by Deb Aoki and Heidi MacDonald
In a blockbuster deal introduced yesterday at Angoulême Comics Festival in France, French writer Éditions Dupuis and Japanese media/publishing big Kadokawa have signed an enormous joint venture that may publish Japanese and Korean comics, mild novels and different content material for the French language markets worldwide, with Kadokawa taking a 51% share of the enterprise, beneath the Vega Dupuis imprint.
Éditions Dupuis is a big and revered French writer that may be a division of MP, the third largest Franco-Belgian comics writer in Europe. They publish such comics / BD classics as Lucky Luke, Spirou, Boule et Bill, The Smurfs, Cédric, Gaston la Gaffe, Le Petit Spirou, and Largo Winch.
Their Vega Dupuis imprint has been publishing manga in French since 2018, and publishes a big selection of manga sequence, together with Tesla Note by Masafumi Nishida, Tadayoshi Kubo, and Kota Sannomiya, Team Phoenix by Kenny Ruiz, and Tezuka Productions, Manchuria Opium Squad by Tsukasa Monma and Shikako, and a lot more, though curiously, many from publishers different than Kadokawa, together with Shogakukan and Kodansha.
Kadokawa is a big Japanese media conglomerate, that publishes manga, mild novels and magazines, and additionally produces anime and live-action films. As a manga writer, it’s dwelling to hits like Neon Genesis Evangelion, Overlord, Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin and many more, and the fourth largest manga writer in Japan. Kadokawa can also be majority proprietor of N. American manga and mild novel writer Yen Press, which is now a part of the Kadokawa World Entertainment division. It additionally acquired majority possession stakes in mild novel writer J-Novel Club in latest years.
They LOVE comics and manga in France, the place one in 4 books bought is a comic book, and the Franco-Belgian comics market is the second largest market for manga worldwide, after Japan. Manga gross sales have quadrupled in the previous decade in France, the place now one in seven books bought is manga.
According to the English PR issued by Kadokawa, the corporate has “adopted a business strategy of promoting Global Media Mix with Technology, centered on the creation and worldwide deployment of a diverse portfolio of intellectual property (IP) and has focused on strengthening and expanding its business in the North American and Asian territories.”
Julien Papelier, CEO of MP, says, “Éditions Dupuis, part of the Média-Participations Group, is very proud to announce this historical alliance with the KADOKAWA Group, a world-leading company in the Japanese media entertainment industry. Both companies will share their culture, expertise, and artistry to develop Vega as one of the major Asian pop-culture and manga publishing house. Through this strategic alliance, Vega will be equipped to face the challenges of the future such as creating new internationally acclaimed Heroes, embracing the digital revolution of the Graphic Novel market, developing the emerging market of Light Novels and cross-platform global media production.”
Takeshi Natsuno, CEO of KADOKAWA says, “We are very excited to form a partnership with the Média-Participations group by means of forming a French joint venture with Éditions Dupuis, one in all their main comics publishing arm. I sit up for strengthening our partnership as we be a part of palms to maximise the complete potential of the French talking markets worldwide for comics and mild novels, in addition to pursuing synergies generated by each teams in the realm of digital platforms and different companies in the long run.“
Dupuis acquired Vega, a manga imprint, in 2020, as defined in this interview with Dupuis head Stephane Beaujean. Vega Dupuis will proceed to license comics from Japanese publishers apart from Kadokawa, in addition to authentic manga by creators worldwide beneath their Ok-Factory sub-imprint, plus different titles from Japan and Korea. This new joint venture can also be an try to increase the market for mild novels in France and Europe, the place these illustrated prose novels aren’t as established as they’re in Asia and even amongst followers in the US. This is a key initiative that may emerge from this new joint venture, particularly as a result of mild novels is one space the place Kadokawa leads the market in Japan.
Even in Google Translate, this interview with Beaujean (who used to run the Angouleme competition itself) by Valentin Paquot on Liternaute is fairly fascinating. Asked why form a partnership as a substitute of a licensing deal he replied:
“In 2018, I attended a conference in Japan which explained that in 2028, thanks to artificial intelligence, publishers would be able to publish and distribute their works instantly and multilingually, from PDF in the native language. Translation and lettering would be done automatically in a few minutes. I came away with the intuition, rightly or wrongly, that Japanese publishers would soon no longer need international publishing relays. To survive, we must therefore join forces.”
“I may be wrong, but I find it hard to believe that our cultural industry will evolve in a radically different way from those of music or video. And I think that things will go very quickly now that books, which resisted the digital revolution, saw the appearance of their first successful “pure player”: the webtoon.”
“We have all witnessed the disappearance of cultural intermediaries in the world of music and in the world of video, movements of concentration, after the arrival of Deezer or Netflix. The only thing that still protects the book market a little – for the moment – is the absence of a comfortable medium, at an affordable price, for reading. But now that all the paper players, previously reluctant, are now driving digitalization, the arrival of a comfortable color e-ink reader seems to me to be only a question of time.”
“And as soon as this medium becomes more widespread, I believe that the paper book market could shrink to join that of Vinyl or Blu Ray, a niche market. I’m still a child of paper, it’s strange to see the future from this angle. But I prefer to anticipate it. If we lose distribution, we impoverish creation. It is necessary not to let ourselves be overtaken by this development and to adapt.”
“Music made this mistake, but not the video market, which had time to observe the damage of an industry which had not reacted to the arrival of mp3. When Netflix gained momentum, Disney immediately removed its titles from their site to create its own platform. I hope that the French book market will be able to anticipate to protect itself.”
Squinting slightly, Dupuis Vega feels like a Francophone model of Inklore, PRH’s imprint dedicated to manga, Ok-comics, webtoons and mild novels. The unfold of this still-unnamed carved out content material area of interest caters to readers who’ve a style for manga and anime and continues to develop around the globe.
As a melding of firms with big cabinets of confirmed IP, this pact additionally an opportunity to maneuver into different media areas, together with “digital comics, novels and other platforms as well as other entertainment activities which both parties are already actively engaged in,” says Kadokawa. The first books in the partnership will debut later this yr, together with most notably, a brand new version of Gundam: The Origin manga that may debut in Summer 2024.
There more from the press convention saying the deal (in French) in this X/Twitter thread:
Une importante conférence de presse @vegadupuis x Kadokawa a lieu à Angoulême. Thread à suivre pour découvrir la teneur de cette annonce : pic.twitter.com/LPOabBsz70
— AnimeLand (@Animeland_mag) January 25, 2024
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