NYCC 2006: Interview with Dallas Middaugh

Ed Chavez: Well, thanks for joining me today, Dallas. I have to say, at least for Anime on DVD and for my own podcast, Mangacast, it’s just been the general consensus that, over the past year, Del Rey has basically been the best publisher for, really for the fans, over the last twelve to fourteen months.

Dallas: Thank you

Ed: There are a lot of reasons behind it, it’s just the titles, the quality,

Dallas: Sure, diversity?

Ed: I want to talk about that a little later. First, I wanted to ask you – we’re here at the Comic Con, what was your first comic book convention?

Dallas: My first comic book convention, oh god, I think I first went to the San Diego Comic Con…no, my first would have actually been WonderCon when it started back in nineteen…ninety? I think?

Ed: Was it in Oakland back then?

Dallas: It was in Oakland back then, yea – that was the first time I went to a comic book convention. It wasn’t my first convention, I’d been to a science fiction convention when I was a teenager in San Jose called TimeCon (?)

Ed: *laughs*

Dallas: For Doctor Who, but, I think WonderCon in 90 was the first time I went to a comic show.

Ed: Uh huh.

Dallas: It was shortly after that, actually, that I started going to ComicCon every year, aside from one year when I lived abroad, I’ve been to it every year since the mid nineties.

Ed: Oh, wow! So, eh, were you going to Comic Con because of the science fiction, or did you read a lot of comics yourself?

Dallas: Oh, I’ve always read a lot of comics, I’ve always been a big, big comics fan.

Ed: What titles were you reading when, when you were younger?

Dallas: Well, when I was, when I was in high school, I was in high school in the nineteen eighties, so I was pretty much reading the Claremont & Byrne (?) X-Men, the George Perez Avengers, the Perez and Wolfman Teen Titans, a lot of that stuff from the nineteen eighties.

Ed: Ok

Dallas: I remember being really, really excited when things, ah, you know, in the mid-eighties and early nineties, when things like Maus and Watchmen and, ah, Sandman all started to happen. that was a really, really exciting time, and for me it was when I, when my tastes kind of grew up at that time, when I came to start to understand how powerful the medium of comics and graphic novels could be.

Ed: Right. Now what, you…can you describe that a little more? I mean, outside of it just being sequential art, I mean is it the type of storytelling, have you, ah, what’s really unique about comics in general that really [drew you]?

Dallas: Well, that, that’s a question that should have a simple answer, but I’m not sure that it does. sequential art is something that I’m, not making a pun here, that I’m really drawn to. I think it’s an amazing way to tell a story, I think you can say and do things with comic books that you cannot do with TV or prose. what happened for me in the early nineteen nineties, again, as I was, as I was getting older, as I was growing up, hitting my early twenties, was this understanding that there were more than superheroes, that there was more than kid stuff. That you could, in fact, actually use these things, as in the case of Maus, to tell a really powerful autobiographical story. Ah, or in the case of Sandman to actually tell a literate fantasy-horror story. in fact, that was a lot of what drew me to manga. I started reading manga when I was in college with some of the stuff that Viz and Eclipse were doing back then, ah, Crying Freeman, Mai the Psychic Girl, those sorts of books, and very quickly, even at the time, one of the things that excited me the most about that was that they were telling a type of story that you would very rarely find in American comic books. Now, over the years as I’ve come to read a lot of manga and to really look at a lot of it in Japanese, I’m still to this day impressed by how many different types of stories we can get out of manga and out of comics. I mean, some manga is even nonfiction.

Ed: Yea, absolutely, absolutely.

Dallas: *laughs*

Ed: I mean, just look at how DMP is about to do autobiographical manga, for like Helen Keller

Dallas: Right

Ed: Like, and actually you kind of answered my next question. I was going to say, what exactly drew you to working for Viz and eventually Del Rey. I guess that was actually progression and, well, and an appreciation for..

