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recentanimenews · 3 years ago

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INTERVIEW: Ed Chavez On How Denpa Connects People Through Beautiful Books

[Editor's notes: This interview contains profanity; minor edits to the interview transcript have been made to reflect the time between the interview and publication.]

If you have ever picked up a book published by Denpa, you know that it feels different than any other volume of manga you've ever held. Part of that is the subject matter — it's equally likely for them to publish manga from indie darling doujinshi artists as it is for them to publish titles from creators who are well-known in the West. Part of that is the actual textures of the book — high-quality paper; spot gloss, cardstock, or flexibound covers; tipped-in pages. And part of that is all that invisible, behind-the-scenes weight of the labor and care of aspects like translation, lettering, and relationship-building that permeates the soul of the book. Denpa books feel different.

Last year, we had the opportunity to sit down with Ed Chavez, the president of Denpa, and talk about how Denpa was started, their core philosophies, and the deep level of care that goes into every volume they publish.

Crunchyroll: Thank you for taking the time to talk with me today. Could you give us a brief introduction for yourself and what your role entails as ... basically Denpa's dad?

Ed Chavez: [laughter] Well, my name is Ed Chavez. I’m the president and Editor-in-Chief at Denpa, as well as director, sales manager, marketing director, convention dork, and sometimes I do some lettering and translating. Basically, the majority of what you see from a book — from when it gets announced to when it gets put out into market — I take care of all of that. And it’s a real pain. Like, it’s actually really painful and time-consuming. In between, there’s editorial for all of the books. I edit all of the books and do administration for everything. Every so often, I’ll do a bit of translation and lettering, especially for things that are really short. For things that are really simple, like Inside Mari, I’ll just take it on myself. Not to say that I’m a competent letterer by any capacity, but it’s simple enough that my production staff can smooth out the edges for me pretty easily. It’s a full-time job [laughter]. Maybe a bit more.

It’s been quite an adventure at Denpa. I’ve had to do a number of these individual jobs when I worked for publishers like Vertical, DC, Seven Seas, or Kodansha over in Japan over the years. To do everything all at once has been an interesting project to take on, and I think we’re doing pretty okay. I guess it was a good idea!

It’s not so much that you wear different hats, but you sort of own the whole hat store.

Chavez: [laughter] Kind of, yeah. In a different world, I would gladly sell or lend some of these hats to other people, but I don’t have the financial resources to have a big staff right now. Hopefully down the line, once we’re past COVID and have some bigger titles … Print media seems to be getting a nice little resurgence right now, so that does help. Fingers crossed.

Could I get a quick timeline of your life in the manga industry? What your life in the industry has been like — where you started and where you’ve gone?

Chavez: When it comes to my personal history, I guess the best place to start off would be back between 2002-2009. I was working on a blog called MangaCast. It was mostly a podcast, and we did almost 500 episodes within around six years or so. A lot of that was reviews, and we also did — weirdly enough — actual journalism, like covering things from the Japanese side that weren’t translated, and eventually stuff that was more domestic as the manga market started to really grow. Because of that, eventually, I was courted to do two things — pretty close together. One was to work with Seven Seas doing some editorial work. They specifically had me doing things on really otaku-y stuff, which I was totally fine with. Things like editing some really random things that didn’t do well for them, but I was really happy to be working on these sort of challenging works. They required a ton of research because they were so self-referential. At the same time, Publishers Weekly reached out to me to do some coverage of, not just the U.S. manga industry, but also covering Comiket since I was going every year. For them, it sounded really fascinating. In the early aughts, we were just starting to get the numbers from Comiket. Attendance was always a couple hundred-thousand people per day, and, to the U.S., that sounded insane. That’s a full San Diego Comic Con, or two New York Comic Cons, and that was each day of Comiket. So I’d go there, do a report, take lots of photos, maybe interview a few people. Eventually, I was even out there interviewing mangaka or Japanese publishers, and that’s where things started to get a little interesting.

