The arrival of a new publisher is always a promise, that of new favorites and beautiful moments of reading. But, when it is accompanied by great titles (Ao Ashi) and great authors (Junji Itō), it is clearly an event. We therefore wanted to exchange, in April, a month before the launch of Mangetsu, with Sullivan Rouaud, the director of this collection at Bragelonne, whom we also follow closely through his activities in the HiComics collection. 
How are you in this particularly intense period for you? As for a collection launch. Since HiComics, I had forgotten this feeling and now it's even stronger because it's a hyper active sector. With Mangetsu, everything is new: the team, the providers, the procedures, the format and the way of working with different steps. While waiting for an assistant, I am a little alone to oversee all the different aspects, even if Blackstudio also helps enormously as a main service provider (copy preparation, lettering in particular, on my side also the press, marketing, sales, accounting, copyright, legal …). I have a lot of work on all fronts and a lot of demands. But the good news is that we work with YouTubers and magazines like So Foot, which we could hardly have done for HiComics. Of course, there is still a health uncertainty but at the same time we are very proud of the work accomplished. As a publisher of Japanese art, what is your relationship with this country? Even though I'm not a specialist in Japanese history, I was very interested in Miyamoto Musashi, the Edo period, samurai, Shinto… Like any child of the 90s, I am fascinated by the artistic excellence of the Japanese and their hard-line vision of art even if they claim less the title of artist than us. I have a lot of respect for their living together, their sense of honor that goes hand in hand with a certain form of patriotism. However, I am aware of the shortcomings of this stubbornness. Ecologically there are things to complain about, even if there is a new generation that brings a lot. I don't think I can live there but on holiday I feel better than anywhere else. I was able to travel to Hiroshima, Osaka, Kyoto, Kamakura, Yakushima… The language barrier instantly creates a form of change of scenery. When you are a tourist, it is an extremely pleasant country to live in. You can go anywhere, no one fears anything. The Japanese are certainly difficult to access in Tokyo but this is less true outside. Tokyo is a fascinating city. First there is an immense horizontal layer and then a vertical excess of dozens of floors unprecedented for us. I knew you as a fan of comics, why fall into manga? I understand that I am first associated with comics because, in my activities, I have always started with comics, whether with Comicsblog or HiComics. On the other hand, I've been reading manga for much longer. I'm from the Club Dorothée generation that I took in my head – Saint Seiya, Dragon Ball, Nicky Larson, Ken the survivor… – then around 10 years old my mother bought me a volume of Saint Seiya and it was the beginning of the gear (smile). The Japanese have a way of getting into the characters and the human psyche that speaks to me a lot and has always been. There is this side of personal development in shônen which are life impulses and daily guides. I also read more manga than comics because it's a market that produces a lot with extraordinary quality and very different genres. The authors are obviously very productive but above all they are excellent. I love this art so much that it was a little intimidating to get started, I thought about it three or four times. I learned my trade with HiComics but, the first year, it was out of the question for me to make manga because it was too scary. But since I'm probably not going to do publishing all my life, I felt the need to do manga, just as much as self-publishing with Astra Mortem. HiComics had a very good year 2020 thanks to the sales of These Savage Shores for example and especially thanks to many awards for Bitter Root and Invisible Kingdom and Turtles that are getting better and better. I started scribbling for six months a first project more based on classics and reissues. At the same time I learned other things about the business compared to HiComics where I was first focused on buying titles and less on production. Bragelonne offered me to launch the collection by bringing together the right conditions: editorial independence and total trust. Behind, it is up to me to be relevant on the publication, the design, the logos and especially in the requirement of a degree of excellence on the lettering and the translation as we were able to prove on our previous collection. We left bundle on the back a little naively at the beginning, then there was the covid which turned everything upside down. I was in Tokyo in April 2019 and Bragelonne sent me back twice in the fall to meet with agents and rights holders. I came back with nice discussions but nothing concrete. I returned at the beginning of February and this trip was super strong: I met a very large publishing house in Japan (Shogakukan), publishers with very beautiful catalogs that we then developed, agents with whom I still work today etc. My two priorities (Ao Ashi and almost all of Junji Itō's catalog) were acquired at the end of this trip. Behind, I discover Chiruran on the plane home, with a copy left by his publisher. The lockdown comes a month and a half later when we were supposed to launch in September and there I spent three months in total darkness: very little response from the Japanese on one side, the American market collapsing on the other hand and Bragelonne who begins to doubt. In contradiction with the idea of launching a new collection Yes, totally. The booksellers thought they were going to close down, we knew nothing about the guarantees of the State, the releases were massively postponed… You really have to try to remember the chaotic state of the future at that time. Then, during the first deconfinement, booksellers leave, we receive contracts from the Japanese and we postpone the launch to January 2021 … Alas, we start again in the2nd wave including Japan. Finally, Mangetsu launches in May 2021, and that's fine. Two years ago you talked about overproduction, isn't that contradictory with this new collection? There's some truth in that (smiles). Overproduction is imposed by a market and an economic context. We talk about overproduction in Franco-Belgian because, behind well-known series that will sell hundreds of thousands, even millions of