Dallas: Well, it was, it was an opportunity more. Before working at Viz I was working for a company called Prima Games that does strategy guides for video games. I was there for about five and a half years. And, ah, and after a while I wasn’t, I wasn’t finding that very exciting from a creative standpoint, so I started looking for something new to get into. Now, I wasn’t a huge manga nut at that point. I was still reading some manga, but not a lot, and here was this job at Viz, I knew a few people there, and I ended up going to work there initially as the Marketing Director, ultimately as the Sales and Marketing Director

Ed: Did you grow up in the Bay Area?

Dallas: Um , I grew up, yea, I’ve always lived in Northern California until the last couple of years, I live in LA now. Ah, I grew up in a town called Monterey.

Ed: Yea, right.

Dallas: Ok, I just didn’t know if you’re familiar with the area

Ed: I was born in San Francisco, so…

Dallas: Oh, Ok *laughs* Yea, I grew up in Monterey, went to school at UNC Berkley

Ed: Ok! I went there too

Dallas: Worked in Sacramento, worked back in San Francisco when working for Viz, so it’s, it’s, I’ve been in Northern California for most of my life

Ed: Ok

Dallas: I was very, very fortunate. I came into Viz as manga was exploding, and I suddenly had this great opportunity working there, I had this huge library of manga to read, and I pretty much read just about every book that Viz published over the course of about a year, and it was fantastic, it was so much fun.

Ed: Yea. Ah, going on that and how when you got to Viz, manga was starting really to make an explosion, did you personally foresee that type of a BOOM coming up, ah, for manga, ah, you know, especially when at least comics in general were kind of going through a funky little, little, little period themselves, so, for the most part, at least when I was in San Francisco at the time, I would have to go get my, my manga at Comics Relief (?). Or, I’d, you know, if not, I’d have to go to Kinokuniya. But hardly any other place outside of maybe the Virgin Megastore had manga.

Dallas: Right

Ed: Did you, did you at Viz at the time expect that things would just…

Dallas: No, no I really don’t think so. What happened was, you know, Viz of course has been doing manga for about

Ed: Twenty years

Dallas: Twenty years, right. So, at the time Viz was still very much focused on the 32-page pamphlet comics going into the comic shops.

Ed: Right

Dallas: What happened, ah, with Pokemon and Sailor Moon coming into the picture was all of a sudden we discovered there was a market in the book stores. And, this, it was unexpected, we didn’t realize that that market was there. And so what we had to do was where a lot of our sales efforts had been driven towards the comic shops, we suddenly found there was this explosive growth in the book stores market, and all of a sudden we needed to shift gears and start dealing directly with the bookstores as frequently as we could. what I was able to do, because I wasn’t, my background was no sales at that time, yet here I ended up in charge of sales for, for Viz. So, it was a great experience for me, because what I was able to do was to learn everything I could about manga, about how books are sold in bookstores, what works, what doesn’t. And do this at a time when the, the sales market was very forgiving to manga. What I mean to say is, I could make mistakes, but they wouldn’t really cost me that much, because our sales were doubling, tripling like every year for a couple of years there. it’s a great way, it’s a great way to learn about selling books, in a situation where everybody wants what you’re selling *chuckles*

Ed: Ah, yea. And then, what, how did, how did working for Viz end up finding your, well, working for Del Rey?

Dallas: Well, basically, in, ah, January of 03, Viz was expanding, I was really looking at my career and what I was doing, and, you know, really it was just time for me to move on, it was time for me to try something else. There were a lot of things going on in my life at the time, some of them, some of them personal.

Ed: Right

Dallas: So I actually left Viz and I started doing just freelance work. And it was a lot of fun there for a little while there, I was doing some writing, I, ah, did some sales work with Oni and Slave Labor,

Ed: Ok

Dallas: A few other small publishers. And, in the few months after doing all this, I went to E3,

Ed: Uh huh

Dallas: and I happened to run into somebody from Del Rey, and we started talking.

Ed: The science fiction department?

