I like how my Librarian calls manga, "anime books"

"Wow this contract sucks." "Shut up, at least we're telling them in advance this time."

As someone who charges pretty cheap for single illustration commissions hearing that tokyopop paid $20 per finished comic page hurt my whole soul.

It's kinda weird hearing people say that Tokyo Pop is dead when you're German and every second manga that comes out has their name on them

Oh wow, this was a blast from the past 😆! I was one of the winners from the 2nd RSOM UK contest. At the time I was in my final year of university and getting a manga contract was my absolute dream. I would have signed any contract regardless of how terrible it was just for the "honour" of being published by TP. I pitched a 3-book series but it ended up not going anywhere, and I was offered the opportunity of drawing a single page fanart for Princess Ai instead. That would come out in a fan anthology (I'm fuzzy on the details now but I think it was a compilation of short stories by various OEL artists using Princess AI characters). I was over the moon as even a piece of fanart meant I officially had done business with TP which was the holy grail for an aspiring artist. I bought & read all the PA books and created a chibi fanart featuring almost every character in funny, contextually correct situations. I sent the sketch over for approval and...heard nothing back ever again. Looking back, I'm quite touched at my own naivety because at the time I was deliriously happy to have contact with editors from TP. I had no concept of money and would have gladly signed for $20 a page. Long story short, I shelved my dream of becoming a manga artist and became a graphic designer. Many years later I started posting DIY videos on KZfaq for fun and that actually turned into a full-time job. I've also learned a lot about business throughout the years and in hindsight totally aghast at the mess that was TP. Being a KZfaqr completely changed the way I view my time and how much value I need to put on my intellectual property. Though personally, I still look back with nostalgia at those pitifully carefree and naive years of my life 😂

Ah, so that explains my childhood phenomena of finding a manga that looked interesting only to find it had only 1 volume or was never finished. Great video!

Ah, yes, I remember the Bizenghast mini-scandal with the rant about inaccurate cosplayers on the back inside cover. Hearing that the editors put it into the book unauthorized does not surprise me.

Every time that Devil's Candy image comes up I can't help but stare at the clothespin. Ow.

I almost got a job with Tokyopop. I was going through the process, and even had an editor looking through my work-- and then it crashed. That was a time

Stu levy flat out telling people no then saying he’s open to talking to people. Glad devils candy creator was like nah and didn’t sign their soul

*takes long drag from cigarette* Manga pilot program? Now that's a name I haven't heard in years.

At least this happened before Twitter. Can you imagine this happening now? They got off real easy

I'm completely unfamiliar with these topics (TokyoPop, mid-00's manga, etc.) and still find these mini-docs fascinating. You've got a talent!

Oof, that explains why my library only ever had the first volumes of all the American Tokyopop manga series available when I went there. :/

“There was so much backlash, Polygon wrote an article about that.” Hilariously brilliant.

".....we had low expectations for you,but holy..." Red,just the way you said that made me laugh so hard.😆

"Half a copyright" sounds kinda... under-specified, and it sounds like the exact kind of legally vague term used to hide the fact that they probably just own 100% of it. You actually *can* separate copyright, but it's not a "half". Copyright owners can grant licensing contracts to other people that are limited by time, activity, medium, region, language, or some combination of those criterion. Those licensing contracts can also be exclusive, which means that you can't license or use those same rights to another party while the first license is still active. Most likely, the Tokyopop OELM contract consisted of an exclusive license of all rights held in the copyright and trademark of the work. This is legally indistinguishable from copyright assignment, which means the OELM creators own nothing. They wouldn't even have standing to independently sue someone pirating their work, as per the Rightshaven decision you don't get standing unless you actually have ownership. They'd be legally identical to, say, someone who was hired to write a comic book for Tokyopop as an employee rather than on a per-page basis. (Also, who the fuck pays *per page* - even if the rate is good you are ultimately paying for volume, not content.) Alternatively, if multiple authors work on the same project, and their contributions are not legally separable, that project becomes a "joint work". Joint work authors don't have "half a copyright" either, though - all the creators have all of the rights. This also means that exclusive licensing actually requires the consent of all joint authors, which is why most people don't actually use joint ownership. For example, if the OELM creators were joint authors with Tokyopop, then they would have the ability to independently exploit the same work separately; and Tokyopop would need their consent to exclusively sublicense the work. This sounds way too generous for the Tokyopop OELM program.