So I was doing stuff for PW for a while, eventually, as that’s building up, I was called up by DC Comics to help edit their CMX line that was launching around the same time. I did that around the same time as I continued to freelance with Seven Seas. It was really interesting to me, because CMX’s catalog was really ahead of its time — it was almost too eclectic. The closest thing I can compare it with would be like if Seven Seas were bold enough to also do three or four ‘70s shojo titles while also doing the weird stuff they’re doing now. The amount of stuff they were doing was possibly too much for a publisher of that size. That’s not to say that DC is small, but the amount of staff they devoted to CMX was not very significant. On top of that, they basically thought that Diamond was the end-all-be-all of distribution — and that’s a problem I’ve had with a lot of comics publishers who try to do manga. While eventually they did get books into Borders and Barnes and Noble, it wasn’t their priority, and where they focused — that’s not where manga readers were back then. And they still aren’t, not entirely. It was a little problematic for them. At the same time though, after doing a little bit of stuff with PW, I got a bit of attention in Japan, and Kodansha Japan ended up asking me to go work on their international manga competition, which was something they were working on with a magazine they run called Morning. It’s the top seinen magazine over there. They’d recently launched a spinoff magazine called Morning 2. It was a little josei-ish, a little indie manga-ish. What they wanted to do was also introduce foreign comic artists in that magazine. That’s how we got things like Peepo Choo. There were a couple of other artists popping up through there. I was in charge of translating as well as doing some marketing for them. Eventually, that expanded out into me doing marketing for Kodansha Box, which is what Del Ray and Kodansha USA ended up doing with Faust and where all the NisioIsin books came from — all the Monogatari novels and things like that. So I was doing marketing for them, as well.

While I was living in Japan and helping Kodansha out — still doing a little freelance work for both companies — eventually, management at Vertical ended up contacting me, knowing that I was working with Kodansha, because they were in talks to get bought out by Kodansha at some point. It was like, ”You’re familiar with the Kodansha catalog, you’re familiar with their manga and some of the manga we’re interested in, and you’re also familiar with the U.S. market, so it would be good if we just bring all this in together.” So I moved out to New York and was initially supposed to be there just to do marketing, though very early on there was talk of me possibly doing acquisitions and editorial. That changed very quickly. Within six months or so, I was doing all the manga acquisitions, and in a couple of years, I was editing and translating and helping turn around this relatively small company into something that was pretty darn profitable before I left. [laughs] I spent almost nine years there, and then I got called up by Jacob Grady at FAKKU, and he was interested in … not specifically starting something up in regard to non-erotic stuff, but looking into better ways to do acquisitions for FAKKU. I was like, “Look, that’s essentially what I do, and if you need help with getting introduced to new publishers, just let me know. I’m more than willing to help.” Prior to that, I helped a couple of publishers in Spain and France, as well as a couple of publishers in Brazil and Argentina, get set up. Mainly through my connections and those little chats between me and Jacob, one thing led to another and he was like, “You know, it might be interesting if we could try to work on a line together.” And I was like, “Yeah, OK. If you want to do this let me know. We can try to figure this out somehow, but that seems like a lot more than me just giving you a couple of emails here and there.”

Within about three weeks, I told Vertical I might be leaving, and they didn’t counter too much, so I moved out to Portland and here we are. At this point, it’s been about four years since I moved out here [at time of interview—ed]. Denpa itself started in October 2018. I had just come back from a camping trip in Colorado, then got back to Portland, flew out to Tokyo, and within three months we had three … maybe four licenses. It just kind of picked up from there.

I really love hearing about your history in the industry! Thanks for going over that.

Outside the Denpa office

You know, I heard that there’s actually a shortage of paper, and manga publishers are having trouble keeping up with demand.

Chavez: It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that. In regard to the supply chain, it’s not really the paper that’s the shortage — though that’s always kind of an issue. Right now, with the U.S. renegotiating NAFTA, tariffs are a problem, and most of the paper we get here in the States tends to come from Canada. That can be a bit of an issue sometimes, but for the most part, a chunk of that rumor came from … well, you might recall at the beginning of the pandemic, it wasn’t like the toilet paper companies couldn’t make enough toilet paper. There was actually an abundance of material for industrial purposes, but not for residential. People who should’ve been in offices were now spending that time at home, right? Because the machines aren’t the same, the paper took a bit of time to start going out to traditional retail and consumer retail. With regard to the printing industry, it had a similar type of problem but from a slightly different angle. It’s actually a little more analogous to the issue we have with meat processing. The concern that printing has is because of the need to suddenly distance people. If you had a full staff on a Monday through Friday basis, they’d be able to get out X number of books. But, because they had to bring that down in some states to less than half of what their capacity was, that means the output was significantly reduced, while the number of orders remained the same. That was really the more significant problem. Acquiring a supply of paper wasn’t much of an issue. While a lot of book production is automated, there weren’t enough people operating the machines to handle all of this printing.

