Tokyopop Raising Prices, Dropping Quality
To be honest, when I first heard that Tokyopop was raising their prices by a dollar I wasn’t that concerned. I want manga to stay around for, well, EVER. If that means paying more for it than I will. However when the quality is so bad you can barely read it?
John Jakala over at Sporadic Sequential has a great post about the poor quality of new Tokyopop titles. You can see in his scan of Sgt. Frog just how low we’re talking here. The back of one page bleeds through to the next. Tokyopop who, like other manga companies, doesn’t flop their manga so as to retain the integrity of the artwork really lets me down. Because nothing says ‘we care about artwork’ like letting one character’s face show up in a nostril of a monster one page over.
I don’t know much about paper companies. Everything I know I’ve learned from The Office so I can’t comment on Tokyopop claims that they can no longer use the paper they once did.
I visited my local comic book store this weekend but I didn’t buy any Tokyopop volumes. However, I want to see the new titles for myself so I might go this weekend and browse.
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Hi, I was wondering what was happening. I noticed the price increase right away because I bought the first volume of a new series and was surprised right away by the retail price. I didn’t know about the drop in paper quality. I’m afraid I didn’t see it in my bought volume. That’s a shame. I wonder if people wrote to Tokyopop to complain, they might change it. It sounds like it’s making a dreadful reading experience. If they have to go to poorer paper quality, they might try CMX’s paper quality, which looks like newspaper, but seems a bit better in lasting quality.
Also, I just looked up the next volume for another series I’m collecting. The publisher is Del Rey. It’s been a bit tough for a manga buyer to buy their $11 retail price manga, but now they’re charging $12?!? (11.99 to be exact) Do you know anything about it?