Dallas: Yea, the science fiction department. And it just simply turned out to be excellent timing because here I was, I won’t say at loose ends, but I really was still trying to figure out what, what I wanted to do for my next step, and right at that time, Kodansha and Random House had formed a relationship. They were preparing to launch their manga line the following year, and they needed somebody with experience with manga. They’d spoken with quite a few people with experience in comics, but they hadn’t actually managed to find anybody who had worked at a big manga company. So, it was a great fit. It was such a great opportunity for me, and I was able to come and give them knowledge they didn’t have before.

Ed: Well, do you, do you know exactly, was it just the partnership with Kodansha that ended up leading Del Rey to explore manga, or were they actually, do you know if they were actually working on that?

Dallas: What Del Rey was doing, and I think you’ve seen a lot of the major New York publishers doing this now, what Del Rey was doing was watching the explosion of manga, and seeing, it was also an explosion of interesting graphic novels in general

Ed: Right, right

Dallas: And they were starting to look at actually creating graphic novels based on some of their science fiction and fantasy books

Ed: Right, I remember you guys mentioning that at the first San Diego Comic Con

Dallas: Yea, yea. But that was probably as far as it had gone. They were very open to the idea of doing graphic novels, but I’ll tell you, licensing from the Japanese? Is something that you learn how to do from experience, it’s not something you can walk into blind, you really have to have some idea of what you’re doing. And, they were a little unsure about how they would do something like that. Well, right in the middle of that, January 2003, the announcement was made, Kodansha and Random House would have a cross-publishing program that would be a larger joint venture between the companies, that would be the formation of Random House-Kodansha, a separate company in Japan, and then that was timed with them looking at graphic novels and seeing what they could do, and it really, it was just putting two and two together, and

Ed: Perfect timing

Dallas: It was just perfect timing, yea.

Ed: let’s see…you guys have gained a real lot of readers over the years. I mean, it’s only been two years, really, since you got started

Dallas: Yea, yea, April, May, May of ‘04

Ed: Yea

Dallas: Is when we started, so we’re coming up on our two year anniversary

Ed: If you look at the Bookscan charts, titles like Tsubasa

Dallas: Sure

Ed: xxxHolic, some other titles, Wallflower was on ICV2’s Top Twenty, property lists, and you’ve earned a lot of respect from fans and the industry. Now, is that something Del Rey really foresaw when they were originally, you know, working on this project? I mean, did they imagine that you guys would all of a sudden be the top new publisher for manga and…

Dallas: Well, do you know, it’s interesting. When Del Rey hired me to come in and in essence be their in-house manga expert, it was because they didn’t have anybody who knew that much about manga. So, even though I kept telling them that things like Tsubasa and Negima, you know, that these were going to have huge print runs, and, and, and they were doing to do great, they didn’t understand that, they didn’t believe it. In those first few months after we published those books, we had to go back to the press on them three or four times, because they were very conservative. For Random House, it was a very new category, they don’t really know me, I come in saying it’s going to be X thousand copies, and, and they’re like yea right, sure.

Ed: *laughs*

Dallas: Well, what happened of course is that the books came out, they sold out, and we went back to press, each time they would do a small run. And then we’d go back and do another small run, another small run, and now they finally understand the potential of the sales so we don’t go back to the press quite as frequently as we used to.

Ed: Wow, I see. That’s really interesting. Now, what did Kodansha think about you guys, I mean, were they expecting that you guys would make short print runs and hardly much of a dent on the industry?

Dallas: No, but then I don’t know that Kodansha came into it, I really couldn’t speak to what sort of expectations Kodansha had for us. I can say to you that about six months into it they looked at our sales on Tsubasa, they looked, in fact, even at our initial print run, I’m talking like it was small, and they told us that it was in fact twice the level that they had seen from any other publisher they had worked with in the United States

Ed: Oh, really?

Dallas: So, I mean, Random House has a very, very strong, established sales force, into a lot of accounts that a lot of smaller publishers probably don’t have easy access to. And so this enables us, I think, to reach more customers.

Ed: Uh huh.

