Well, first off... Remember back when Tokyo Pop was Mixx? The original editor/creator was booted because he was trying to keep everything geared towards manga and the other staff wanted something more 'cultural'.
Pretty much, from what I can tell TokyoPop's handling of translations and sound and general presentation is fairly subpar compared to what Viz and DarkHorse produce. I hazard to say, below what should be industry standards, then again they may have improved recently. I haven't seen anything of theirs since last year. But friends assure me that they still suck. laugh A Japanese friend tells me that Viz has some faults in the way it handles dialogue and Americanising it in a way that makes certain things sound cheesy in a bad way (versus cheesy in a good way I guess). It's just minor word choice points there. But it seems that both Viz and DarkHorse push their products as what it should be: Manga/comics/art. Versus what the current TokyoPop does which smacks of "Hey we're cool, we do manga. it's AZIAN-PRIDEZ!! and we're COOL!" And yes, I agree with Ehtereal Mind's post on that furthur up on the page.
It could be just me, of course. Since I knew the guy who got kicked off. (why are the bosses/creaters of a company ALWAYS the one that gets thrown out?!) Could be I'm specially sensitive to these sublevel social politics things.
|