- #Kurosagi corpse delivery service kissmanga serial
- #Kurosagi corpse delivery service kissmanga series
#Kurosagi corpse delivery service kissmanga series
15 separately, but as new material that could be bundled with volumes 13 and 14 to make a Book Five.īut how would the people who had already bought 13 and 14 separately feel about that? And also…then what? Kurosagi is still an ongoing series in Japan. It might seem as if the obvious solution was always the one we in fact have decided to do-to not publish vol. 15 would sell any better than had the individual volumes 13 and 14 it would almost certainly also lose money. But there wasn't any indication that an individual vol. 15 individually, and then later we could collect it with 13 and 14 into a Book Five. At first I was thinking along previous lines-put out vol. Of course, we wanted to get more Kurosagi out there, but the first problem is that the omnibus editions are 3-in-1s we'd put out individual volumes 13 and 14, but that still left us one short if we wanted to put out an omnibus Book Five. But gradually, more and more people discovered and bought the omnibus, and in the words of the immortal Kenny Rogers, somewhere in the darkness (actually, somewhere between 2Q 2016 and 1Q 2017), the gambler he broke even, and The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, ten years after it first premiered in English, finally turned a profit.Ī modest one. We had no guarantee it would work, and indeed, after we put out the first four omnibus books we were even deeper in the red. Kurosagi was already in the red, and of course, it would be even deeper in the red if we tried an omnibus, at least at first-after all, putting together and printing the omnibus would itself cost more money. Those previous omnibus manga I mentioned had been successful also as individual volumes, and/or were released directly to omnibus in the first place. It seemed a shame to have all this story material that had been translated and lettered, and just allow it to fade away.īut doing a Kurosagi omnibus program had risks, too. There was the idea that it could be used to give Kurosagi a fresh start-after all, the series had first launched in 2006 into a very different market: before the "manga boom" ended, before the closure of the Borders bookstore chain, and of course, before the Great Recession. But it can work well with some titles, and in fact Dark Horse had been using it with various manga since the late 2000s-on CLAMP's and Kazuo Koike's works, on Trigun, and others. The omnibus format for manga has advantages, but it's not necessarily appropriate for all series-particularly, of course, new manga, and manga where it's not clear how long the series is going to be. It wasn't their fault, and they didn't do anything wrong it's just that there weren't enough of them. It's frustrating for everyone-not least for the people who bought every volume of Kurosagi and supported it all the way. I feel bad about it-I want every manga publication program to be a success in the end, even if it's only a modest success. That's what happened with Kurosagi-we'd put out 14 volumes of a good series, but even after all that effort, had lost money doing so.
Cover to omnibus number one by Bunpei Yorifuji.Īnd then you have manga series where the earlier profitable volumes don't outweigh the later unprofitable ones, and if you keep going, after a certain point the entire series is going to be at a loss. Then you have manga series where the decline is more rapid (or is starting from a lower initial sales point), so that later volumes do start to lose money on an individual basis-but the series as a whole is still popular enough that the profitable volumes outweigh the unprofitable ones, and when the series is over, there's still some profit left. "Decline" may be relative-there are manga series where the first volume sells the best, but the series as a whole remains popular enough so that none of the later volumes ever sell poorly enough to lose money on an individual basis.
#Kurosagi corpse delivery service kissmanga serial
It must have truly dropped off the radar, as there was actually a volume 14 in-between there ^_^ Kurosagi followed a basic trajectory that's not unusual for manga, or other forms of serial media-its first volume sold the best, and then after that sales started to gradually decline. Can you take us on the road from the series' English language hiatus after volume 13 in 2012 to the announcement of omnibuses five and six at Anime Expo 2019?
Re-releasing Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service in an omnibus format in 20 seemed like a gamble, but this appeared to be the catalyst for the series' return.