Kodansha Enters into US Manga Market
Been meaning to report about this for a few days now, but it kept getting pushed on the back-burner. Well a bit of news that has been rumored for awhile now has been officially confirmed. Japanese manga publisher Kodansha will be starting their own manga licensing division for the American market. Now Kodansha is a pretty big manga publisher in Japan & have released a huge amount of their titles in the US, but they were always licensed to different American manga companies. Now with this bit of news, Kodansha will essentially be taking out the middle man & release their own titles in English themselves.
This kinda spells big trouble for American manga companies, since Kodansha is basically one of the "big three" in terms of releasing manga in Japan. The other two big guys are Shogakukan & Shueisha, but both of those have exclusive partnerships with Viz Media since they're co-owners (Shueisha is the parent company of Shonen Jump). So all the manga from those two publishers pretty much goes solely to Viz. So this Kodansha stuff doesn't really concern them, but it does spell trouble for all the other manga publishers. Particularly Del Rey, who's become a huge partner in recent years in bringing tons of their titles over stateside. But it also spells trouble for other manga licensing companies like Dark Horse & Tokyopop (whose having enough trouble as it is), as they all rely on having such a huge company having their titles available.
Now that Kodansha will be their own American company, they'll probably be the only ones releasing all their future titles from now on. It has been confirmed that all current Kodansha licenses out there are safe & wont be pulled, so Del Rey doesn't have to worry about losing Negima or Fairy Tale to them. Still, this really spells trouble for most of the American manga publishers. Who knows what trouble this all might bring.
Source: http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/12832.html