ed chavez

Vertical Inc. publishes manga about eating disorders, adorable cat antics, 18th century prostitutes, and murderous high school cults. It brings avant-garde creators like Kyoko Okazaki and Moyoco Anno to Western eyes right alongside classic Tezuka work and more mainstream shonen fare like Knights of Sidonia and Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin. I point to Vertical when friends ask me how to get into female manga creators, how to get into horror manga, how to get into josei (women’s) manga, or how to just take a break from the cycle of standard sci-fi and fantasy. Vertcal is utterly singular and entirely necessary to the comics industry, and it was to the Vertical booth that I sped once the doors to the San Diego Comic-Con Exhibit Hall were open this year. After examining their new releases (I recommend In Clothes Called Fat, another glance into female anxiety courtesy of Moyoco Anno), I sat down with Ed Chavez, Vertical’s marketing director, to talk about past successes, present realities, and future plans.

As part of our recent editorial about the upheaval in the manga industry, ComicsAlliance had a chance to speak with some of the most influential tastemakers working at American manga publishers today, and their answers were so frank and informative that we thought they deserved their own feature...

In the past few years the manga industry has experienced upheaval, to put it lightly. A number of seemingly unconnected, but pressing, issues have turned into a perfect storm of sudden, dramatic change. Online manga piracy, generally conducted in the open on sites that contain thousands of pages of copyrighted work, finally reached the point where publishers could no longer turn a blind eye to ot