Newsarama has a story on TokyoPop’s partnership with Universal Press Syndicate to bring some manga-style comics to America’s newspapers. This story is being framed by recent news about the continuing decline in newspaper subscribership (down 2.6% this year) as a means to reverse that trend.
It is an interesting development although even the comic book industy has already figured out that it needs to grapple with the appeal of manga so the newspaper syndicate are essentially the last major segment of American comic to figure this out. It’ll be interesting to see how many newspapers pick up the manga offered through Universal Press.
It should be pointed out that one of the comics being syndicated, “Van Von Hunter”, began as a webcomic and continues as such to this day.