Studio Proteus

• 1. Introduction

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  Studio 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 his country. He had tried the polite route first, approaching publishers in America. That failed. So he moved to Japan. What followed was nearly two decades of negotiation, persuasion, and production that would reshape the landscape of comics publishing in the United States. The questions worth asking are not just how he did it, but what it cost him, what he got right before anyone else did, and why he eventually walked away from the thing he built.

• 2. The Road to Japan

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  James D. Hudnall was the one who first introduced Toren Smith to anime and manga, back in 1982. Smith was already working in comics at the time, writing stories for Marvel's Epic magazine and for Eclipse Comics. He became convinced there was a real market for Japanese comics in America, and he and Hudnall brought that idea directly to Eclipse with a proposal that included acquiring rights to Akira. The Japanese publishers were difficult to deal with at a distance, and the attempt collapsed. Smith concluded that the only workable solution was to go to Japan and build relationships in person.

  Before he made that move, a connection arrived through manga expert Frederik Schodt, who introduced Smith to Seiji Horibuchi. Horibuchi was then laying the groundwork for what would become Viz Media, and Schodt believed Smith's knowledge of the American comics industry paired well with Horibuchi's ties to Japanese publishing giant Shogakukan. Smith and Horibuchi worked together for roughly a year on starting Viz, but a falling-out ended the partnership. Smith then founded Studio Proteus as his own vehicle. He still co-translated several titles for Viz, including Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, which Hayao Miyazaki personally requested he work on.

• 3. The Packager Model

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  In 1986, Smith moved to Japan with arrangements already in place with Eclipse Comics to provide publishing support. He designed Studio Proteus around a specific business structure he called a "packager": the company would handle everything up to the printed page and hand it to an existing publisher to sell. That meant choosing titles, negotiating contracts with Japanese licensors, and producing finished translations and lettering. The publisher's job was advertising, distribution, and handling the money.

  Smith preferred to work on a profit-sharing basis rather than a flat fee, believing shared stakes produced better work on both sides. He also insisted on shared ownership of the derivative copyright in the translations. That insistence, which might have seemed like stubbornness at the time, turned out to be the decision that saved the company. Within a few months of his first Japan trip, Studio Proteus was working with Eclipse. By 1988, when Eclipse ran out of room for more manga, Smith went to the San Diego Comic-Con and licensed Johji Manabe's Outlanders to the then-new Dark Horse Comics.

  He couldn't make the initial sale, though. That evening he had dinner with fantasy writer Raymond E. Feist, who offered the advice Smith later described as the most valuable of his career: "Don't tell them how good it is; tell them how much money they are going to make." The next day, Smith sold Outlanders to Dark Horse and Yuzo Takada's 3x3 Eyes to Innovation Publishing.

• 4. A Standard of Quality

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  From the start, Smith ran Studio Proteus by a set of principles his competitors did not share. He refused to work from photocopies of published books, insisting on shooting directly from original art. The techniques for handling sound effects in translation were developed by award-winning letterer Thomas Orzechowski and later refined by manga artist Tomoko Saito. Every translator on staff had more than a decade of experience and had published books, articles, and fiction beyond their translation work.

  Pay rates for Studio Proteus letterers and translators were the highest in the industry. They also received royalties, a practice no other company in the field offered at the time. In some cases, original cover art was commissioned directly from the manga artists themselves. Smith picked every title personally, and if a publisher rejected his choice, he offered it to another. If all of them passed, he dropped it. His instincts were nearly always correct, even when they ran against conventional thinking. In 1994, he persuaded Dark Horse to publish Oh My Goddess!, a title the publisher had so little confidence in that Smith had to personally guarantee them against losses. It became one of Dark Horse's bestselling manga titles for years, and along with Ranma 1/2, it was among the first translated manga to draw a large female readership.

• 5. Crashes, Recovery, Survival

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  The early years of manga publishing in America were unexpectedly strong, driven partly by the popularity of black-and-white comics in the direct sales market and by Marvel's bestselling colorized edition of Akira. That boom ended abruptly when the black-and-white market imploded in 1988. Most manga genres that had been flourishing found themselves cut from publisher schedules; only titles that appealed to the core comic-shop audience survived. It would not be until the early twenty-first century that manga would again cover as wide a range of subjects as it had in those first years.

