Tokyopop shutting down North America division

[perfect-night.livejournal.com]

I'm sure this isn't news to everyone, but I just found out about this today. Tokyopop's North American division is closing (as of April, I believe)...it might be shut down already, I'm not sure.
Does anyone know if they completed publishing of all of Xxxholic? It looks like you can buy volumes 17, 18, and 19 on Amazon.ca, but they're all pre-order, so who knows if they'll be available for sale or not. Tokyopop only has a Facebook account now, so there really isn't a reliable way of getting in touch with them!

Comments

[darkserasenshi.livejournal.com]

I thought Del Rey are the ones releasing xxxHolic, not TokyoPop o.o

[selenityshiroi.livejournal.com]

Tokyopop doesn't have the license for xxxHOLiC, DelRay does.

In fact, the Tokyopop licenses for all of the CLAMP manga expired ages ago, hence why Dark Horse snapped up Cardcaptor Sakura, Magic Knight Rayearth, Clover and Chobits for omnibus releases. (Now, if only those releases hadn't come to a sudden halt...)

[kurishojo.livejournal.com]

Tokyopop shut down early this month and thus (and alas!) will be publishing no more books. However as selenityshiroi stated, they lost all their licenses of CLAMP manga already (back in 2009). Dark Horse has been picking up a lot of their old titles however, releasing them in high-quality omnibus editions which I highly recommend purchasing! Yen Press is currently releasing Kobato.

Tsubasa and XXXHolic are published by DelRey. While DelRey did hand over almost all its licenses to the fairly-new Kodansha Comics, they held onto XXXHolic and Tsubasa. Tsubasa has ended but they've still got a few volumes of XXXHolic left:

XXXHolic (Vol. 17) - September 2011
XXXHolic (Vol. 18) - December 2011
XXXHolic (Vol. 19) - February 2012

Hope that answers your questions!

[hoshiko-2000.livejournal.com]

Why such the long gap until we get vol 17 T-T?

[chiapetzukamori.livejournal.com]

This is surprising news to me....anybody know why they're closing? Is it just financial reasons or something else, like a name change - like how they were Mixx ComiX before they were TokyoPop? I ask because I was under the impression that they were doing the best (in the US at least) in manga sales.

[arekuru.livejournal.com]

Long story short, Stu Levy decided he'd rather make movies.

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2011-04-15/tokyopop-to-close-north-american-publishing-division

And they haven't been doing the best for a long time. The top manga seller in the US is Viz, followed by I think Yen Press at the moment.

[kel-aka-gandy.livejournal.com]

Stu Levy got bored with books and so he closed it on a whim, like almost every other decision he's ever made about the company.

More seriously, they had been hit fairly hard with the economy and Borders not paying them, but I'm pretty sure they were getting back on their feet (they had Alice in the Country of Hearts and Hetalia, both of which would rank for weeks at a time on the best-seller lists; I'm aware that manga best-seller lists are not necessarily saying that it sold a lot, but comparatively they sold a lot more than other series) and so this seems like just a decision made on a whim by someone who wanted out. I really don't understand why the company wasn't just sold to someone else.

[ajisaitea.livejournal.com]

Something about wanting to make documentaries I believe. TP will still be doing manga over in Germany.