copies, you have 3 to 7,000 creations that will sell less than 2000 copies, their authors will be paid with very low royalties (when they are not non-existent) and work in deleterious conditions. I don't have this feeling with manga because the Japanese send a lot of titles that deserve to come out and the manga market is taking off like never before in France. It has become the majority market in comics, ahead of Franco-Belgian, which had not happened for twenty years, when it was an epiphenomenon. There, I think there will be no turning back, even if Asterix will inflate the figures "artificially". We recruit typologies of readers that we do not see in comics or in our local industry: Manga is much more popular (it is therefore a huge vector of sharing), in every sense of the word. I already have a fantastic readership on Junji Ito, with more women than men, fewer Parisians than people from everywhere, etc. Kids read manga and, at the same time, adults read more and more later because our generation and the one before me continue to read it without ever stopping, even if their readings have evolved. There are a lot of very strong licenses (Attack of the Titans, Jujutsu Kaisen, Demon Slayer, My Hero Academia, One Piece, Naruto …) with animes, which also support the entire market. With Ao Ashi, Mangetsu arrives with a football manga of excellence, which has its place in the market and can reach a very wide readership. So I think there are still two or three publishers who will be added in the coming months because several groups will see a juicy commercial opportunity with the Manga, it's a fact. We have also seen collections relaunch: Doki-Doki, Panini Manga, thanks to Demon Slayer and then very beautiful reissues: 20th Century Boy, Banana Fish, Eden… They are proof that the market is not clogged but super welcoming on the contrary. It's just that manga departments will grow in general bookstores. I have the deep feeling that the titles I propose are not just the purchase of rights and that 25 mangas a year is nothing at all. We are a small collection, we arrive on the sly for a readership already aware of what is happening, the challenge is precisely to make ourselves known to the very general public, the one who makes the concrete figures of this market. How do you select a work whose text you don't understand? I have my little tricks (smile). I'm not the only publisher who doesn't speak Japanese. When you know manga and the grammar of comics in general, you know when a book is good just by its staging, cutting, rhythm, lettering… It's not ideal but I have a team that I totally trust and I also refer to their judgment and interpretations when I talk to them about the titles that caught my eye. And then, I mostly went to Japan three times in the space of ten months so I scoured the same bookstore of Ikebukuro up and down with Ken Niimura, the cartoonist of I Kill Giants who lives in Tokyo, speaks Japanese and pitches me the different series. Negotiations are different from comics and often longer. You who are impatient, how do you manage this wait? The first year was difficult on this side. We had certainties for Junji Itō and Tetsuo Hara. Ao Ashi I felt very good from the beginning but it took us a while to conclude with the counter-signature. There are certainly objective signs like the relevance of the collection you propose but sometimes, you know that you have the series even before you have signed it. However, we did not get confirmation until mid-October, the day before a meeting where I was to present the entire collection to my big bosses and their associates. At the moment, for example, I have sent a package of offers for the future and I have been waiting for several months. It doesn't matter, it's the game. Although if they say "yes" to all my offers, I will have a problem: too many books to publish (smile). That's the game with manga: you have to shoot a lot of balloons and you don't know which ones are going to come back to you. 
The manga has the image of poor quality books with light paper. This is not true for everyone. With Mangetsu, I want great quality without being garish with beautiful paper, beautiful jackets, effects on the covers and so on. Tomie by Junji Itō is the most beautiful book I have done in my career by its appearance and content. The story is fantastic and we were able to add a preface by Alexandre Aja, an interview with the author and an analytical afterword written on purpose and redo a lettering as well as a translation at the top, etc. Beyond my work as an editor, this is the first time I have published a book that I dream of doing. I am personally attached to this album to the point of getting goosebumps talking to you about it. I consider that I have not yet released THE book of my career. Maybe it will be Tomie ? Who knows? It's a luxury to get started with such a prestigious author. To honor these titles, the challenge is high for the absolute fan that I am. But I hope it also demonstrates the editorial ambition that we have at Mangetsu. So let's talk about the first releases. Being a neophyte, I am surprised by this very fine categorization of manga while at HiComics, you seek to break gender stereotypes. We also do it in manga. Tomie is a well-known feminist figure today. I also have plenty of offers on heroines strong in shojo that have been turned down. On my very small scale, I would like to make little girls dream through pop culture as I can do at HiComics. These genres (shojo, shônen, seinen, josei) come from Japan and annoy some readers already very informed at home. I wanted these categories to go through colors without displaying the names of each of them, but it was our broadcaster who wanted to write the genre on the back. Our shônen and seinen are obviously just as intended for a female readership. Our collection is not aimed at boys at all costs and I think we prove it with titles as fine as The Fire Mandala or Panda Detective Agency, where the fighting scenes are non-existent. At the same time, I'm not going to deprive myself of a title because it is in it and it is exchanged mandals or strikes in the skylight at 30 meters. You can publish anything at Mangetsu. Finally, by creating a special collection for Junji Itō, we gather the different genres of the author under the same banner: his name, quite simply. It is on this beautiful promise that we closed the interview and be sure that we will be at the cleat to chronicle the first releases of Sullivan.
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