Sean Collins has brought up an interesting idea... While it seems almost a no-brainer that the big 2 should be packaging certain comics in digest size to take advantage of the manga market , at least where the content matches up to the demographic, what about other publishers? Oni is doing this, as are Antarctic, SLG (i think), and others... But what about, say .. Fantagraphics?

Sean:Honestly, this is something that even altcomix publishers could learn from. I'd certainly be interested to see how some old Love & Rockets stuff, particularly Jaime's, would do in manga format; I'd imagine quite well. Blankets is a great fit as well; it may be tough to shoehorn that book into a digest without splitting it up, but could trade dress be experimented with in an attempt to catch the eye of shoujo fans? Hell, even Jim Woodring's Frank stuff might find an interesting new, young audience if repackaged appropriately. I don't want to get carried away here, but there are many possibilities. And from a publisher's viewpoint, I'd think they were both intelligent and enticing.


I know for a company like fanta with limited means, it's kind of hard to turn around and immediately consider doing a new line of reformatted books.. But man! think about it- a line of digest sized Locas books! I really believe that would find an incredible reader base.. The content is not any more risque than half the shojo manga out there, and it's actually very similar in terms of content and characters.. Plus there's a LOT of material to pull books from.. It wouldn't be a definitive archival format like the new Palomar book- it'd be almost the exact opposite, but I can only imagine fanta finding thousands of new readers from across the age spectrum getting hooked on the various episodic stories of Maggie, Hopey and the gang.  ¶ 4:31 PM