VIZ Marketing VP Talks: New Manga and Sci-Fi Fiction for '09

In a four-part interview with ICV2, Gonzalo Ferreyra, VIZ Media's Vice President of Sales and Product Marketing talks about the success of 2007's ramped up releases of Naruto manga, mentions VIZ's plans to get younger readers hooked on manga earlier with their VIZ Kids imprint and keep 'em reading long past the tween / teen years with their VIZ Signature line for mature manga fans. He also talks briefly about their Original Content initiative to publish original English language comics and a new sci-fi fiction imprint, Haikasoru.

Since ICV2 is mostly geared toward comics retailers, the interview is very much focused on the marketing and business side of manga and anime, but there's more than a few tidbits emerged that should be of interest to manga fans, including:

Spotlight on VIZ Signature: More Manga for Grown-Up Graphic Novel Readers
In Part 4, Ferrerya talks about some noteworthy titles from their VIZ Signature imprint that they announced at San Diego Comic-Con '08, including Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys, Tetsu Kariya and Akira Hanasaki's long-running cooking manga, Oishinbo (an "Iron Chef meets soap opera saga") and Solanin, a emo college coming of age story.

One title that Ferreyra was especially excited about is Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit by Mase Motoro, a "big, dark title" due out in May 2009. As Ferreyra describes this new seinen manga series,

"It’s (about a) a futuristic society--almost like a Logan’s Run mentality -- where the population needs to be weeded out by the government and a different individual in each chapter is brought a letter by the main character (who’s the deliverer of this letter), which informs them that they have 24 hours to live. And so each chapter is how each individual handles the 24 hours. It’s pretty tremendous."

VIZ Kids Tries to Get 'em While They're Young
I groused about the lack of manga for kids in my Top Trends for 2008 -- but it looks like the folks at VIZ have been working on fulfilling this gaping gap in manga in America for a while. In Part 2, Ferrerya mentions VIZ's intentions to publish more manga for this underserved market:

"Certainly with VizKids we see tremendous potential and there’s a mother lode of content in Japan. So working with retailers and garnering their support for this initiative was a big step and knowing that it has a place to go in stores right now, our only limit is ourselves and how much we want to bring into the States."

The numerous Pokemon story, game and character books are a strong part of the VIZ Kids mix, as are the Naruto prose chapter books and several new and upcoming releases, such as the recently released The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time .

Haikasoru: VIZ Media's new sci-fi fiction imprint.
Maybe this was announced earlier, but this was news to me -- I had heard about VIZ Media's Original Content initiative to publish made-in-America manga / graphic novels, but the expansion of their fiction line came completely out of the blue for me. In Part 4, Ferreyra describes Haikasoru as "one of the more exciting initiatives... that's quite firmly not manga."

"It’s a Japanese science fiction imprint that is spearheaded by one of our editors here and is a wholly separate imprint. The name Haikasoru is a kind of Japanified version of 'high castle.' It’s a veiled homage to Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle which is set in an alternate world where Japan colonizes the west coast of the U.S. It’s pretty traditional science fiction. We’ll see where it goes in terms of the breadth. It’s solidly a fiction line and we’ve got the buyers onboard for it. It’s pretty exciting to see what come out."

VIZ Media has previously dipped its toes into the light novel pool with their releases of the novelizations of Kamikaze Girls, Be With You and the Death Note: Another Note novel, but this marks a much deeper commitment to beefing up their prose offerings. Look for more on this to come.

Image credit: Courtesy VIZ Media, © Mase Motoro, © Zelda no Densetsu TM & © 2008 Nintendo. / Shogakukan Inc.