U.S. manga pioneer and Studio Proteus founder Toren Smith thinks so. At press time, Smith was in negotiations with Dark Horse Comics to turn all of the Studio Proteus titles over to the publisher for in-house production.

On the face of it, this decision would seem to be counterintuitive. By most estimates, the market for manga in the U.S. roughly doubled in 2003, the vast majority of the growth occurring in bookstores. Bookstores that had never heard of the word a few years ago, now have larger sections dedicated to manga than to graphic novels. Tokyopop alone ships more than 400 titles a year and sells more graphic novels through the U.S. bookstore market than either Marvel or DC. Projected growth figures from Tokyopop indicate that the publisher is ramping up to a release rate of 10 books a week. The manga anthology magazine Shonen Jump reports it has a circulation of 300,000. Random House is scheduled to launch a manga graphic-novel line in spring of 2004. Anime distributor ADV launched a manga line at the end of 2003 and reports that it has licensed more than 1,000 properties for publication in the U.S. Because the major manga publishers are all privately owned, concrete sales numbers are hard to come by but ICv2.com commentator and former Capital City Distribution co-owner Milton Griepp estimated that the manga market represented between $60 million and $100 million at retail for 2003.

Smith was well ahead of this curve when he began scouting and translating Japanese manga in 1987 with the intent of finding publishers in the U.S. "I think it was summer of '87. Quit my job in America, sold my car and all my worldly goods and went over to Japan to try and somehow survive over there and get involved with comics and animation," he told Amazing Heroes in 1990. He had advised Seiji Horibuchi in the launching of Viz Publications, then an America-based company associated with Japanese manga publisher Shogakukan, and was expecting to do rewrite and translation work on Viz's first titles. Smith found Viz frustratingly slow to acquire rights to manga and anime properties not already owned by Shogakukan, but he was able to make enough important contacts with creators and companies in Japan to form his own packaging operating, Studio Proteus, in 1988. After seeing an article in the Japanese Starlog in which Smith tore apart the mangled American release of Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaa (as Warriors of the Wind), Miyazaki (more recently director of Spirited Away) hand-picked Smith's Studio Proteus to adapt Nausicaa for Viz. The studio's first client was Eclipse Comics, for which it adapted Appleseed. Smith also packaged Outlanders that first year for the company that would become his oldest and steadiest customer: Dark Horse Comics. In 1995, Smith began fulfilling Fantagraphics (publisher of The Comics Journal) Books' demand for erotic manga for its Eros imprint.

Smith would find and purchase the North American publication rights for promising manga, then, with the help of freelancers, translate and reformat the material for American consumption. In those early days, manga was an alien form to most Americans and Smith felt his job was to introduce the U.S. to the best manga Japan had to offer while, at the same time, rendering it more palatable to Western tastes. That meant not only changing the vertical lines of Japanese text to horizontal English, but also inverting the sequence of panels. As everyone now knows, comics in Japan take the form of thick, roughly six-by-eight-inch softcover books that are read, like everything else in Japan, from right to left. From a Western perspective, Japanese readers begin at the back of a book and work their way forward, reading each page backward along the way. Smith reformatted the material to fit the average American comic book, reversing the order of the pages and flipping each individual page so that the action could be read from left to right.

The contract between them made Studio Proteus the exclusive producer of manga for Dark Horse. Dark Horse could not go to other manga providers without Smith's approval, a provision that was to become a sore point toward the end of their partnership. They have worked together as co-publishers, with Studio Proteus retaining 50 percent of profits and 50 percent of all U.S. copyrights. "I have lost or made money on each book with them," Smith told the Journal.

Increasingly, over the years, the co-publishers have been making -- not losing -- money as manga has built a stronger and stronger base of readers in the U.S. Each year since its inception, Studio Proteus has enjoyed greater profits than the year before. Then, in 2001, Japanese publisher Tokyopop launched a major beachhead in American bookstores. The U.S. manga market expanded exponentially, and profits went through the roof.

Unfortunately for Dark Horse, just as the bookstore demand for manga exploded, the publisher's distributor to the bookstore market -- LPC -- imploded. Its accounts (including proceeds owed to Dark Horse and others) were seized by its bank and, within weeks, it had declared bankruptcy, leaving Dark Horse without a book distributor just when it needed one most.

"Words cannot express how ill-timed that was," said Smith. "We were out of bookstores during a crucial period for market expansion. But even with that, the last 13 years have been fabulous. We were moving toward a big boom, even before the Tokyopop explosion."