Dallas: And, you know, at the end of the day, hopefully sell more books

Ed: Yea! Ok, this is, this is one of my questions right there. one of the things that I really enjoy about Del Rey is, something that I see, is that they have a real lot of diversity in the lineup. You’ve got titles like Genshiken, Nodame Cantibile, you’ve got Sugar, Sugar Rune

Dallas: Sure

Ed: You have, just across the board, there are titles practically for almost everyone, you know, outside of maybe BL titles

Dallas: Sure

Ed: You guys have a gambit. Now, is this done on purpose by, well, I mean since you’re, you’re like the manga guy

Dallas: *laughs*

Ed: Were you really thinking of making a really wide, ah…

Dallas: Well, listen…at, at..

Ed: I mean, I know that it’s not that big of a library

Dallas: No, you’re right. I mean, I, I think at last count, as of the end of this summer, I think we’ll be up to twenty four series that we’ll have. We have thirty seven books released in 2005, and we’ll probably have about 75-80 in 2006. when it comes to picking titles, make no mistake, as much as I love manga, my very first question is how well is will it sell?

Ed: Absolutely

Dallas: That has to be the core of it. So that makes it very simple to make decisions about things like Tsubasa and Negima, School Rumble, Air Gear, these are no brainers, these are the ones that we know are going to, are going to do well.

Ed: But then on the other side you have Eternal Sabbath. Or you have a Basilisk

Dallas: Right

Ed: Or a Nodame Cantibile. All of these are excellent titles, award winning titles in Japan, you know, did you think that these titles would actually do well here?

Dallas: Well, most of them have done pretty well for us. I mean, Nodame has done pretty decently for us, Sugar Sugar Rune is doing decently, although I expect a pretty big push on that when the anime eventually comes out because I think that’s just a spectacular art. my personal philosophy when it comes to acquiring manga, once you get past that first and most important question of, you know, how many can we sell here, is, I have to publish for a wide audience, I have to. If I publish entirely in that kind of shounen/shoujo category for teenagers of just fantasy stories, just fantasy-drama stories, and make no mistake, we do a lot of those! I mean, when you look at our list, we do have a diverse list, but it is dominated by things like Gatcha Gatcha, Pastel, excellent books, but ones that tend to fall into the more typical manga mold. But having said that, I feel a responsibility to experiment, I really do. I feel a responsibility to take series from a wide variety of sources and release them in the United States. Nodame of course is a josei series, it’s for young women. It is so successful in Japan that sales of Beethoven CDs have gone up since that series came out. can we achieve that level of success in the United States? No, we can’t, because that’s selling half a million copies a volume. Should we nevertheless bring it out for these readers who are getting older, who might be looking for something a little more sophisticated? Absolutely, I think we should!

Ed: Same thing, I mean, I think it’s just so great to have, ah, a place to really turn to to get a title like maybe Nodame, or maybe A Perfect Day For Love Letters.

Dallas: Sure, sure

Ed: Excellent titles

Dallas: It really was

Ed: And it’s one of these little, just, titles that just goes under the radar for a lot of people, and obviously it’s for sophisticated readers in a sense.

Dallas: Well, there’s a reason I used the term sophisticated, I’ve been using it a lot more lately. If I were to say the book was more mature, then the assumption that people would make was that it would have nudity or violence.

Ed: Right

Dallas: And a book like A Perfect Day For Love Letters is more mature, but it doesn’t have any nudity or violence, it’s perfectly appropriate for kids who are thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, but, like I said, I describe it as more sophisticated, because I think there is, it’s a little more literate than some of the manga that’s targeted at a younger age.

Ed: Now, this is another question that I had. We know that Del Rey is going to have a different price on trim for titles like Suzuka and Basilisk

Dallas: Basilisk, that’s right.

