Tokyopop Loses Kodansha Titles
Been kind of a rough week for American anime & manga companies. Tokyopop, which used to be the biggest manga distributor in North America, has just lost a large number of their titles. For whatever reason, Japanese publisher Kodansha chose to let their contract with Tokyopop lapse & expire without renewing it. Tokyopop themselves say they have no idea why Kodansha decided to do this. This isn't the first of this either, as Kodansha decided to let their contract with Tokyopop Germany earlier this year.
Some of the titles that they lost were modern classics & favorites like Love Hina, Chobits, & CardCaptor Sakura. But others were titles that Tokyopop hadn't even finished releasing yet like Rave Master, Initial D, & GTO: the Early Years. You can blame TP's very slow release of Rave for not being able to complete your collection. The series has been over in Japan for sometime now, TP has been releasing it in the US for several years, & yet they still had a few more volumes to release before the end. Granted 35 volumes is rather long, but they had more than enough time to get it done.
This probably has something to do with Kodansha starting their own American manga company last year. It appears for some of their older titles, Kodansha will now be the official licensing company, but they'll let Random House (parent company to their good friends Del Rey) be the distributor for them. CardCaptor Sakura, Chobits, Clover, Magic Knight Rayearth, Parasyte, & Samurai Deeper Kyo are all being rescued & re-released under this format, most of which in omnibus collections. Many others, however, now lie in limbo.
Source: http://www.mangablog.net/?p=5344