Levy looks back on 10 years of Tokyopop

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It’s been ten years since Stu Levy founded Tokyopop, which has gone on to major success as a publisher of both imported and original manga and the lifestyle that goes with it. In honor of the occasion, Daily Variety has published a special feature package in today’s edition of the paper that can be read online at www.variety.com/tokyopop

Having first interviewed Levy for Variety at the 2002 Comic-Con Intl. in San Diego, I was eager to ask about the many changes in the businesses of the manga, graphic novel and comics-to-film. The interview with Levy ran more than an hour in a conference room at Tokyopop’s 20th floor offices across from the L.A. County Museum of Art, and yielded way more interesting material about publishing and the market for manga than could be included in the two articles I was asked to write for the print edition. So here, we’re presenting some additional, manga-specific highlights from our extensive interview with Levy.

Variety: Did you have any overt intention of getting into the entertainment business?

Levy: I was exposed to it. As I moved on to high school and college and went from the geek side to kind of the trendy socialite side, I used to crash with my buddies a lot of Hollywood parties and concerts and things like that. And so it was kind of that combination of having an aspiration for entertainment plus this love for technology and geek culture that when I went to Japan it all came together and I fell in love with that culture and how multimedia it was, how futuristic it was.

Variety: How did that lead to you publishing manga?

Levy: My first business initiative really was as a multimedia producer and I turned it into a little company called Japan Online. It came along right when the videogames started, the CD-ROM-based videogames — Sega Saturn, Sony Playstation, 3DO. When those things first started, the technology that I was using in my business merged with the old days of “Street Fighter.” I was in Japan and all the anime and manga and videogame guys all merged together and it was this incredible time creatively, where graphic design was moving into early 3-D work and everything was coming together on the computers. Around that time, I discovered manga. I had already been watching anime, and I was like, “Oh wow! This is the origin to everything.” What a better way to build some kind of position than grab an analog library of content that I can then move in the digital realm. Hence, manga. Then I founded Mixx.

Variety: How did Mixx become Tokyopop?

Levy: We were searching for domain names and thinking about stuff and we ended up with Tokyopop. We had for a while Mixx and Tokyopop. I don’t know when we started to actually use Tokyopop for everything, but we debated it constantly. We had Mixx, which is a cool name, but there were some trademark challenges. It wasn’t a clean trademark. And our online site was not Mixx.com, somebody else had that, so we had Mixx Online. And then there was Tokyopop, which people got immediately.
So finally, we said, you know we’ve got to put a stake in the ground and choose just one brand and run with it — and we chose Tokyopop.

Variety: In the company’s early days, what were your relationships like with the license holders in Japan? Was it difficult to convince them to give you a shot at publishing manga in the U.S.?

Levy: That was actually the easier part of it, to be honest with you, because no one was doing it. People in Japan, they thought it was so out there and, frankly, kind of strange or weird that I even had an interest in doing that. I guess they kind of thought it was sort of cute.

Variety: Did you look at previous attempts to publish manga in America? In the 1980s, there was always some publisher trying to do manga in the American-style comics format.

Levy: When we started, I was pretty ignorant to all that because I didn’t really grow up a comic book collector. My exposure was more to film and music. The extent of my American-based comicbook knowledge was that I used to love the Bob’s Big Boy throwaway and that was kind of my thing. I never really delved into collecting

Somebody always tried to publish manga but it was always in the comicbook shops, which I never thought about. I was always thinking about the malls and it hadn’t even occurred to me to approach the comicbook shops because I didn’t really consider the comicbook shops to be, at that point in time, a place that frankly was mainstream enough to actually make a business out of it. It seemed so niche-y that you couldn’t pay your bills.

Of course, once I wasn’t able to get any distribution anywhere, and I learned about the comicbook shops, Diamond and all of that, that’s ultimately where we had to start. But yeah, we could barely pay our bills from that distribution and a lot of that was because everything was driven by, at the time, especially Image Comics and to a lesser degree Marvel and DC.

Variety: How did you get into the bookstores and malls?

Levy: A year, year and a half in, Waldenbooks started to bite a little bit and it was mainly because of “Sailor Moon.” We put together media kits for “Sailor Moon” with Buena Vista. Although it was taken off TV at the time, Buena Vista was about to put out some videos and we teamed up and sort of decided to help each other out. They gave us some information for the media kit and they put a little ad, a postcard, in their videos. We went to the bookshops and Walden decided to try a couple “Sailor Moons” — and they sold. So that was kind of the in that we needed, and little by little they would take some more product.

Variety: The major turning point seems to have come in 2002, when you began publishing manga in the original right-to-left format, as well as in standardized books at standardized prices. How did you make those decisions?

Levy: That was definitely the stuff that we did that, out of everything we tried, was the most successful, which was able to build our company. It was from a lot of studying other businesses. Me, I had always been influenced by the videogame industry.

