by Deb Aoki and Heidi MacDonald
In a blockbuster deal announced yesterday at Angoulême Comics Festival in France, French publisher Éditions Dupuis and Japanese media/publishing giant Kadokawa have signed a huge joint venture that will publish Japanese and Korean comics, light novels and other content for the French language markets worldwide, with Kadokawa taking a 51% share of the business, under the Vega Dupuis imprint.
Éditions Dupuis is a large and respected French publisher that is a division of MP, the third largest Franco-Belgian comics publisher in Europe. They publish such comics / BD classics as Lucky Luke, Spirou, Boule et Bill, The Smurfs, Cédric, Gaston la Gaffe, Le Petit Spirou, and Largo Winch.
Their Vega Dupuis imprint has been publishing manga in French since 2018, and publishes a wide array of manga series, including Tesla Note by Masafumi Nishida, Tadayoshi Kubo, and Kota Sannomiya, Team Phoenix by Kenny Ruiz, and Tezuka Productions, Manchuria Opium Squad by Tsukasa Monma and Shikako, and much more, although interestingly, many from publishers other than Kadokawa, including Shogakukan and Kodansha.
Kadokawa is a large Japanese media conglomerate, that publishes manga, light novels and magazines, and also produces anime and live-action movies. As a manga publisher, it’s home to hits like Neon Genesis Evangelion, Overlord, Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin and many more, and the fourth largest manga publisher in Japan. Kadokawa is also majority owner of N. American manga and light novel publisher Yen Press, which is now part of the Kadokawa World Entertainment division. It also acquired majority ownership stakes in light novel publisher J-Novel Club in recent years.
They LOVE comics and manga in France, where one in four books sold is a comic, and the Franco-Belgian comics market is the second largest market for manga worldwide, after Japan. Manga sales have quadrupled in the past decade in France, where now one in seven books sold is manga.
According to the English PR issued by Kadokawa, the company has “adopted a business strategy of promoting Global Media Mix with Technology, centered on the creation and worldwide deployment of a diverse portfolio of intellectual property (IP) and has focused on strengthening and expanding its business in the North American and Asian territories.”
Julien Papelier, CEO of MP, says, “Éditions Dupuis, part of the Média-Participations Group, is very proud to announce this historical alliance with the KADOKAWA Group, a world-leading company in the Japanese media entertainment industry. Both companies will share their culture, expertise, and artistry to develop Vega as one of the major Asian pop-culture and manga publishing house. Through this strategic alliance, Vega will be equipped to face the challenges of the future such as creating new internationally acclaimed Heroes, embracing the digital revolution of the Graphic Novel market, developing the emerging market of Light Novels and cross-platform global media production.”
Takeshi Natsuno, CEO of KADOKAWA says, “We are very excited to form a partnership with the Média-Participations group by way of forming a French joint venture with Éditions Dupuis, one of their leading comics publishing arm. I look forward to strengthening our partnership as we join hands to maximize the full potential of the French speaking markets worldwide for comics and light novels, as well as pursuing synergies generated by both groups in the area of digital platforms and other businesses in the future.“
Dupuis acquired Vega, a manga imprint, in 2020, as explained in this interview with Dupuis head Stephane Beaujean. Vega Dupuis will continue to license comics from Japanese publishers other than Kadokawa, as well as original manga by creators worldwide under their K-Factory sub-imprint, plus other titles from Japan and Korea. This new joint venture is also an attempt to expand the market for light novels in France and Europe, where these illustrated prose novels aren’t as established as they are in Asia and even among fans in the US. This is a key initiative that will emerge from this new joint venture, especially because light novels is one area where Kadokawa leads the market in Japan.
Even in Google Translate, this interview with Beaujean (who used to run the Angouleme festival itself) by Valentin Paquot on Liternaute is pretty interesting. Asked why form a partnership instead of a licensing deal he replied:
“In 2018, I attended a conference in Japan which explained that in 2028, thanks to artificial intelligence, publishers would be able to publish and distribute their works instantly and multilingually, from PDF in the native language. Translation and lettering would be done automatically in a few minutes. I came away with the intuition, rightly or wrongly, that Japanese publishers would soon no longer need international publishing relays. To survive, we must therefore join forces.”
“I may be wrong, but I find it hard to believe that our cultural industry will evolve in a radically different way from those of music or video. And I think that things will go very quickly now that books, which resisted the digital revolution, saw the appearance of their first successful “pure player”: the webtoon.”
“We have all witnessed the disappearance of cultural intermediaries in the world of music and in the world of video, movements of concentration, after the arrival of Deezer or Netflix. The only thing that still protects the book market a little – for the moment – is the absence of a comfortable medium, at an affordable price, for reading. But now that all the paper players, previously reluctant, are now driving digitalization, the arrival of a comfortable color e-ink reader seems to me to be only a question of time.”
“And as soon as this medium becomes more widespread, I believe that the paper book market could shrink to join that of Vinyl or Blu Ray, a niche market. I’m still a child of paper, it’s strange to see the future from this angle. But I prefer to anticipate it. If we lose distribution, we impoverish creation. It is necessary not to let ourselves be overtaken by this development and to adapt.”
“Music made this mistake, but not the video market, which had time to observe the damage of an industry which had not reacted to the arrival of mp3. When Netflix gained momentum, Disney immediately removed its titles from their site to create its own platform. I hope that the French book market will be able to anticipate to protect itself.”
Squinting a little, Dupuis Vega sounds like a Francophone version of Inklore, PRH’s imprint devoted to manga, K-comics, webtoons and light novels. The spread of this still-unnamed carved out content niche caters to readers who have a taste for manga and anime and continues to grow around the world.
As a melding of companies with giant shelves of proven IP, this pact also a chance to move into other media areas, including “digital comics, novels and other platforms as well as other entertainment activities which both parties are already actively engaged in,” says Kadokawa. The first books in the partnership will debut later this year, including most notably, a new edition of Gundam: The Origin manga that will debut in Summer 2024.
There more from the press conference announcing the deal (in French) in this X/Twitter thread:
Une importante conférence de presse @vegadupuis x Kadokawa a lieu à Angoulême. Thread à suivre pour découvrir la teneur de cette annonce : pic.twitter.com/LPOabBsz70
— AnimeLand (@Animeland_mag) January 25, 2024