On the other side, some of the stuff that’s been put out, especially very recently, is a little dubious. For example, [in January of 2021], we announced that we were going to do reprints on a few of our books. We put out the word back in January knowing that this was going to happen. I made it public, just in case the reprints were delayed, accounting for a few extra weeks on the off-chance that we were impacted the books would be out of stock at our warehouse. What I did there was forecast far enough to make a reprint to avoid customer disruption. What I find frustrating, particularly for some of the larger publishers that have been leaning on the paper shortage narrative is that they could do this sort of forecasting much easier than we can. They have larger staff and, in many cases, better distributors like Random House or Simon & Schuster and the like. Why they decide not to do that sort of forecasting I feel is a little dubious, when I can do that with a staff of three people. Even in my position, I’m able to do the math to not have those disruptions. We got the books in and the customer didn’t notice an issue at all.

This is a different topic, but are we having issues getting books out in terms of launching books? Yes. That’s another story, and that’s partly due to COVID and the like. But, at least when we consider reprints, I understand what the concerns are. Some of these issues could be mitigated if people planned better, but I feel like that might not be the whole case. I feel like it might be hiding some other issues, like maybe publishers reasoning, “Some of these titles may not need to go to reprint right now,” or, “Maybe we don’t want to reprint these books right now.” Then they might realize there’s demand too late in the game, and then they decide to do so. It’s something that’s not that uncommon in publishing and it’s frustrating to the customer because they don’t necessarily see that very often. Communication is historically not that transparent. I find that to be a really interesting topic, personally. I’ve been having to deal with these sorts of logistics for like 12 years now. I don’t know, I think it’s a much easier problem than people make it out to be.

Oh wow, I’ve always been interested in supply chain logistics for manga in particular. It’s interesting that with such a limited staff and resources, you’re still able to make those sorts of calls and not have it affect the consumer too much.

Chavez: I mean, it’s just being aware of what value you have in your properties, right? I do understand that some publishers may come in to do the lifespan of a book and just be like, “Oh, this random BL title is a one-shot that has been doing okay,” for example. “We’ll just ride it until we get to this red line and see if we make a decision now.” If nothing really pushes them, they’ll cross over that line until something forces them to make a decision. That’s something we would do when I was at Vertical, too, with titles we weren’t confident in, which is why, back then, we would sometimes just not reprint stuff. We’d literally just take things out of print. Things like Twin Spica and titles like that. We would finish the series but then come to a decision like, “Is this viable to just keep putting out there?” Particularly with things that are relatively shorter and things that are more niche, you have to make the decision, you know? Thankfully, for the stuff we have right now at Denpa, we know which titles we’re not going to be reprinting, and right now we haven’t gotten to that point with those books. For the things we’re confident could maintain or continue to have a lifespan out there, we’re more than happy to inform the customer ahead of time, so even if there are situations where some retailers — particularly in international markets or less populated parts here in the States — the customer can have the confidence that they can at least go to retailers like Amazon or RightStuf to get the content. They won’t be entirely shut out. I feel that that’s very informative to the customer and it actually makes them more engaged with the product under those circumstances. They can be a little more confident to say, “Oh, I’m just going to reach out and see if this thing is actually out there,” and not listen to the chatter and rumor mill that is, unfortunately, social media.

That’s one thing I really value about Denpa — unlike lots of other publishers, you guys are so open to the consumer. You Tweet out really interesting things like the proofs that come in. Personally, I’m so hugely into that, and I love to be brought in, as a fan, into the process. It’s really cool to hear that that sort of transparency is something that’s important to you.

Chavez: You have a really good point there. I recall when I was at Vertical, it was always this weird sort of back and forth with the company. Initially, I was given quite a bit of freedom to do — I won’t say anything I wanted to do with marketing — but to be relatively forward-facing with the customer. Under those circumstances, I think it really endeared us to the readers quite quickly. It got to the point where — for better or for worse — there was a close association with the customer base and myself and some other people in the staff. I feel that creates a level of trust that’s really — 1. hard to shake off, and 2. it’s valuable in ways much more than numerical. You’re almost certain to have that kind of customer who may not necessarily be buying every type of work, but they’ll be on your side to hype your stuff up or recommend it to other people or even just provide moral support in various ways, whether it’s events or online.

