TOKYOPOP Founder Stu Levy Interviewed in Latest Episode of The Anime Business!

Anime distributor AnimEigo and parent company MediaOCD have announced the debut of Episode 7 of The Anime Business, a documentary series featuring interviews with a variety of pioneers of the Western anime industry. The latest installment features a wide-ranging chat with Stu Levy, the founder of TOKYOPOP.

Episode 7 is available now on the official AnimEigo YouTube channel at:
https://www.youtube.com/@AnimEigo/videos

TOKYOPOP was founded in 1997, and Levy published scores of hit titles that included Sailor Moon, Fruits Basket, Battle Royale, Chobits, Gakuen Alice, D.N.Angel, and Gravitation. He helped to bring manga into major retailers like Waldenbooks and Borders and pioneered many aspects that are now publishing standards such as the right-to-left format, a brand bar on the spine, and the use of original Japanese sound effects.

Levy also pushed boundaries by bringing J-Pop music and anime soundtracks to U.S. fans and dove into anime with Initial D, G.T.O., Marmalade Boy and Rave Master. He also developed several manga-inspired projects with top U.S. entertainers such as Hanna Montana and Courtney Love and made early inroads into Korean comics, aka manhwa, with titles such as I.N.V.U, Priest and Ragnarok.

Pressure for profitability from TOKYOPOP’s venture capital investors strained the company and a confluence of factors at the start of the 2008 global financial crisis, including many retailers going out of business, ultimately led to TOKYOPOP going dormant for a time. But Levy was resilient and TOKYOPOP reemerged and remains active in the North American manga market, as well as in Germany, where he now resides.

The Anime Business is a first-of-its-kind series featuring a wide range of entrepreneurs and visionaries that helped to pioneer and shape the North American anime and manga industries. It is produced and hosted by industry veteran and MediaOCD founder and AnimEigo CEO Justin Sevakis.

All episodes of The Anime Business will be available in English. Japanese subtitles will also be available via a special grant from the Kleckner Foundation. Additional episodes and interviews are in production now.  AnimEigo and MediaOCD invite fans that would like to help support and crowdfund future episodes of The Anime Business to donate at: https://www.mediaocd.com/plans-pricing

Episodes 1-6 of The Anime Business are also now available to stream on the AnimEigo YouTube channel.

Justin Sevakis was the original founder of Anime News Network in 1998, and he contributed many of the site’s most popular columns for many years, in addition to co-hosting ANNCast, the #1 anime podcast worldwide, from 2009-2015. Sevakis was the first in-house video and subtitle editor at Central Park Media, a prominent 2000s era anime distributor, and worked on Grave of the Fireflies, Project A-ko and many other bestselling releases. With his current company, MediaOCD, he has produced more than 1,600 Blu-ray discs for North American market and pioneered restoration efforts for classic anime including Project A-ko, Digimon Adventure, Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, and the forthcoming Macross II. He acquired anime distributor AnimEigo in 2024.

all art – AnimEigo

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