The Four Color Media Monitor

The Japan Times/Bloomberg has a report on an investment firm buying into a Japanese romance comics publisher that's mostly working on digital items:

Blackstone is betting on the popularity of Japanese manga with a $1.7 billion deal to buy a digital provider of romance comics.

The world’s largest alternative asset manager will launch a tender offer for Infocom in its biggest private equity transaction in Japan to date, the U.S. firm said in a statement on Tuesday.

The deal will allow Blackstone to tap into Japan’s digital manga market, which has rapidly grown into a $3 billion industry. Infocom’s main source of revenue is from Mecha Comics, a website and app where users can pay as little as a few cents to read a chapter of serialized comics. Some of the most popular titles include workplace comedies or fantasy melodramas with intimate romantic storylines.

Blackstone will look to grow original content from Infocom’s network of manga artists, developing more works around themes enjoyed by its reader base of women — a demographic that has growing disposable income, said Atsuhiko Sakamoto, head of private equity in Japan.

"The more original content we have, we can monetize that intellectual property over time,” Sakamoto said in an interview. "We can create animation or merchandising around that, which is going to be the potential opportunity in the midterm.”

Right now, original content brings in about 10% of revenue, but about half of the 10 most popular titles are home-grown products, Sakamoto said. More than three-quarters of its customers are women, mostly in their 30s and 40s.

Global interest in Japan-created content has surged as streaming companies rush for rights to stories that have already resonated well to produce live action or animated shows. Some of Japan’s best-known anime, such as "Dragon Ball" or "Naruto", started as serialized manga before gaining global popularity. Recent Netflix hits like "One Piece" and "YuYu Hakusho" were also originally manga works.

"I’ve spoken to big players in Hollywood who said they are envious of Japan because it has this back catalog of extraordinary, world-building intellectual property in its vaults of manga that has not been tapped,” said Roland Kelts, author of Japanamerica, a book on the nation’s pop cultural influence in the U.S.

Gee, what if this turns out to be more of a trick to force mangakas using Mechacomic's services to water down their creations over time if they want to make use of their platforms? The only result will be that some mangakas will withdraw from making use of Mechacomic, and even warn others valuing creative freedom to stop using the service too. That aside, it's telling that clearly, there's another example here of conglomerates looking for little more than ways to make money galore, but not necessarily products with entertainment value. And do we need more live action adaptations that're unlikely to resonate as well as the original mangas?

Romance and comedy are important themes, but USA companies can't really be trusted at this point to deliver the goods, and when Netflix is mentioned, that's another bad omen. Let's hope the mangakas delivering their stories to Infocom are aware of all that, and won't stick around if they make things difficult.

Labels: Europe and Asia, manga and anime, msm propaganda, sales, technology