That started off in the early days of what is now social media. Once Vertical got bought by Kodansha, that sort of direct connection just wasn’t something they wanted. Things ended up changing quite a bit. That didn’t mean I stopped doing that, but it was something I could only do in increased frequency at events — like conventions or book clubs like the one we had at the New York Public Library — or videos and podcasts — stuff like that. We were sort of hiding it out in the open because the people above us were not so savvy to be able to find us in the other places — to my benefit and their detriment, in a strange way.

Once I moved on to help launch Denpa, that sort of direct contact with the audience was something I thought would win us points faster than anything else. The reason being that we don’t have the money of a publisher like Viz, we don’t have the distribution backing that Kodansha has, or even Vertical at the time I left, for that matter. For the first year, we were “distributing” by shipping books out of my little three-room office here, bringing in palettes and packing things up ourselves. It wasn’t easy, but it was important to keep being accessible to the customer, literally going out to them at things like Denpafest where we let them know what our finances were like, what our sales numbers were like, what our projections were like for the future. Most of that stuff went over the heads of the people who attended since it resembled a sales pitch, but it was important to me that they understand that we were trying to be professional and that we weren’t just fucking around. We wanted to take this seriously, even though this is something that’s very fun. I wanted them to feel like they were on the ground floor of something. It wasn’t something that clicked with everyone present, but it clicked with enough people that we did pretty good publicly early on. That translated to pretty big things down the line. I’ll always talk about this — but we got a significant distribution contract with Consortium within eight months of launch, which was pretty surprising! I remember when I first started working at Vertical, it took them four years to get on Random House, and they had a lot more support than we did, and double the staff. I wasn’t expecting Denpa to get to that point until maybe sometime in 2020, but to be 8-12 months ahead of schedule was good.

To have as many titles as we have is significant as well, like Kaiji, our Fate series, and now March Comes in Like a Lion, more Gundam, and working with Moto Hagio. To do that so early on in the process is the result of good hype we got from the customer and working our asses off on the backend to keep those customers with the limited production staff we have. I really owe it all to the fact that the customer can see that, and that they haven’t given up on us. I say that with a bit of trepidation, because there’s a lot of hard work going on that people don’t see, so I should be giving a lot more props to my staff. I still think that in this case, the key is our customer base, so I try to make them as happy as possible.

With the equitable relationship you guys have with your customer base, and the fact that you were able to get the Consortium deal so quickly, it seems like real, honest relationships are at the core of Denpa.

Chavez: I’d have to say so. It’s funny — my business partner Jacob Grady has joined me a couple of times in Japan for licensing meetings, and I remember the first time he accompanied me. He was kind of shocked by how the publishers embraced me with open arms when I kinda “came back to manga” after leaving Vertical. Those types of relationships that we’ve had, that I’ve had over the years, really show. You work in the industry, so you probably know, but licensing can be a pretty cold sort of business. There may be cases where people may have a good relationship with one studio or something like that, or one specific licensing manager. But to go universally from publisher to publisher and be embraced like that — ”We’re so glad that you’re out here, because we wouldn’t be able to release all this catalog into English,” is literally something we’ve been told. In some cases, we’ve gone after things like panpanya’s Invitation From a Crab, which was just so ahead of the curve. We make these choices and take these risks, and publishers come back the next time we see them and say, “Thank you for doing this. Thank you for making these books look so great. We’re getting recognition from this. Could you do this title?” In the case of Crab, that title we were offered was March Comes in Like a Lion.

Wow!

Chavez: That’s like the math of these things. You go from a title from the indie side of a major publishing house like Hakusensha— Invitation From a Crab in this case — to March, their third best-selling manga of all time, behind Berserk and Fruits Basket. How do you make that relationship in a year and a half, right? That's the type of trust you continually try to nurture and maintain and build upon. We try to do as much with the Japan side as we do with the customer base. We try and do that with our retailers. That’s my next step, if we ever get to it — trying to get on schedule with the books so that the whole proverbial Triforce is complete but [laughter] unfortunately … baby steps, you know?

For sure.

Chavez: But no, I appreciate that you can see a little bit of that already.

