At the tail end of an Archie Comics panel (SO nostalgic!), and then broccoli starts. Whee!

Shizuki Yamashita presides, and she has no powerpoint today (technical difficulties), but she’s talking about the newly-released Koi Cupid and upcoming Sola (manga, natch).

And then there’s the special Cosmode, which I failed to get at expo but which I will get in the dealer room here! Apparently it didn’t originally have Gurren Lagann on the cover but then they heard the show was getting pimped big-time at Expo.

Honoka Level Up is also being mentioned, along with Disgaea which is in production, and Nui, whose third volume is in preproduction now.

That’s about it– no new announcements, I guess, so q&a. Why no character goods at the booths anymore? Because the booths are getting smaller, especially here at Comic-Con, who decreased the number of booths significantly…the con is too big even for its XXXL britches, if you hadn’t heard.

Broccoli titles are available in regular bookstores and they’re getting into libraries now too. On the Galaxy Angel games front, Broccoli Japan has done talks to get people to keep making games for the franchise, and the PS2 game is 2D so it’s hard to get out in the US these days– it looks old.

Apparently Broccoli is talking to MangaGamer, the new downloadable bishoujo games distributor, and that’s a possibility, but the US is still an unknown market for these games, so they’re experimenting with the downloadables to see if the market is big enough for packaged product.

Anything new for bl line Boysenberry…Yaoi Con is in touch since Pet On Duty mangaka Nase Yamato is guest of honor now so they’re trying to get Cigarette Kisses out in time for that.

On I Wanna Be An Angel, the license expired two years ago so good luck finding it; Kamui 10 is coming out…they’re in production but a lot of stuff got shifted to get sola out with the anime (d’oh!).

The state of the industry: Broccoli president thinks manga grew too fast and consumers were overwhelmed, it became hard to tell what’s good. And there’s no way to really preview manga, except shonen jump, shojo beat, and now yen+. So the manga world has struggled, and while overall manga sales are on the rise, but the number of individual titles selling is falling (i.e. some series just aren’t selling). It’s hard to make the titles known…although one of their better-selling recent titles (My Dearest Devil Princess) was panned by reviewers.

Any updates for the Broccoli website coming? Shizuki blogs now so less updating for the main site.

If borders gets bought by barnes and noble how will that affect Broccoli? Some titles that did well will be fine, like Juvenile Orion, but some titles might not, but Broccoli likes to focus somewhat smaller stores. In Japan, not every manga is in ebery store– you won’t find Sola at Kinokuniya, Yamashita says. They’re mostly sold at otaku shops like Animate, Gamers, Toranoana. A lot of manga is niche even in Japan, but all of it is niche here, so they’re hoping to see more specialty stores.

Gamers online store…went bye-bye when they started working on dot-anime with Bandai Visual USA, which of course has fallen apart slightly since BVU merged with Bandai Entertainment. As for brick and mortar they’re doing a lot with Anime Jungle in LA since they had to close the physical Anime Gamers shop some time ago.

Breaking into US manga…a lot of the work is package design and website design, lettering, that kind of thing, rather than actual drawing. A lot of letterers are interning these days, and freelancing is good, and that works for translating as well. Also, shmooze with Yamashita at cons! (Check!) Also, manga is not a very high-paying industry, so if you want to make a lot of money you might wanna try something else. You also need to have a worker attitude, not an artist attitude for graphic design: it’s more about the client than the artist in that field.

I think that’s it. Janken time now?

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