Tokyopop didn’t set out to be the publisher that got America hooked on shojo manga. Once upon a time, in the distant 1990s, it was Mixx Entertainment, an L.A. startup with lofty, if vague, ambitions to become a multimedia portal into Asian pop culture: video games, CD-Roms, even a website! But the project that took off was MixxZine, a manga magazine similar to Viz Media’s house magazine, Manga Vizion. Manga Vizion folded not long after all this, so maybe it wasn’t the best business model to follow. But MixxZine had a secret weapon, and that weapon was Sailor Moon.

Mixx Zine, April 1998

I’m not here to talk about Sailor Moon. I’m here to talk about Fuyumi Soryo’s Mars, one of the great romance comics. But to explain how Mars made it to English translation way back in 2002, only a couple of years after its Japanese serialization ended, I choose to indulge in a few paragraphs of weeb nostalgia for the Willy Wonka laboratory that was North American manga licensing at the turn of the millennium. Manga and anime were starting to catch on in a way they never had before, but no one knew what was going to be big. So why not put out a monthly magazine that was half ultraviolet men’s manga and half fantasy manga for tween girls?

And so MixxZine launched with Tsutomu Takahashi’s gritty cop drama Ice Blade, Hitosi Iwaaki's sci-fi horror classic Parasyte, CLAMP’s portal fantasy Magic Knight Rayearth, and Naoko Takeuchi's Sailor Moon, queen of magical girl manga. If you’re any kind of nerd at all, even if you’re not a manga nerd, you’re probably aware that CLAMP and Sailor Moon went on to become kind of big deals in American fandom. Parasyte has grown a cult following over the years, and Ice Blade…okay, not even I have read Ice Blade. Sorry, Ice Blade.

Mixx and its founder, Stu Levy (who strove to establish himself as manga’s answer to Stan Lee through his alter ego/pen name D.J. Milky–as I said, it was a special time in publishing), soon twigged that the shojo titles were carrying MixxZine and snagged more girls’ manga, mostly from the catalog of Japanese publisher Kodansha. Mixx cast a wide net, selecting not just geek-pleasing genre fiction like Rayearth and Sailor Moon, but the kind of slice-of-life drama not often seen in American comics at the time.

Manga guru Rachel Thorn had been working for years to bring more shojo (girls’) and josei (women’s) manga to English translation, and had convinced Viz to publish a handful of prestige works by artists like Moto Hagio and Keiko Nishi. But these were mostly appreciated by dorks named Shaenon feverishly reading A, A’ in their dorm rooms. All of a sudden, Mixx–now calling itself Tokyopop and moving from magazines to graphic novels–turned on a firehose of mainstream hits.

(This rush to publish had another historic effect: Tokyopop opted not to “flop” its manga from right to left to make it read like an English-language comic, as previous publishers had done. Keeping the manga unaltered saved time and money, but, advertised as “100% Authentic Manga,” it felt like a special favor to the fans. Before long, all of Tokyopop’s competitors followed suit.)

art from Mars by Fuyumi Soryo

Volume 1 of the Tokyopop edition of Mars opens with a page advertising the publisher’s other 100% Authentic Manga. It’s an eclectic mix, to say the least: Chobits (“In the future, boys will be boys and girls will be…robots?”), Skull Man (“They took his family. They took his face. They took his soul. Now, he’s going to take his revenge”), Dragon Knights (“Part dragon, part knight, ALL glam”). Upcoming shojo titles include Ai Yazawa’s fashion-school soap Paradise Kiss (technically josei, as it ran in a women’s fashion magazine), Masami Tsuda’s high school romcom Kare Kano, and Miho Obana’s Kodocha, a dramedy about a child actress that I really wish somebody would bring back into print.

None of these shojo manga are much like Mars, which has the form of a glittering girls’ romance but the heart of Charles Baudelaire and a surprising amount of motorcycle action. Of the other manga in that Tokyopop lineup, it might be closer to Tōru Fujisawa’s GTO, set in the world of teenage gangs, or Shuichi Shigeno’s street racing manga Initial D. Admittedly, those tough-guy manga probably don’t have lines like, “I sense colors in you. They’re strong and beautiful…and sad.” (Initial D is 48 volumes long; I’m not going to check the whole thing.) On the other hand, I’m pretty sure no one in Kare Kano<...

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