coming back as announced on a panel at Anime Expo with plans to begin publishing again in 2016" announced by founder Stu Levy.

This is an old link, but Robort Boyd has posted a slideshow he delivered on Comixploitation! that rounds up some of the more egregious...

Founded in 1997, TokyoPop was one of the most influential publishers of the Aughts, driving the manga boom in the US as the first publisher to print manga in its original right-to-left format, a move that helped cement its authenticity among young readers. Later on their "original English language manga" line developed an entire generation of young creators working in a manga style, including Becky Cloonan and Amy Reeder Hadley. But it all came to an end in 2011 when the company shut down except for the German office. Owner and founder Stuart Levy went on to make a documentary about the Tohoku earthquake, even amidst continuing controversy about the reversion of rights to creators However there have been flickers of life since then, with some new digital publishing, licensing OEL books like King City to Image, and a TokyoPop-branded newsletter that was part of Nerdist's adventures in that area. Since TokyoPop never went bankrupt, it's entirely possible that Levy can bring it back, as promised on the company's about page:

Guten Tag! Germany... it's a bit of a conundrum in Continental comics. Smack dab in the middle of Europe, it gets a lot of comics imported...

Titan has socialed up the above image and some information:

We've been covering the sometimes glorious, sometimes ignominious history of Tokyopop for as long as there has been a Beat. Although its biggest legacy...

With Toykopop hovering somewhere between somethingness and nothingness, one thing is certain: owner Stu Levy will never give the creators back their books as...

Well, it turns out that Tokyopop wasn't really dead...it was just resting. Since the manga pioneer closed up its LA office nearly two years...

As we've been noting, of late the ashes of Tokyopop have been stirring, and several volumes that were thought lost are actually coming out in one shape or another. BIZENGHAST #8 by M. Alice "Marty" LeGrow is the latest book to find a new life as a print-to-order book via The Right Stuf and digitally through Graphicly. BIZENGHAST was one of the most successful of all Tokyopop's homegrown manga (as making it to volume 8 would indicate) and it's been spun off into an art book, coloring book, novelization, animated shorts, merchandise, and a tabletop role-playing game, according to ICv2.

After hinting at it on their Facebook page for a while, Tokyopop's surviving member, Stuart Levy, announced a little wee return...as a licensing entity, anyway. The Right Stuff, in conjunction with Genosha Comics, will republish three volumes of Himaruya Hidekaz's HETALIA: AXIS POWERS, including the first two—which came out from Toykopop before it imploded last year—and the never-before-in-English third book, which was in production when Tpop went away.