my poor Tokyopop novels, rest in peace
I’m sure most of you have already heard about the whole Tokyopop’s Restructuring by now. Basically the deal is that they fired a lot of people and they will be reducing their annual output by half. So everybody is asking: “Will my favorites be the one to get the cut?”. I also tremble for the fate of Aria manga, it’s been rescued once already, I doubt it will get the third chance. We can expect the less popular titles to be discontinued and unfortunately the Tokyopop line I’m most interested in: their novels are their less popular titles and as expected they are among the victims of the restructurization
Andrew Cunningham, the translator for many of Tokyopop’s novels is one of the persons who were fired and he made a post on AnineonDvD forums detailing which titles will get the cut.
Missing, Gosick and Chibi Vampire novels were canceled. There are still some of their volumes that will get published (Chibi Vampire vol5 will be out soon and Missing 3 also might make it out too, Gosick vol2 doesn’t look likely), but once Tokyopop rolls out the stuff they have already finished or almost finished, the lines won’t be continued.
Goth looks like it will come out (and it’s one volume long, so at least this will be finished), but for the rest of their novel series, including Full Metal Panic, Kino no Tabi and Twelve Kingdoms… nobody knows. Their novels section was always pretty low-profile and with Tokypop cutting out most of their less-popular offerings the future doesn’t look good for those series.
It’s such a shame, I really enjoyed Tokyopop’s novels line, not just the long series, but also (if not mostly) their one shots like Welcome to the NHK, Chain Mail or Calling You.
I must say though I’m really thankful to Andrew Cunningham, for both translating all those cool novels as well as informing the fans about those series’ fate. I hate how Viz doesn’t seem to care enough to inform fans Shakugan no Shana novels were canceled. It’s better to know for sure that our beloved series is done, at least this way we can move on.
Fortunately for fans of Japanese literature there’s plenty of other novels coming out in 2008 and 2009, so while the loss of Tokyopop is painful, it won’t be fatal
Sort-of related posts I guess:
Most Commented Posts
5 Comments so far
Leave a reply
Loading ...
Well, back to fansubs for most of these series I suppose. It really sucks there cancelling like this. Guess there running outta money as well. Also, for Viz to cancel Shakugan no Shana is retarded beyond compare. They just lost a kick ass series. Whatever. As much as I love and adore tokyopop, they really hit us hard on this cut back. That ruins all the titles that I was collecting plus some others I was waiting on. The way it’s looking, everything is just gonna be done by fansubs period. Japan we’ll just have to bite the bullet until they can figure out a way to get there share of the profit for us looking at there work online.
The fan translations of japanese novels are definitly picking up, but unlike the fansubed anime and scanlated manga novels loose a lot of their charm when translated by amateurs. Still better than nothing I guess, plus hopefuly the quality will improve once they gain enough experience
True. But as of right now, there all we got. ^_^ I just hope they give out a full release list of what’s been cancelled so I can plan ahead of time on what to do about thoses novels.
Ugh, there goes any hope I had of getting more Kino no Tabi novels…
Tokyopop, anything but Aria. If you’re going to take away my Kino, then PLEASE JUST LEAVE ME MAH ARIA.
I worshipped Tokyopop after rescuing Aria, if they cancel that, my opinion of them will officially go down the drain. I guess all I can do now is cross my fingers and wait.
[...] novels update: I’ve already mentioned about the sad situation with Tokyopop light novels line, now we know that Gankutsuou, Gosick, [...]