When the videogame guys — Playstation and Sega Saturn — first launched, everything was in the same package and you put it into the computer or your Playstation or your Saturn and it worked. It was all standardized, so the user didn’t have to think about anything other than, “Is this the content that I want? Is this a cool game?”

And then I remember the year before we decided to go with the right-to-left thing, I was getting pressure from the Japanese. “Publish it right-to-left! We hate it when you flip it! This artist doesn’t like that or this editor doesn’t like that!” And we had gone to the retailers out there around 2000 and said, “Hey, what would you think if we published this right-to-left?” And they said, “You’re out of your fricking minds to even think about it.”

So we went back to the Japanese and said we can’t do it. And they said fine, we understand, but these particular titles we can’t license to you because the artists won’t accept it.

And then in 2001 I went to Frankfurt Book Fair for the first time and I saw that in Germany, they were publishing “Dragonball” right-to-left and it was selling blockbusters. And so it was kind of like, well look, the Germans tend to be really conservative and if they’re accepting of a right-to-left format, why can’t we try something a little bit unique?

And so that’s when we talked about it and I said: “You guys, we’ve got to do it. We’ve got to standardize the thing. We’ve tried all these different sizes, we’ve tried these different price points, nobody wants to try right-to-left … Let’s just do it all at once and just go for it and make a big statement.”

I was in the room with a few people in the company and, I swear to God, there was probably only one other guy who got it. Everybody else in the conference room looked at me and said, “Should we start looking for jobs right now?” And one guy, our head of marketing at the time, was like, “Let’s do it. Let’s make this thing happen.”

And so we did a few things. We lined up all the various book sizes — from Japan, from Korea — put them all in a row, in order from smallest to biggest, and we said: “What’s the size? What will work from a production point of view? What will work from a marketing point of view? What’s the size?”

We looked at them all and we said, “Boom! The one right in the middle.” And that’s the size we use.

Variety: You also very strongly branded your books. How did you do that?

Levy: We tried a bunch of things and came up with this branding bar on the side of the book. And we made a point of really pushing the fact that it’s Tokyopop doing this, which at the time, for this business, wasn’t very common. Certainly, Marvel I think was successful at that, and Image was successful in the comicbook world. But in the book world, nobody was doing that kind of stuff. So there’s that, and the influence for the brand bar was frankly Nintendo. Nintendo did that with Game Boy and all of the Nintendo stuff had this huge stripe.

Variety: And how did you come up with the price point?

Levy: At the time it was, let’s make it easy on people. Let’s make the shelves all look pretty. Let’s make everybody know that any of these are $9.99 — just choose your content. That was the strategy and definitely quite a lot of people said we were out of our minds.

Variety: At what point did you know that this was starting to click with people?

Levy: Well, we got a bunch of recorders.

Variety: Did that happen very quickly?

Levy: That happened very quickly. We ran out of stock really quick. We ran out of stock! My God, maybe it’s working! And then our distributor went bankrupt, and it really screwed us. It was literally, we ran out of stock, we’re about to re-supply and then our distributor went bankrupt and we couldn’t use our inventory. Our inventory is frozen for two months, which probably actually got people wanting it even more because they couldn’t get the reorders immediately.

Variety: From a business perspective, how essential was it for you to start to develop original material that you own over versus the stuff you’ve licensed?

Levy: I was realizing at the time, well we’ve proven our name as Tokyopop, that we can market and we can distribute. But a lot of people, especially in Japan, were treating us like we were a distributor, maybe even like we were an agent.

So I decided that, yeah, it’s important for us to prove that not only can we work with finished product and adapt it, but we can work with creative people and we can express ourselves creatively as well and become more of a studio. That’s certainly what American comic companies do. We’ve been doing graphic novels, comic books for a long time. We know it really well. We think we understand the secrets of the success of Japanese manga, and why it resonates worldwide, so let’s take a stab at it.

Variety: How important is it for you guys to keep connected with your fans, whether it’s in print or online?

Levy: I think it’s critical. The fans are the key to everything.

Our general mentality is a totally open environment. Any fan can talk about anything they want on our website. I mean obviously pornography is something we have to be careful about because there’s a lot of underage fans. But other than that, in terms of if somebody’s a huge fan of our competitor's manga? So what? That’s great. We love that. We welcome that. Somebody wants to take some of our stories and crate a fan fiction or a mash-up video or things like that? We totally encourage that.

So my personal view on how to approach copyright is I really tend to lean towards opening it up and embracing fans expressing themselves creatively with IP that other people have created. I think that's what this country stands for and I think that obviously it’s a fine line, because with piracy, ultimately, if nobody gets paid for anything, then we’re all out of business. But I think fans are conscious of that and they respect you.

Variety: And where do you see the company 10 years from now?

Levy: Honestly, 10 years from now, we’ve either really made it or not. We’re going to go balls to the wall. The next five years, the next three years, the next 10 years, we’re just going for it. And either we’ve become a true part of the fabric of world pop culture, or we’re not here anymore.