Curated playlist
Manga distributors
- Dark Horse ComicsDark Horse Comics was founded in Milwaukie, Oregon, in 1986, and it began not with investors or a corporate mandate but with the proceeds from a chain of Portland comic book shops called Pegasus Books. Mike Richardson had built that retail…
- ShogakukanJapanese publishing company
- KodanshaKodansha, the largest publisher in Japan, began not as a publishing house but as a spin-off of a public speaking society. Seiji Noma founded the company in 1909, growing it from the Dai-Nippon Yubenkai, which translates roughly as the…
- Kadokawa ShotenJapanese publishing company
- Viz MediaViz Media commands nearly a quarter of the graphic novel market in the United States, yet the company traces back to a single man from Tokushima Prefecture who moved to California in 1975 with no particular plan to change American reading…
- HakusenshaHakusensha is a Japanese publishing company headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo, and it was born out of one of Japan's most powerful media empires. On the 1st of December 1973, the parent company Shueisha formally established it as a dedicated…
- Central Park MediaCentral Park Media Corporation got its name from a corner. The company's offices sat at 250 West 57th Street in Midtown Manhattan, right on the edge of Central Park, and that geographic accident shaped everything about how it presented…
- Studio ProteusStudio Proteus was a company born from a single conviction: that Japanese comics belonged in American hands. Toren Smith founded it in San Francisco in 1986, after years of watching an art form he loved remain invisible to most readers in…
- TokyopopTokyopop arrived in 1997 with a bold claim: that American teenagers, and especially teenage girls, were hungry for Japanese comics. Almost nobody in entertainment believed that. The prevailing wisdom among executives was that girls simply…
- Glénat ÉditionsGlénat Éditions began not in a boardroom but in the imagination of a student named Jacques Glénat, who in 1969 launched a comics fanzine called Schtroumpf, borrowing the French-language title of the series that would later become The…