Peggy Burns, Associate Publisher at Drawn & Quarterly, was not able to participate in this roundtable…but she did graciously agree to let me reproduce an edited version of the email she sent me when she declined. It’s below.
Hi Noah,
Thank you for the invitation but I do not think I would have much to contribute. We have had a lot of success with gekiga, but I sincerely think that the reason why someone like Tatsumi made the cover of the Paris Review, NY Times Arts section and on the NYT graphic novel bestseller list is because we promote him as one of our D+Q cartoonists, and because we publish books for adults, there is no added marketing necessary to get this point across to stores or readers.
While I wish mainstream manga sites the best, I feel no need to convince them to write about us, if they do not already.
Best,
Peggy
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The whole Komikusu roundtable is here.
This is interesting to hear– and not too surprising :) I think the takeaway for other publisher’s from D&Q’s Tatsumi success is four-fold:
1) Be smart and go after non-traditional grants to publish important manga, like the Japan Foundation, etc.
2) Production is important– getting Tomine to edit the books was smart, but getting him to LETTER them was genius.
3) Weave a story and imbue the works with cultural significance. D&Q excelled here, arguably making Tatsumi better known among the contemporary comics-reading public in N. America than he is in his home country.
and finally:
4) License really fucking good comics. EVERYTHING above (marketing, indie cred, etc) falls down if the work isn’t worthy, and Tatsumi is a genius of international comics so… THERE WE GO!
I’m curious to hear how their other books are going– Red Snow seemed like an easy sell to the D&Q crowd (and an utterly fantastic set of small stories) but I wonder about Box Man’s sales…
Is their “normal” promotion approach the reason why they’re printed from left to right, just in case it might alienate “adult” readers?
I can’t answer for sure of course…but it makes sense that they’d be following Brigid’s line of thinking and figuring that an uninitiated audience would rather have the art flipped.
Noah,
I realize this is very nit-picky, but to me it’s important to make the distinction- most of their books are cut up and reassembled, not flipped.
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