Ed: Now, I was wondering, I mean, is that just specifically because those are M titles, or could there some day from Del Rey be like a, like an imprint where sophisticated titles are just, all sophisticated titles, kind of like the Signature line from Viz

Dallas: I don’t, I don’t

Ed: Or is it just that once you start calling titles mature, then…

Dallas: Right, right

Ed: You could kind of scare some people off

Dallas: Well, and the Basilisk and Suzuka, they’re both labeled mature, they are.

Ed: It would be interesting, at least from an older reader, I’m twenty eight now, I mean, I really wouldn’t mind paying two bucks more for [can’t make out]

Dallas: Sure

Ed: Or two bucks more for, if A Perfect Day For Love Letters came out, you know, at the end of this year, of course it started last year, same thing

Dallas: Sure

Ed: Just because there are no support attached to it, sophisticated or mature.

Dallas:We tend to be…I think that we at Del Rey, we tend to be more conservative than most publishers in terms of our ratings. We tend to be very, very careful about how we rate the books. Now, something like Basilisk is a series that is exceptionally violent, it has nudity, and there’s sexuality in it. This is a book that is clearly for adults. Now, there was a lot of discussion internally about if that was something we should publish at all, because of that mature content. My feeling is that our responsibility it to present the book in such a way to make it clear that it is not for kids. That it is clearly different from the rest of our manga line, and that it is intended for older readers. So, what we came up with is larger trim size, shrinkwrap, increase of the price, different treatment of the cover, the Basilisk cover is foil enhanced, it just looks gorgeous, it’s going to be a really nice looking cover. but I stop short of saying that we would start a line of those books, because it’s not my goal to go out and find a whole bunch of books that I need to label mature. My goal is to find books that I want to publish in the United States. If I have a book like Basilisk, or later on this year Suzuka, which is more of a high school drama but has a lot of nudity, it has a lot of nudity, and that would be a problem, [something] and R-rated film. do I, do I set up a line of those books and then go out and look for books that meet those criteria, or do I do what I do, which is I go out and I find books that I think are good books, that I think we can sell, that I think people would like to read. And the ones that have mature content, this is simply how I have to package them to be a mature publisher. That’s the way it works for me. Now, of course I’m not publishing the same number of books that a Viz is.

Ed: Right

Dallas: Viz is publishing four or five hundred books a year, and it’s much easier for them to set up a line like that. I love Viz’s Signature line, I mean, I’m really happy that they’re doing a lot of those books.

Ed: Ok, now what is, what is the biggest challenge for Del Rey with manga right now? Is it ratings, is it distribution, I know there was a question yesterday in regards to Diamond, and actually I’ve noticed that as a comic book buyer myself, that they sometimes have a problem getting books on time for some reason in comic book shops

Dallas: Now, that was a bit of a surprise to me, actually, and now I want to look into that, and after this show I’m going to look into that, but when he, when the person in the audience asked me that question, that was actually the first time, I mean, I think I was asked that once before about a year ago. I looked into it, didn’t find any problems, this is the second time I’ve been asked in the past year, I definitely want to look into it. Well, all I’m saying is that I want to look into it. As far as I know it’s not widespread. But I want to look into it. So, the biggest issue facing Del Rey…

Ed: And another thing that was brought up was Gatcha Gatcha, how that title

Dallas: Sure

Ed: How that title makes a transition when the first arc is over and it moves on to the next…

Dallas: Yea, that’s exactly right. The first, the first five volumes tell one story arc with one set of characters, the next, I don’t know if it’s five because it’s ongoing, the next set of volumes tells a new story arc, and in that transition between five and six we go from some partial nudity that really isn’t a problem to, to full nudity, um which for us is. I mean, that’s something we then have to consider marketing as a mature title. So that is certainly an issue for us, we have to be very careful about that.

Ed: The reason I ask is that age restrictions and ratings have been a topic that has come up quite a bit here in New York.

Dallas: Sure, sure

Ed: So, I was wondering if that was something that you guys, I mean, you already mentioned it before

Dallas: Well, listen. The fact is that we’re so sensitive about it that it took a long time to figure out if and how we’d publish Basilisk, for example. take another couple of mature titles that are out there, Battle Royale and Berserk. For some reason they all start with B, but there you go.

