For the past 10 years, boys love manga fans have been flocking to the San Francisco Bay Area every autumn for YaoiCon, "a celebration of male beauty and passion in anime and manga" for a weekend of giddy fun among other boys love fans. But YaoiCon 2011 brought its share of surprises, including the announcement made at the opening ceremonies: that Southern California-based Digital Manga Publishing would be taking over the reins of this long-running, fan-run show, and that as of 2012, YaoiCon would be moving to Los Angeles.
While this was big news, it wasn't all that Digital Manga had to share with fans at the show. They also unveiled their new Digital Manga and Vampire Hunter D apps available via the Android Market and Apple App Store, announced some new Digital Manga titles for 2012, and gave fans an update on Digital Manga Guild, their initiative to give fan translators/editors/typesetters a chance to localize manga and take a cut of the profits for their efforts.
While at YaoiCon, I spoke with Digital Manga's President and CEO Hikaru Sasahara, and with YaoiCon director Sue Chen about the changes announced for YaoiCon 2012. I also chatted with Sasahara about Digital Manga Guild and it's relationship (or not) with JManga.com and the possibilities for DMG to translate/localize other types of manga, besides yaoi titles. Here's what he had to say that weekend.
FROM PUBLISHER TO CON PROMOTER: DMP TAKES ON YAOICON
Q: So tell me more about this news that DMP will be taking over YaoiCon. What exactly is happening here?
Hikaru Sasahara: We are very thrilled to take over Yaoicon and move it to Los Angeles in 2012. In the first place, it will be very big PR vehicle for us. Second, we think we can make it better, with our connections with Japanese publishers and creators, which the current YaoICon staff may not have.
Q: So how did this all come about? Did they approach you, or did you approach them?
Hikaru Sasahara: Before we started talking about DMP taking over YaoiCon, I was talking with Susan Chen, the director of YaoiCon. I was interested in purchasing the YaoiCon membership mailing list, because, as you can see, the attendees of this show buy a lot of yaoi manga books. We were interested in sending out our newsletter to the people who are in the YaoiCon database. Then, Sue told me that she wanted to retire.
Q: Did she explain why she wanted to retire, after over 10 years of running this show?
Hikaru Sasahara: She explained that she wanted to devote more time to running her own business. She said she had a few choices: to either close down YaoiCon, or find someone else to take it over. I thought it was a shame for YaoiCon to end after 11 years of building it up to this point. So she said, 'If you're interested, why don't you take over?'
Later on, I gave it some thought about what kind of benefits taking on YaoiCon could have for DMP. I thought it would be good because we're merging our business into digital. We're just on the edge of changing the whole structure of our business, so YaoiCon is a very important PR vehicle for us.
I always want to keep my company evolving, every day; new things, new ideas, new concepts. So I think this is a really good change for us.
Q: I know Digital Manga is a small company that manages to accomplish a lot with a relatively small staff, but running YaoiCon is a pretty labor-intensive undertaking!
Hikaru Sasahara: I know. I asked Sue a bunch of questions about how Digital Manga could possibly run this show. She is allowing us to keep some of the key personnel for the show. I've talked to a few of them, and they're willing to come to L.A. to help us run the show. Still, it will be a challenge for us, especially in the first year. It's not a particularly difficult thing to do, to run this show, but it requires a lot of manpower and logistics to make it run smoothly.
I always try to look at things positively, so rather than just moan like, "what if this doesn't work?" and "what will we do if this happens?" I figure, let's just assume that whatever will happen will happen, and just do it!
CAN DMP KEEP YAOICON THE SAME WHILE MAKING IT BETTER?
Q: When I asked a few fans at this year's show for reactions to the news, several of them mentioned concerns that it would just be a Digital Manga show –- just Digital Manga artists, just Digital Manga books.Hikaru Sasahara: One participant expressed those concerns to me today, so I told her this show isn't just about Digital Manga –- it caters to all sorts of publishers. When we take over YaoiCon, we're going to present it from a neutral position. In many ways, we're not a publisher, per se, we're distributors, of print and digital comics from other publishers in Japan.
We deal with so many different publishers, like Libre, Taiyo Tosho, Oakla Shuppan, and so on. So we're in a perfect position because we have all of these connections. This will allow us to bring in a lot of things that maybe YaoiCon wouldn't otherwise be able to do.
Q: So what kind of new things are you thinking of doing for YaoiCon 2012 and beyond?
Hikaru Sasahara: Things like autograph sessions with multiple artists –- YaoiCon typically brings in only one artist per year. We can bring in so many. We can also possibly bring in the Japanese publishers to YaoiCon, so they can have a presence here. Taiyo Tosho, Shinshoukan, Libre, and so on. We can also bring in doujinshi artists from Japan, which is something that YaoiCon hasn't done too much in the past.
I have to give a little more thought to this, but I think we can create a new YaoiCon concept, by implementing new ideas. We are definitely keeping the foundation of what YaoiCon is. They know what they're doing, and they know how to deal with yaoi fans, so I've got to give respect to them for that. But at the same time, we want to bring in new ideas, new concepts that only we can do.
It's going to be very interesting, because now VIZ is tapping in to yaoi, right? It used to be they weren't into yaoi manga. But now they are, so go figure.
We'll definitely keep the focus on yaoi, but we're also thinking about bringing in romance novels, like the Harlequin type stories. We've been seeing the same kind of crowd who is reading both yaoi and Harlequin. Eventually, I want to bring this idea up to the people at Harlequin headquarters in Canada. I've brought it up with them casually already.
We've been test-marketing this concept by bringing in over 125 Harlequin manga titles from Tokyo on eManga.com. All of the top 20 bestsellers on eManga so far are the Harlequin titles! So my hunch was right! (laughs)
If I can confirm that yaoi fans and Harlequin fans can enjoy the same show, then I think this could be really interesting. As you know, romance novels are huge! That's my ultimate goal, to expand the yaoi business into the romance novel arena.
I've been talking to this company in Tokyo that is the largest Japanese romance novel publisher, very much like Harlequin. We are going to translate and publish Japanese romance novels. If it goes well here, then we'll create the manga based on these novels, then possibly approach Harlequin to publish these stories – Japanese-written romances.
Q: So you're thinking of doing something like what Digital Manga did with the Vampire Hunter D manga, where you brought together the Japanese author and the artist to create an original DMI publication?
Hikaru Sasahara: Yes, right.
(Note: Digital Manga's edition of Hideyuki Kikuchi's Vampire Hunter D manga is illustrated by Saiko Takaki, and is currently up to six volumes. It was also serialized in Japan in Comic Flapper Magazine published by Media Factory.)