Oh hey, ad at the end of the video. nice. On that note The Devil's Candy creator DODGED A BULLET there.

Wow, I’d heard about some controversies with TokyoPop before, but I didn’t expect this! How shameful. Thanks for the video, it’s been enlightening!

I seriously love your work. It's so nostalgic to me, and you seriously give us such detail. I would love it if you might consider doing a series on the changes we're seeing in the styles and receptions of anime these days. I think back to so many of the classics we've had, and how there haven't been as many stand out or stand alone series that have really broken the mold or become a classic and and standard. Obviously a gem like "Cowboy Bebop" isn't going to be something that happens every day. But the overall themes of so many animes that seem to become mainstream seems so different from things we used to see in the early 2000s.

Kurt Cobain was married to Courtney Love until his death, I think the term for that is his widow rather than his ex-wife. Ex-wife implied they divorced before he died, they did not. Great video anyway! Love you're 'history of the downfall' videos!

Peach Fuzz and Bizenghast were cool, but I'll never forget that one time Tokyopop adapted Warrior Cats. Yes, really.

Gosh, as a 13-year old who was completely unplugged from ANY manga scene when I was deep in that 'phase', I always assumed Peach Fuzz was weird and niche. Never realised how big it was. Neat!

I practically lived in the B&N manga section for most of the 2000s. It says a lot that I don't recognize most of the series brought up in this video.

I remember wanting to enter the Rising stars contest as a teen, but I got swamped with school and had never written a comic let alone a manga before. So I never entered.

Imagine being so unaware of your company’s bad practices that you accidentally expose a massive problem in the manga industry Loved the video as always! Thanks so much for your work in archiving this stuff, it really means a lot ❤️

As someone from a German speaking country it is so interesting to hear about this. Before you did your last video on Tokyopop I didn't know there where any problems going on with them.

Oh god Tokyopop. I still have all my Kingdom Hearts Manga from them. What a blast from the past.

lmao, that's my college. Hey SCAD. Nice to see they've always been as hilariously mismanaged and weird as it has been while I'm here.

Sounds like Stu didn't really care about comics at all, despite being the thing that made them money. Stuart was more focused on getting into DJing for a time (hence the "Milky" name) and only dubbed anime for televison (mostly cablecasters, barring Showtime getting "Great Teacher Onizuka"), striking gold with Rave Master (yeah, remember that?) when it was on the Cartoon Network before moving to Syfy in the US (Cartoon Network would complete the entire run in the UK). Rave Master's video release was the typical "volume" format at retail (and Tokyopop's standard "three-volume" format going there, too) before being compiled as a $40 Dub-only (I assume that the dub was too heavily edited for the Japanese video) DVD-R set by CreateSpace in 2010 (I wonder if anyone has that?).

Imagine domain squatting, but with unfinished comic book series instead of domain names.

That book store that you show a lot, it looks magical. I never see manga older than a few years old in stores. Sometimes I see older ones in used book stores, but manga is so rare in those.

I remember Princess Ai! They'd post daily strips of it in the Boston Globe for a few years when I was in high school

Princess Ai also had a TV commercial. I think it was the only TV commercial for a comic book since GI Joe in 1982. (Spawn in the early 90s was more for the toys which came with promo comics.)

I am seriously impressed with the amount of research you put into these videos. Finding a pattern and establishing three points that generated a slow burn of hate would take serious engagement with the material and I find that impressive, Also was that 428 soundtrack I heard in the background?

Freakin' loving these videos.