So why is Smith turning his back on the manga business just when all his hard work is paying off? According to Smith, part of the reason is that he's simply had enough of manga -- but more than that, he's had a bellyful of what American bookstores are turning manga into.

"The wheels have been turning on this for a while," Smith said. "I was burning out. Over 15 years I had put out 70,000 pages of manga. I had no life. The actual acquisition by Dark Horse of the Studio Proteus copyrights and exclusivity was on track for activiation... then the LPC disaster rendered it impossible for Dark Horse to afford the deal."

During that year-long delay, manga became a more plentiful presence in the U.S. than Smith had ever dreamed. "There had been about 50 to 60 titles a year coming out four years ago," he said. "That's grown to over a thousand titles this year. Tokyopop puts out more in a month than I've put out in my entire career. The manga business kind of moved out of my league. But if anyone believes that expansion can continue indefinitely, they're incorrect. Booms are always followed by a bust."

Smith predicts the public's enchantment with manga will lead inexorably to disenchantment for the simple reason that bookstore retailers are too unfamiliar with the content and aesthetics of manga to separate the wheat from the chaff. Therefore expect a lot more chaff on bookstore shelves in coming months. What retailers have learned to love, said Smith, are the format and the price point popularized by Tokyopop. If a book is in manga format (called the tankouban format in Japan), runs 200 pages and is priced at $9.99, that's good enough for most bookstore retailers -- and it shouldn't be, according to Smith.

"My opinion is that what has occurred is the commodification of the product," Smith told the Journal. "All [bookstore retailers] care about is how it's formatted and what it costs. [Dark Horse and Studio Proteus] asked retailers, 'Is there no room for larger works with a higher price like Ghost in the Shell?' Their answer was 'No.' I think that shows a complete lack of respect for the material. For a long time, America has seen nothing but the best of the Japanese comics, but there's lots of crap over there. There may be some smart bookstore buyers out there who can distinguish between them, but I've never met them."

According to Smith, since bookstores are just as happy to buy desirably formatted and priced "crap" as quality manga, U.S. publishers are dealing more and more in cheaper low-profile manga. "A lot of this stuff is not going to find an audience in the U.S.," he said.

In a memo expressing his frustration to Dark Horse, Smith wrote, "[Tokyopop and other manga publishers have] made their choice -- quantity over quality. Personally, I'm not interested in going that direction. If it turns out to be the future of manga, then maybe it's time for me to move on in my life. I can't see getting up every morning to compete in a 'who can publish the most crap cheapest and fastest' race. No thanks. I'd rather put that effort into a carefully chosen, high-quality guaranteed evergreen like [Ghost in the Shell 2:] Man-Machine Interface we can sell for 20 years, and leave [it] to those other companies to be the bottom-feeders, operating on razor-thin margins and having multi-way hatchet fights over the shrinking shares of an inherently limited pie."

To some extent, Dark Horse editor Tim Ervin-Gore admitted, Dark Horse would be caving in to bookstore demands: "We're definitely trying to get a lot closer to that format. We're trying to push our books toward that size."

Ervin-Gore has thought a lot about who reads manga. "Last summer, I made an effort to make it to anime and manga conventions to see the audience for these things," he told the Journal. They were a wide range of ages, but most were in their late teens or early 20s -- both sexes. They're computer-savvy and many of them come out of computer culture, the Internet message community of people talking about anime and Japanese culture. They tend to use bits of Japanese language in their messages. They're outgoing and like to have a lot of fun."

Above all, Ervin-Gore found anime and manga fans to be characterized by what he called an "innocent nervousness." As in the plots of most manga, sexual tension abounds among manga fans and is expressed in the mixture of sophistication and naivete that is particular to the manga/anime community. "American culture is afraid of sexuality," said Ervin-Gore. "It doesn't even want to recognize that kids even think about sex before they're 18. American media doesn't like to present things that make you uncomfortable, but these are things that kids are dealing with all the time. In Japan, sexuality and nudity are put in front of kids' eyes at a really young age. Japanese comics have a lot of content that would be considered adult content [by Americans], but is not pointed toward [adults]."

These are age-old tensions that manga and anime have tapped into, and for that reason, Ervin-Gore believes the demand for those forms will be strong and long-lived. In any case, both Ervin-Gore and Smith are confident that Dark Horse will weather whatever the future brings. "Dark Horse is obviously going to hedge its bets," said Smith. "It'll do all right."

[To read the rest of this article, please see The Comics Journal #259.]

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