Not So Fast!

I'm kind of flattered to see gossip columnist Rich Johnston digging through my old blog posts (I've considered deleting all the stuff from the older version of the blog, more than once), but he's made an error.

Tokyopop has not junked all its digital comics plans.

What that means depends on what you mean by "digital comics."

T-Pop's a pretty Web-aggressive publisher, and they post lots of their material online and via phones, but they do not publish anything digitally exclusively. The fact that they describe the samples of their print volumes as "online manga" does muddy the waters if you don't know what they mean.

All I was referring to was the fact that they had eliminated the online department, folding most of the related responsibilities into the promotional division. The online department never managed content because T-Pop doesn't publish anything digitally that it hasn't committed to publishing in print (not counting the user-generated content on its site). This was bad news for me as a job-seeker, because I could claim lots of online experience but not so terribly much promotional experience. But it doesn't seem to have slowed down T-Pop's online self.

Rich and I have talked occasionally and I don't remember all the conversations with perfect clarity. If I misled him on this, my apologies!