  A second blow came with the crash of the direct sales market in the mid-1990s. By the time that shakeout was over, only one distributor remained, Diamond Distributors, and more than half of the comic stores in America had closed. Nearly a third of all manga titles were canceled. Studio Proteus responded by tightening its production process and working with smaller bookstore distributors for whom manga represented a meaningful share of sales.

  Then in 1994, Eclipse Comics failed to pay the profit-share money it owed. Because Smith had insisted on shared translation rights from the beginning, Studio Proteus was able to legally acquire all the shared rights and production materials from their co-published titles. Those were re-licensed to Dark Horse, which immediately became the second-largest manga publisher in America. When Eclipse then declared bankruptcy, Smith paid all outstanding royalties owed to his Japanese licensors out of Studio Proteus's own funds.

• 6. The Flipping Controversy

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  For most of its existence, Studio Proteus published manga in the "flopped" format: pages mirrored so they read left to right, matching the convention of American comics. By 2002, that choice had become a flashpoint. Hardcore manga fans increasingly wanted titles published "unflopped," reading right to left as in the original Japanese. Smith had defended flopped manga publicly and vocally, arguing that readers would struggle to adapt to reading in the opposite direction.

  By late 2002, he acknowledged he had been wrong. A generation of readers had grown up with manga since Studio Proteus began, and they did not share the assumptions of readers who had come to manga from American comics. But Smith noted that as long as distributors were reluctant to carry unflopped titles, the market reality was not going to shift on its own.

  The shift came from an unexpected direction. Kurt Hassler of Borders convinced Waldenbooks to commit to stocking large quantities of unflopped manga, including placing titles in dump bins near cash registers. ICV2 later called Hassler "The Most Powerful Person in Manga." Smith publicly agreed with that designation and added that he considered Hassler "the most important person in the history of American manga." The resulting success of small, unflopped paperbacks priced around $9.99 more than doubled the size of established publishers like Viz and elevated Tokyopop to prominence. It also ended Super Manga Blast, the Dark Horse/Studio Proteus anthology magazine, and left most of the series that had run in it without graphic-novel continuations, including Club 9, which had already been completed.

• 7. The Sale and the Reckoning

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  In February 2004, Dark Horse Comics announced it had purchased the publication rights to Studio Proteus translations. Smith stayed on as an adviser and translator for selected titles, but by 2006 he had left entirely. In a 2004 interview with The Comics Journal, he explained why: "I was burning out. Over 15 years I had put out 70,000 pages of manga. I had no life."

  He watched the industry transform into something different from what he had built. Publishers such as Del Rey and DC entered the manga market. Japanese companies such as Shogakukan began treating their American operations as serious businesses rather than sidelines. "I'm just a manga fan who started my company because no one else was," he wrote on the Studio Proteus website. "To move ahead now would require me to become more of a corporate type, and I know that's not for me."

  He also made predictions. He compared the manga boom of the 2000s to the crashes he had lived through in the 1980s and 1990s and said a bust would follow. Tokyopop cut its releases by over 40 percent in June 2008 and laid off 36 employees, then 15 more in December of that year. Viz cut 60 personnel. DC shut down its CMX manga imprint. Tokyopop shuttered its U.S. publishing operations entirely in May 2011. Smith had also predicted the market would stabilize and not disappear completely. The last manga produced by Studio Proteus staff in the flopped, left-to-right American format was Blade of the Immortal issue 131, published in November 2007, making it the longest-running manga ever released in that format.

• 8. Awards and Legacy

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  Studio Proteus accumulated a substantial list of honors despite never becoming one of the largest publishers by volume. Blade of the Immortal won the Will Eisner Comics Industry Award in 2000. Lone Wolf and Cub won the Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of Foreign Material in 2001 and collected Harvey Awards in 2001, 2002, and 2003. Akira won dual Eisner Awards in 2002, for Best Archival Collection and Best U.S. Edition of Foreign Material. What's Michael? received a New York Library Book Award in 1991 and a Parent's Choice Award in 1997. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind received Harvey Award nominations as early as 1990.

  Smith expressed regret in his later years that the flopped-versus-unflopped debate had come to define how people remembered the final stretch of his career. He felt it obscured the longer arc: two decades of promoting and publishing quality manga at a time when most of the American industry had no idea it existed. His first publication under the Studio Proteus banner was The Legend of Kamui in 1987; Ghost in the Shell, published in 1995, earned a Harvey Award nomination the following year and became one of the most recognized titles in the company's catalog.