>> |
Anonymous
Tokyopop/Mixx was founded by Stu Levy, a teenaged Jew who took a course in Japanese, and then a vacation of indefinite length in Japan on his parent's tab, simply because he "had never been."
While in Japan he "discovered" anime and manga, and when he came back home to America to tell us all about it, he realized that we had already known about it since long before he was born. Then he realized that people actually got PAID to bring this stuff over, so he said "me too!"
He went to Japan again, got a $500,000 loan from a Japanese bank, and bought the manga rights to Sailor Moon. He then proceeded to exploit and abuse Sailor Moon fans (his best friend and company vice-president co-founder even decided to quit after Stu's decision to pull Sailor Moon from Mixxzine and change the magazine's direction one month after taking people's money for year-long subscriptions), and he used the money to leverage Mixx/Tokyopop into becoming the biggest, shittiest manga publisher in America.
His biggest and only worthy contribution to manga history is that he pushed the price down to $10, and got manga into bookstores, giving it much greater mainstream appeal.
|