Growing up as a teen during the 2000's, I loved reading the manga Tokyopop published back then (only Japanese series; mainly 2 volumes of Sailor Moon and some Fruits Basket along with other series from Natsuki Takaya). After deciding on wanting to be a manga artist, I definitely considered Tokyopop as an option for a publisher to consider since there weren't much of any publishers that accepted manga that wasn't from Japan. I ended up not doing so because I knew I wasn't ready as an artist or writer to submit anything. Now knowing more how Tokyopop was really handling all those creators, I'm so glad I ended up never even trying to get anything published through them. I now know that I need to be careful about my rights as a creator as well as making sure I understand the terms and conditions of a contract of a publisher. Accepting any contracts like what Tokyopop did in the past is something I would have to make sure I need to watch out for.

I'm SO GLAD you mentioned Princess Ai because I never hear anyone talk about it and it has been haunting me for years

Back in the day I was one of the few people trying to put a word of caution out on forums against Tokyopop's takeover of the industry. It was like, yeah I know we all like the fast, cheap manga after years of putting up with manga that was slow to release, art flopped, and over-edited or censored but maybe it's not a great idea for one company to have over 50% of the market share. It seemed like all they were concerned about was turning over the largest quantity of volumes as cheaply as possible without regard for quality of product or fairness to their employees and creators. When Rising Stars of Manga hit it was like a bomb went off and everyone was freaking out about the "amazing opportunity" it presented. I'm disappointed but completely not surprised that it turned out to be a shitshow.

Holy shit, that "pact" might just be the worst contract I've ever seen. It's a bizarre mix of careless language and weasel words clearly meant to prey on young creators desperate to get into the industry. Contracts are boring and legalese is a pain, so the key should be to use consistent proper nouns and cull extraneous prose. Let's not even get started on the pay: $20 per page is not even remotely livable and is below even a simple piece commissioned piece done in an online artist's spare time.

Great, informative video per usual Kennedy. As an English speaking manga reader it's really disappointing to hear about how greedy and evil TokyoPop was considering they are a huge reason behind the current popularity of manga in the western world.

I remember loving Bizenghast as a young person and getting really frustrated that there only seemed to be 3 issues out and never any more.

I kinda want a whole video on that courtney love manga

I remember getting the first volume of the Tokyopop edition of Kingdom Hearts back when I was ten, and I also used to browse their site for a while (anime and manga in general were still kinda hard to access in the UK back in 2006/7), so seeing the archived version of it brought back a lot of memories. I mean, I won't deny that the US division was scummy as hell (I don't know any stories about the UK division despite being a Brit), but I still can't help but feel nostalgia for the company because they introduced me to manga. The German division is still going strong today, and I think they have a much better reputation than the US division. (Or at least, I've never heard any bad stories about them). I went to Berlin in the summer of 2018, and I stopped by a geek shop in a shopping center which sold manga - most if not all of the titles were published by German Tokyopop. Does anyone here think that Tokyopop could have survived in some form if the German division had somehow bought out the rest of the company?

I thought I was clicking on the other Tokyopop video which could've shown up in my recommended. This is a welcome surprise.

These are always entertaining videos. I'm learning what happened to the anime/manga side of my childhood. It imploded on itself.

Oh boy, Princess Ai... It was the first manga series I ever bought, during a time in which a now prolific alternative manga publisher here from Brazil was being founded and made a deal to release a lot of TokyoPop titles. I think it's not just that Courtney Love wrote a manga, the worst part is that it's a fictionalized version of her life story where she is an alien demon princess who skyrockets to fame because she's just soooo good, and then a lot of things go wrong. Well, at least the art was pretty good.

I remember when this happened because I was considering submitting to them and then saw the chaos of the details on deviantart and gaia online. Boy what a mess.

7:44 I'm currently going to SCAD and I feel really self conscious at the moment. At least I didn't go when this happened.