The Denpa office

Yeah. I mean, again, as a consumer, I remember at Crunchyroll Expo a few years ago, I bought Invitation From a Crab from you at the Denpa booth, and you did a live book cover wrapping and everything, which was a really special experience as a customer. It was interesting to follow that journey. I was elated to see March Comes in Like a Lion finally get licensed. It really made my heart expand a bit to hear the story of Crab leading to that license. That’s so cool.

Chavez: The funny thing about that too, is that there were a couple of titles that we’ve been putting on the backburner with regard to that specific licensor relationship, too. I’m hoping we’ll be able to get to those things as well, but it is interesting how quickly those relationships start developing. It’s a bit strange to say, but it doesn’t really take that much effort in some ways. You literally just have to be kind of thoughtful, right? I get the question, “Why do you pick the titles that you do for your catalog,” a lot, and I get this question from the customers, but also the Japanese publishers. For the most part, I tell them that I try to pick things that are good. But there is a hidden, more intimate type of answer for that. It’s that I’m trying to create a narrative on both sides. I’m trying to create a narrative with our customers and publishers for them both to start thinking about what we could be licensing, who we could eventually work with, and what they can expect from us. That narrative starts with the thoughts, “Which publishers do I have access to? Who do I have relationships with? How can I make these publishers feel better about their position in the English market through us?” It’s weird to quantify, but in many cases, it's literally just looking through a catalog and saying, “This is it.” Most publishers have a lot of good stuff that’s not translated. Things that can really tickle somebody or have them start looking at you in a different way, those are the kinds of titles we look for, and it’s interesting when it pays off.

I actually was really interested in talking about the physical aspect of Denpa’s books. They are printed on really nice paper and they have really cool flourishes — like french flaps. There are a lot of manga publishers who don’t publish the color pages, so I’m always really happy to see those being included, as well. I wanted to hear from you how important physical presentation is to Denpa’s identity.

Chavez: Yeah, going back to our relationship with the customer, as well as our licensing partners, what I wanted to do from the get-go was, first, to try and have as much fidelity as possible for the customer. To try and be as close to the original publication as possible. What I mean by “as much as possible” is that we have to be selective. To be frank — could we have tankobon type dust jackets? Yes. Would that mean books would come out on a reasonable schedule ever? Impossible. Why? Because North American printers just don’t do dust jackets for paperbacks. At all. It’s extremely rare. Just for good labor prospects here in the U.S., it’s good to have domestic printing, and we’ve found places that can do that very affordably and very quickly with very good quality. That’s not to say we don’t print things overseas. All of our full-color books are done overseas, as well as any hardcovers or flexibound — like Moto Hagio’s Lil’ Leo. One thing I ended up realizing, though, was that little flourishes don’t cost all that much. The customer might be pretty shocked to hear that, because then it’s easy to ask, “Why hasn’t Viz done it? Why hasn’t Kodansha done it? Why hasn’t Seven Seas done it?” I don’t know. I don’t work for those companies. But in my case, when I was at Vertical we did things like a release with foil covers and dozens of pages in color, or the Gundam Origins hardcover books. I knew what those numbers were. I know what FAKKU’s physical book numbers are, and they’re done overseas. I knew I could get cheaper numbers domestically with a few tweaks here and there, and I figured out, “We can print like this and not put too much of that cost on the customer.”

When I brought that up to Jacob, he was like, “Awesome. Just make sure costs don’t go nuts.” When I brought it up to my staff, they were like, “Awesome. Just how far can we go with this?” That’s where I have to kind of push and pull a little bit. Not so much with them, but more with our printing partners. Say, for example, we look at Crab — do we have a thatched cover stock? Yes, and that’s awesome. Do we have printing on both sides of the cover? Yes, full color on both sides of the cover. Do we have french flaps and printing on the inside of the flaps? Yes. Do we have tip-in sheets inside the book — those green sheets at the start and end? Yes. What do those cost per book? Is that a full dollar? No. Is that another 50 cents that could be added on? Maybe. But that’s not going to kill us. This is going back, once again, to the humanist element. Do we know we can do this? Yes. Should we do this? Yes. Why? Because the customer and Japanese publisher are going to love this. Does it bother us at all? Eh, it might be a little bit more work, right? OK. But most of the stuff is in that cover price. Where it does get to be a bit more complicated is with a book like Heavenly Delusion. There, we did a reverse spot gloss. Instead of having the book mostly gloss with a little bit of matte, because of the way the printer works, it’s a matte cover with a bit of UV on top, which is a weird thing. When we brought that up to the printer, they kept going back and forth with us like, “Are you making a mistake here? Is this how you want it?” And that does add up. Once again, that’s another 50 cents … maybe five to eight cents more per book. It’s just because we’re basically reinventing the wheel under some of these conditions. Another example is when we released futurelog. Did we have to do a PVC jacket outside of a regular jacket and then 12 fold-out posters? No, but did we want to be badasses when we launched? Yes! [laughter]. Sometimes things are going to be painful, and that’s why you have a $60 book.

