vertical inc

Most anime is adapted from manga, often produced by the manga publisher to raise awareness and selling it overseas. But what about the anime shows or film that go the other way, adapted from the screen to the page? How do those works hold up, and what changes or stays the same? That's what Screen & Page aims to explore. This week, we're looking at Mamoru Hosoda's 2009 science fiction film Summer Wars, and the Iqura Sugimoto manga that followed it!

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.

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