Hoo boy, I entered no less than three Rising Stars competitions back in the 2000s and boy am I glad I didn't win a single one. (I am still working toward drawing manga full time tho :3)

absolutely amazing video kennnedy you have perfectly compacted the entire dumpsterfire of tokyopop into one amazing video GG thank you for all your hard work rest assure this was well worth the wait :D

Ah Tokyopop, still publishing some favourite mangas, good to be a german speaker

Are you gonna talk about the rise and fall of Borders Books

Ah, TokyoPop OELM, Cliff Hangers R' Us.

This video deserves so many more views! I love hearing stuff about companies that aren't around anymore, specially comic related ones. Thank you for the awesome video!

Oh god I remember Peach Fuzz. I know it because it was also translated to Finnish. I didn't know it was an original englih manga from Tokyopop.

29:45 Kamo is made by a german artist who has been very popular for years. Lots of big german artists currently publish something under Tokyopop even though they always had massive success with self publishing too. So I guess the contracts from the german divison of Tokyopop are way better.

The 18 dislikes are Stu Levy and the Tokyopop gang themselves.

Thank you for making this video (as well as your others). Being a part of that original "Toonami" generation that was raised on anime in the 90s and 00s, I was never into manga or visual novels at that time. It is interesting to watch these videos and see all the other things that were happening then. I remember some of these names vaguely, but I didn't start reading manga relatively recently.

Yay. Was hoping you'd cover more of this.

*Sees TokyoPop posting a contest for new manga* Ah shit. Here we got again. *face palm*

You said Rikki Simons and the Jhonen Vasquez fangirl in me had a heart attack. Thank you.

I remember reading peach fuzz as a kid, it was actually my first introduction to manga! Great video, love learning about tokyopop and its demise hehe

It was fun to get this glimpse into the past of Devil's Candy, as I backed the Kickstarter they had last year. Excellent job on the video as always Red ^^

It’s crazy, I was introduced to TokyoPop back in the early 2010’s because of Queenie Chan’s The Dreaming. She was a fantastic artist and told a scary and gripping story about 2 twin sisters who went to a high school and uncovered a crazy mystery. I’m sad that treated her and so many others so poorly..

Just seeing your videos pop up in my notifications brings me so much joy!

Your videos are next level. So high quality and fascinating and make me feel nostalgic at the same time.

This video pleases me greatly! I wondered if there was more to it.

These type of videos are just fantastic

That footage of Stu Levy in that otaku show made me let out a loud "OOF." He even looks scummy. Btw I remember making fun of Princess Ai back when it ran. Never picked it up... and I'm still uninterested. Though I do recall loving Drama Con. Just got some memories of being in middle school and trading manga with friends. Drama Con was everyone's favorite at the time.

I remember I read the first two volumes of Bizenghast but stopped when they announced it was canceled or something, I got curious one day and discovered it was completed after a while. Great video, I always felt curious about what happened with those projects.

I own a couple of the tokyo pop books, but this is a great informative video and I hope your video gets more views.

A half hour Red Bard video?! Fuck yeah! Right on time for lunch too!

The kind of anime/manga content I've been dying for lately

Thank you for making this ❤️❤️

Great video as always, feels like I'm watching a documentary

Considering how many creators TokyoPop screwed over, many of whom have since gained their own footholds in the comics industry since, it is a wonder they don't seek each other out to present Stu Levy with a big fat Class Action Lawsuit. As for any issue that they may have taking on TokyoPop... well the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund exists for a reason.

20:10 "The shining stars Programme" Kinda remind me of Sol Press calling themselves the "Shinning start of the localization industry ", I don't think it's a coincidence...

Wow, I want to do a dramatic reading of this contact. That's incredible.

Considering how Chuck Austen was already infamous in the American comics industry for low-quality and unpopular comics (to the extent of where Marvel and DC both cut ties with him when comic stores flat-out refused to stock his work), it's very fitting that he made a similarly ill-fated OEL manga for an ill-fated company.

Also little side note every time i hear your music I cannot help but think of LABeast doing his usual videos like. “Have A Good Day!”And also “LA BEAST HERE!”

Wow, I remember wanting to apply to that competition so badly. 😂 This is a great video! I always wondered what happened to Tokyopop.