I mean, hell yeah.

Chavez: Yes, when you can. This is something I kinda wish the customer would really better understand. Some kind of do, but it’s really not fair of me to ask. I’ll be frank. I really wish that a customer would pick up a copy of Kaiji and have a sense of the intense work that went into it. Kaiji is a pretty old series, so we had to take the convenience store edition that is pretty janky with grit and a whole lot of weird things going on with it. It’s a series that’s been reformatted and resized and the script has been reworked multiple times. If you get the convenience store edition that we’ve been working off of, then grab the original tankobon edition, the script is different, and both are different than the e-book version that’s available, too. And these are all Japanese editions we’re talking about. For the Denpa publication, we had to fix the English script, fix the files, and then make completely new covers because we weren’t using the Japanese covers. We had to think of how to package the insides and everything and all this weird copy for what we’re trying to do, all in order to make it accessible to people. Will the customer understand that? No. Should they understand that? Absolutely not. But when they pick up that book, I hope they realize that this is not something that was a simple or easy turnaround. That’s not a fair thing to ask, but it does get frustrating sometimes, because we do put in a lot of work and just don’t have enough time in the day!

This is completely anecdotal data, but for people I’ve talked to — myself included — there may not be a sense of what exactly the decisions are, but there’s a different emotional weight to a Denpa book. I think people know that. This is probably confirmation bias on my part, but I really think that craftsmanship for the physical product and all the work that goes into the content itself can be felt when you hold and read a Denpa book.

Chavez: I appreciate that. The only way I can quantify that is through sales numbers and customer feedback. But, once again [with Kaiji], it’s something we could’ve easily just released in a haphazard type of way. Like, we easily could’ve worked with the translation [Nobuyuki] Fukumoto did himself that’s available on Amazon or Apple, right? It’s not ideal, but it’s also their work, and some customers are aware of it. The same thing for when we worked on Inside Mari. We could’ve easily grabbed the files on Crunchyroll, dropped them into an InDesign file, and sent it off to the printer. Easy peasy. The only thing we needed to do was actually make a cover, since Crunchyroll only has front covers and not back covers, and their edition is missing some extras as well. For me, it was like, we’re re-releasing some of these things — Kaiji’s a good example, and Mari’s maybe a better example — how are you going to get the customer to come back to this? They may have read this online for free and it was fine and they easily could have enjoyed it. Why would they want to double-dip unless there’s another selling point, something tangible? For me, it was like, “OK, so we have additional art that wasn’t available, we have extras. Can I clean up this translation that’s already very good — make it smoother and more grammatically fluid?” Yes. Easily. It’s not a lot of work and I was happy to do it. And the customer has consistently shown that they appreciate it, at least through the sales numbers. For us, making those efforts isn’t that big of a deal.

Where it does start getting dicey has to do with the limitations of our company as it is. One thing we haven’t done so far, which I do want to get to, is customer surveys and really getting a sense of what the customer wants from us. Once again, bringing the customer even closer and closer toward us. On the other hand, my biggest fear is the number of requests for titles that are very long — because, you know, a number of beloved titles out there are extremely long and we just don’t have the manpower to support that. Even continuing with more Kaiji is problematic for us, after this initial arc that we’re working on. The other thing is working with older titles from before things were digital. Even some of the decisions we’ve made recently we had to tread very lightly with things like Hagio Moto. Working on something like Kaiji is an amalgamation of both, you know, an older title and something that’s long. Just having to remaster old books is really painful. We’re not going to be able to do that too often. Right now, when we do that sort of thing, with like Hagio, it’s like we’re doing that exclusively for ourselves. We’re doing it because we love these works, we love these authors. What the customer feels, under those circumstances, is not necessarily discounted or disregarded, but we’re often being selfish under these circumstances. It’s under those circumstances, too, that you end up seeing very special things from us. So I hope people appreciate when they do come out.