Ed: *laughs*

Dallas: They’re labeled mature, they have explicit content in them, and they’re not carried in Barnes and Noble for that reason. We worked very, very closely with the Barnes and Noble buyer to try to give him a package that he would feel comfortable putting in his store, and Basilisk is, I think it’s going to be the first mature title to go in to Barnes and Noble.

Ed: Wow!

Dallas: So, so, we’re very sensitive to it, but, you know, the fact of the matter is, and I think certainly all manga publishers can say this, is that we encounter these problems, these issues, there are oftentimes a way we can actually turn them into an advantage, you know? Mature titles are difficult to sell to certain stores. Well, that’s OK, because if we find a way to treat them that makes it clear that they’re mature, and makes it more difficult for younger kids to get their hands on them, then we can open up a new venue for sales for these types of stories.

Ed: now looking at a little bit of the future, one of the things that was being discussed, actually right when we were starting this interview, was, digital forms of distribution

Dallas: Sure

Ed: Emanga, ecomics

Dallas: Right

Ed: I know that Del Rey now is putting up a page a day,

Dallas: Right

Ed: Per month, for a lot of their titles

Dallas: That’s right, for our new titles we’re putting up a thirty page preview.

Ed: Is Del Rey maybe thinking at all about, maybe the Sony eReader in the future? I mean, those things are pretty, you know, far out, but…

Dallas: Yea, yea…well, the simple answer to that question is yes, we are thinking about that. as somebody who has a pretty immense library of manga at home, the thought of being able to keep it all on a hard drive and put twenty books on an eReader and take it on the plane with me is pretty, is really, really appealing.

Ed: Yea

Dallas: Now, when Sony launched the eReader in Japan, under the name Librie, they made it only able to use a proprietary format, and as a result it actually didn’t do very well there. The Sony eReader in America when it launches this spring, is not just one particular proprietary format. It’ll take PDFs, it’ll take Word files, it’ll take a lot of different stuff. Having said that, I mean, I can imagine a future in which a device like the eReader becomes as prevalent for books as the iPod is for music, I really can see that, but I don’t see it happening quickly.

Ed: That’s right

Dallas: I don’t see it happening quickly. So, we have our eye on digital content, no question, in all honesty those kind of discussions happen company-wide for Random House, which is a group of, I don’t know, fifty or sixty different publishers, and for that matter, those discussions happen at Kodansha a lot. My personal feeling is that it’s going to become a big part of our future.

Ed: This is a question that goes back to the fact that I’ve been going to, seeing you guys at cons for quite a while.

Dallas: Sure

Ed: I know you guys have mentioned that the very first San Diego Comic Con

Dallas: Oh god…

Ed: That you guys were at

Dallas: *laughs*

Ed: That you guys were working on novels. I know that was brought up at the panel yesterday.

Dallas: Right.

Ed: Was there a reason for the holdup after your almost two years now, or was it a difficulty gauging out that novels would work? I know that Battle Royale was already released by that time from Viz

Dallas: Right

Ed: And Vertigo was coming online at that time, but it took almost a whole year to do their thing, and now…

Dallas: The thing you have to understand about New York publishing, the New York publishers make their acquisition decisions as far as two years in advance

Ed: Oh, really? Wow, Ok…

Dallas: So, where another publisher might say acquire a manga, let’s just imagine here that Viz acquired a manga today, this is February. It’s conceivable for them to have that manga out in July. I don’t know if they still work that fast, they did when I was there. I’ve actually pretty much finished all my acquisitions for 2006, and I’m now working on 2007 and 2008. So, ah, that was probably my mistake in…I don’t want to get into a situation where I announce something too far in advance, but at this point we have been working on the novels thing for a while now, we’re very close to closing our first deal. I mean, literally, within like two weeks we’ll be making an announcement on that.

Ed: Now, will that fall underneath Del Rey’s…novels?

Dallas: Novel or manga, I don’t know, we haven’t figured that out yet.