I love your videos so much omg

Thanks for making this. I remember getting really invested in a couple OEL titles by Tokyopop....then really let down after none of them made it past vol 1, usually on a cliffhanger. Nice to know the story behind my adolescent angst.

I bet Princess Ai didn't have any issues with editing, probably because the founder of the company was one of the co-writers

I was watching this video and looking at my manga shelves and wow i forgot about bizenghast what a weird manga that opened that body horror door for me. also The Dreaming like WOW what a trip down memory lane, i remember i was super confused at the third volume because it left a lot of plot holes or something (its honestly been 13 years since ive read it and since have resold the books) and just wow. fantastic video, a weird saunter down memory lane for me

I remember reading steady beat as a (pre)teen! I always wondered why I couldn't find a third volume!

I clicked on this to see if you would include Mark of the Succubus and you did! I commented on the other Tokyo Pop video that I had friends who got published through the contest and when I told them I bought the first volume they sent me pdfs for all three and told me about TokyoPops horrid contracts. That was Mark of the Succubus, I was mostly friends with Ashly who was a teacher in Japan, I think Irene got a job with D.C. I lost contact with them after 2012 though.

I remember as a teen wanting to participate in this but the plans I always had with various collaborators always fell through so it never panned. Meanwhile, I had been following Sophie Campbell since 2006 so I ended up seeing the whole saga with the Abandoned being discussed in various updates and from there, decided to stop trying to participate. I didn't realize the whole "cancellation in the middle of it's run" was so widespread! Thanks for the informative video!

Good video and glade you touched on books like King City. Will you also be covering the weird and bizarre "Van Von Hunter" live action film that TP made starting Yuri Lowenthal?

Thanks Red, you're the best

The sarcasm in your voice during the Press Release reading was just... (Chef's Kiss)

I have always oddly been a manga publishing company nerd because it really mattered a lot more circa 2004. I am excited for this video.

I live in Germany and I am shocked. Never knew any of this. I only know that they have around 12% market share here. They are not the biggest manga publisher here but are still doing pretty good. I think they mostly publish manga and mostly romance. Haven’t heard of any kind of contests here either. So no kind of original German manga type of thing. At least not that I am aware of.

Oh my God, I remember getting a preview for Peach Fuzz on a mobile app on my LG Chocolate phone and absolutely loving it. I HAD to get a physical copy of it.

I had NO IDEA that peach fuzz and princess Ai were OELM originally. Tey got published in Germany, which are the volumes that I own. I have a huge nostalgia for those but haven't looked at them in years. Now I probably will re-visit them and see how well they hold up today. We also have a couple of original German manga, not only from Tokyopop (which is still going strong here) but from other manga publishers as well. Interesting video!

I participated in the Rising Stars of Manga contest at around 2007. The opportunity was great or so I thought at the time, but the people at TP severely mishandled the idea of "western manga". Yes the term is vague, but reality is that any work that dares to use the label "manga" will unavoidably be compared to the Japanese works, especially with populartitles at the time such as Naruto, Bleach, and the Toonami and Funimation shows. So when "manga style" was discourage in favor of a more indie comic style approach, you already know something was wrong and TP was bound to mishandle such, at the time, a fresh market to take and the RSOM project just was not gonna go anywhere in terms of breaking into the manga market, let alone revolutionize it. The contract was reviewed by a lot of users in the forums, particularly ones with access to lawyers, and it did get a lot of backlash (particularly the choice in writing style), so on that end, not only were artists being told how (not) to draw, they were also treated like idiots overall. Still, it was a fun experience for what it's worth.

I'm not sure if I should be proud or ashamed that I've read every series you mentioned (the ones that were published, at least

OMG this is so weird I just found my Princess Ai dolls in the attic a month ago! The Barbie type ones! it was so weird hearing it and my other childhood favourite 'indie' manga mentioned!! I had no idea who wrote it or anything as I was really young at the time i just loved the way she looked! 😲💖

All the footage of going through manga at a book store is making me nostalgic for last year. Damn quarantine.