Proofs of the Range Murata artbook, futurelog

You mentioned before we started recording that you guys do a lot of your proofing work with physical paper, instead of digitally, and I had two questions about that. One: Is that standard for the U.S. industry; and two: Is that like a specific choice since you guys do have so many really interesting physical flourishes on your products?

Chavez: Well increasingly it’s not that common, and obviously right now with COVID, I assume it’s getting even less common. Denpa is a sister company with Kuma, who work with BL titles, and FAKKU. We don’t share staff and those other two companies are entirely digital. On occasion, because I actually have to do QC and edit for those books, I bring up to the editorial and production departments the usefulness of printing things out and I just get shot down every time. This is something I caught onto when I was at Vertical — I’m not sure if they’re still doing things by hand and paper as well. The reason we do things on paper at Denpa is because one detail you may notice while looking at a screen can appear very different on paper. There are little details that pop up just by changing formats. The really obvious ones are things like bleed, which may lead to things getting cropped on a page incorrectly. This is a problem that has been really significant for me in the past year. Obviously, with COVID, I’m not coming into the office that much. I may come in two times a month at most, mostly to write up checks for freelancers and things like that. My screen at home is literally just a laptop. I live with some other people so there’s just enough space in my apartment for an office area. I’m just on a small laptop screen, which, if I were to stand it vertically, has a smaller screen than the height of a vertical book. All of the sudden, I’m compressing things and I’m missing out on resolution. I’m also compressing things enough where I don’t see things like little details in art or hidden little effects. I might miss them then because the screen is so much smaller.

When we get to the phase where we’re printing things out, then I can just look at the book at spec and just go, “Ah-ha! Here’s where this bubble doesn’t seem to be the right size,” or, “Oh wow! Some of these fonts we can make a little bit bigger because it’s not looking as clean here,” or different things you can catch. You have a full page in front of you instead of having to scroll up and down on a section of a page, and it’s like, “OK, so this is going to get cut off, so let’s move things down a little bit or make these adjustments.” That’s just so much easier to catch. When you print, the details are just very tactile. Even with the first Hagio book, we worked on with the proofs for Lil’ Leo, we ended up realizing that we put a couple of page numbers on the wrong side of a page. If you look at it on a .pdf, you don’t necessarily think about it, but if it’s on paper, you have both sheets in front of you, the whole two-page spread, and you can be like,” Ah! The numbers are on the inside instead of the outside!” It’s clearer under those circumstances. You may not catch those little details on a screen. So you go through another round of revisions and another round and it makes things, in a way, more real than just looking at it on a screen.

In regard to the book flourishes we talked about, we don’t necessarily have all the different stocks of paper that we print the final books on eventually for proofing. For those types of things, it’s more like we print it out and go, “How are these spreads going to line up properly?” And then trying to discuss within the staff like, “All right, so I guess you’re going to have to thread this up, which will require some work, but at least we have an idea of where to do so.” I find it really useful. I’m not sure that’s something we’ll see many publishers doing more of in the future, I think it’s increasingly rare. I don’t think it’s going to fade away entirely, but a lot of publishers, particularly with Viz these days — and Kodansha — they do more and more digital-first work. Printed proofing is going to be less frequent. I don’t know if that’s for better or worse, but, at least in our case, I would like to continue to do this, because it allows for an additional safety measure.

We’ve talked a lot about the humanist element to everything, and I personally hold Denpa in such high regard because you guys have shared stories with everyone that I never would have known about otherwise. I never would have known about Invitation to a Crab or Maiden Railways. With all that in mind, I wanted to ask an annoyingly broad question, which is: How would you describe Denpa’s core philosophy?

Chavez: [laughter] Apologies for laughing, but we kinda covered that a little bit.

True!