Ed: Ok

Dallas: That’s a really good question

Ed: Actually, in the same vein, are you going to be releasing a lot of sci-fi, fantasy, horror, kind of like Del Rey novels, or are you guys going to have a broad library, kind of like the manga?

Dallas: Well, I think that you’ll see from the way we launched the manga program, we started with a core group of four titles that we were very confident in, and the success of those titles pretty much immediately propelled us to a major space, a major point in the manga industry. I mean, we were taken very, very seriously, virtually overnight.

Ed: Yea, yea

Dallas: It was really, really great.

Ed: Once fans knew that you guys had Negima, I mean, that was…huge

Dallas: Yea, yea. Well, with novels, it’s like we’re going to do the same thing. We’re going to pick up a few, we’ll see how they do, if they’re successful, we’ll expand. We have to think of this business in terms of five and ten years from now. this is not about who is publishing the most novels in 2006 or 2007, this is about creating a category that can sustain itself and survive and expand over the course of the coming years. And that, that’s really our goal, and we like to take those kind of things gradually.

Ed: Ok. Well, one final question, as I started this interview at least for Anime on DVD and for my own podcast, I’m very happy to say that we consider you guys the very best of 2005.

Dallas: I know, and I really appreciate that. Thank you very much.

Ed: *laughs* Well, and I just wanted to ask what could we expect from Del Rey in 2006, and why are you guys going to be the best at the end of the year?

Dallas: Well, I’m very, very pleased to report that a lot of the things that we do that I believe helped us to win that award, to win that recommendation, I still don’t see a lot of the other publishers doing it. For example, I personally believe it’s absolutely essential to translate the sound effects. If they’re not translated, then I find the manga can be incomprehensible. You can see a noise, and it just doesn’t make any sense in context, if it’s not translated. I think it’s a very bad idea to convert the sound effect into English, you know, physically, artistically on the page, because kanji, hiragana, the different kana from Japan, they’re an art form in and of themselves, and when you delete that, I don’t think it’s that far different from deleting a piece of art the artist has drawn and redrawing it for them. So, we subtitle, very few people are doing that at this point, we still have the big translation note section in the back, I know a lot of people have been very happy about that, we’re continuing to do that. I have seen a lot of people have started copying us on that, which I’m actually happy about, reading the manga myself. I think what you can look for from Del Rey in 2006 is, we have a number of new books coming, you mentioned one yourself.

Ed: Yes

Dallas: I’ve read the first volume, really good book.

Ed: Kurogane is a good title, too

Dallas: Kurogane, wonderful title, really quirky, really unusual, but Kei Toume is a fantastic artist, really good story

Ed: I love his, ah, his title from Tokyopop

Dallas: Yea, Lament of the Lamb. Yea, yea. He’s got a number of other titles with, with Kodansha that we want to look at for next year, too. Q-Ko-chan by Hajime Ueda, FLCL, ah we really, the relationship with Kodansha means we have access to some really excellent manga. We’re just going to keep doing the best we can on them, we love to listen to the fans, you know, when we’re doing something right, we love to get the praise, definitely, when we’re doing something wrong, I love to hear that, too. Because we really do try to listen and take it into account. 2007 will see the debut of our first novel, I’m very confident about that, and I guess that’s it! I mean, really, it’s not like, it’s not like we can revolutionize the business. When we came in, we had, we had to establish our own identity. We had to come in and establish who we are in a market that already had very, very strong identities from the Viz, Tokyopop, Dark Horse, and the rest of the manga publishers. By putting all those extras into the book, and listening to the fans as much as we could, that, that was the identity we were trying to achieve, so far I think we have succeeded in that.

Ed: Very, very successful

Dallas: And we just want to keep doing that. We just, we just want to keep doing right what we’re doing right, and fix anything we find we’re doing wrong.

Ed: *laughs* Well, thank you for doing all that, and thank you for joining us here today at New York Comic Con.

Dallas: My pleasure

Ed: Hope to see you next year!