Tuesday marked the second day of AsiaPop!, a week-long event featuring on-campus activities. One of the guest speakers was Ben Applegate who is an editor, translator, and a publishing professional for Penguin Random House. He has been specializing in English Mangas since 2007.
During his presentation, Applegate attributes his translating abilities to his time in Japan.
“I didn’t always know I would be working in manga,” Applegate said. “And I took kind of a circular path to it. I started studying Japanese in undergrad. I got to go on a sister-city exchange program after I found a flier in the library. It changed the course of my life. Junior year in college I got the wonderful opportunity to study abroad in Kyoto, where I stayed with a host family. That was one of the most important things that I have ever did to increase my Japanese ability.”
Along with going through the history of mangas, Applegate went more into how rising artists could get a job in the manga field. Many rising artists submit their ideas to contests and editors. If the idea is popular enough, it can be written into a magazine or a manga. An example of this that Applegate used is the widely popular manga and anime series “Attack on Titian,” which made its debut in a Shonen magazine.
“[When looking at the cover], you might notice something,” Applegate said. “[Attack on Titian], isn’t on there. This is because they didn’t know “Attack on Titian” was going to be the breakout hit.”
Applegate reminded the attendees that no one ever knows what will actually be successful.
“I had come onboard to that series [Attack on Titian], and working on volume two,” Applegate said. “And it was not doing well. We were actually thinking that maybe we should decrease the frequency of publication, just because no one is buying “Attack on Titan.” The anime hit, and four to six weeks after the anime was up online, I was up in Boston, and I was already seeing anime cosplayers for the series and that was when I knew that it was going to be big.”
Applegate attributed the rise of manga sales to the streaming service Crunchyroll. According to him, manga sales had been down for quite a while, but due to the rise in anime adaptations, the mangas have been selling off the shelves.,
“We were printing 10,000 copies of the first volume and it would sell out within a week. And then we were like maybe we could print 20 [thousand]. Maybe we could even print 50,000?”
He also discussed how anime soon became a priority for streaming services such as Hulu and Netflix, following the sudden rise in popularity, especially in the U.S.
“Manga saw a 70% rise in sales every year around this period,”Applegate said.
Applegate also contributes this success to the coronavirus. “Everyone being locked inside lead to a huge influx in new fans and existing fans increasing their consumption of anime in streaming. Manga sales grew 398%.”
He went further into new competition seen in recent years. Platforms like Webtoon, Tapas and Legend are all competing markets going against traditional mangas and animes. To adapt to these new models, manga publishers are trying to start their own platforms like Webtoon, but that could be in the far future.
He ended his presentation by saying, “I am so overjoyed to see more and more of [media and fandom], in recent years.”
Kya Timmins, an artist, who is interested in comics and graphic novels spoke about what she thought of the event.
“I learned a lot of things I didn’t know about different cultures and how their mangas are compared to American graphic novels. It was interesting to see how [mangas] can be seen digitally and through print,” Timmins said
The event concluded with a display of mangas and magazines featuring popular animes, and Applegate encouraging eventgoers to even take them, “I’m not going home with any of this stuff.”
Andrea Roberts can be reached at [email protected]