Chavez: I guess the easiest way to describe it is … whatever is topical in Japan right now is at our core. Where things get a little bit fringy is, as I mentioned earlier, things like Hagio and things like the Range Murata artbook. Seriously, that book might have been a nightmare to work on, it might be selling all right, it might be really expensive, but … [sighs] Range Murata is literally one of my top ten favorite artists, period. To be able to see his work with such detail is a pleasure and … I want people to feel jealous of having that! [laughter] Same thing with Hagio. With regard to the majority of the catalog, it’s like … Why is Crab important? panpanya is one of the most beloved and influential doujinshi artists in Japan. As an indie comics creator, which is what doujinshi generally means, he is put on a very high pedestal in Japan. Does that mean anything to the West? Not necessarily, but it means something to certain people. Once again, in this case, those certain people tend to be Japanese publishers and licensors. When you bring up that name, some editors don’t know what that is, they’re focusing on what they’ve got and what sells the best — panpanya does not sell great numbers in Japan. It’s to the point that our run is selling almost as much as they are. At the same time, though, you bring this up to a manga critic, you bring this up to the president of Hakusensha, and they’re like, “You’re … aware of this? How?” And that means something. People are not going to forget those moments.

It’s the same thing with Maiden Railways. Has it done well in the States? Sadly no, but the mangaka Nakamura Asumiko has been pretty influential in the West. We’ve seen Classmates — Doukyuusei — brought over in anime form. We’re increasingly seeing more stuff from her as well. I worked on Utsubora which was nominated for an Eisner when I was at Vertical. Those types of things aren’t in their own little bubble, they’re a lot broader than people might think. They may not be selling big numbers, but it’s important to have one of the more influential mangaka, like josei and BL mangaka of these days translated? Yes. And us doing that could possibly motivate some other publishers to view some of her catalog. That wouldn’t surprise me.

Same thing with stuff like Type-MOON. I mean, Jesus Christ, for a while Fate/GO was one of the top-grossing things on the internet. Why wasn’t there any manga from it for like … years? Who the fuck knows? But we gave Emiya Family a shot and you see Kodansha and other publishers trying it. We did the same thing with Gundam. That’s one of the most interesting things for me because I did that previously and it did gangbusters, then quieted down. We’re about to do that again and are getting some pretty good attention for it.

All of those titles I just described, moving from something really specific like Crab, and then to Maiden Railways, then moving on to Fate and then to Gundam, then moving to Kaiji … you bring that up to a Japanese person and everyone who reads manga knows of Kaiji if they’re over 16. They just know. Should it be in English? Yes! Had it been in English before? OK, yeah, it had, but could we do better? Yes. Simple decision. Could we bring it to an even broader audience? That’s exactly what we want to do. And then with March Come in Like a Lion — why hasn’t that been licensed before? I don’t know. We picked it up, we’ve literally been sitting on it for like a year and a half, just because we didn’t know if Denpa would even last this long. But here we are and we hope things will improve, fingers crossed. And when that book comes out, we hope the hundreds of thousands of people who went nuts about it for the announcement [last year] will come back for us. Even if we get 50 percent of them, that would still be amazing. It’s such an important title in Japan right now, and the fact that it hadn’t been licensed is, in itself, a shame. I was really touched by the outpouring that the fans had once we announced … it wasn’t as if we were uncertain about it, like we knew it had a fanbase, we knew that, if anything, it being on Netflix now kinda helped it a little bit as well, but we had no idea we would get the most traction out of any of our titles ever from March. You know we’ve done Fate and Gundam and we’ve done some other big properties, but March blew them out of the water. We’re really stoked about it. We want to do things that are more in that type of vein and, at the same time, we’ll be introducing people to new stuff as well. It’s all about being topical.

It gets complicated when people give us suggestions … Like, hell, if I had the finances of Viz, I’d be doing a lot more books and we would be a lot more obvious with how we do things. But because we don’t, we have to be much more cautious of the risks that we do take. That’s why we have things like Heavenly Delusion for example. It’s random, but it’s also like possibly some of the best sci-fi that’s out there right now, and nobody knows about it in the West. And that’s fine. Did that win us points in Japan? Absolutely! [laughter] But you can’t win every single one of those battles.

Well, I don’t know if you can see, but I’ve had a big, dumb grin on my face for that entire answer. But yeah, for whatever you guys do, you’re at least laser-targeted at my wallet, so I’ll be around for the ride.

You can visit the Denpa website and browse their manga here on their website!

Cayla Coats is the Editor-in-Chief of Crunchyroll News EN. She tweets @ceicocat.

By: Cayla Coats

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