ICV2 Interviews Del Rey Manga's Dallas Middaugh

Del Rey Manga Associate Publisher Dallas Middaugh is featured in a three-part interview at ICV2, where he talks about the current state of the manga industry (sales are fine, but slowing down), Del Rey's current and upcoming original English manga projects (including the recently released original shojo manga series Kasumi, by Surt Lim and Hirofumi Sugimoto and In Odd We Trust by Dean Koontz and Queenie Chan), their Marvel / X-Men manga projects in the works and lots more.

While the ICV2 piece seems mostly geared toward retailing and publishing professionals, there are some hints of things to come and other tasty tidbits that fans will find fascinating. One bit that I thought was quite interesting was Middaugh's description of a conversation he had with Japanese manga professional about what makes for "good manga":

I had a really good conversation with someone at the Comic-Con. This is person from Japan who I work with pretty frequently, and he asked what makes a good manga? And I started to immediately answer him with all of the things that I look for if somebody’s bringing me an original project, whether the layout of the page is good, whether the art is dynamic, and he stopped me and said, no, the most important thing is whether it has heart. And I stopped for a moment and thought, he’s right. When we acquire a project, the first thing we look for is simply, does it have heart? Is it good? We’ll apply labels later.

Check out the rest of the interview, with Part One (which discusses the fight for bookstore shelf space), Part Two (which is mostly about Del Rey Manga's original English manga mix and the impact of Japanese comic giant Kodansha's plans to open their own U.S. imprint), and Part Three (which touches on the Marvel manga projects and the aforementioned discussion on the ingredients for good manga).

Image credit: Courtesy Del Rey Manga