Well, Mat Moyaln never said never. He has said before that depending on Ariga's works's sales, Udon would consider the X mangas down the road, since they are a big investment. Mainly due to having to use the re-release compilation volumes, which are pretty big, and would be pretty expensive to make. So naturally, the price for them would be somewhat high I imagine.
It is something we will think about after seeing how well the Megamix and ZX mangas sell. If these series do initially well, next we would do Ariga's Gigamix, and then think more seriously about Iwamoto's X manga.
There are a few things to consider.
1)it is a big investment, as Iwamoto's X manga runs something like 12 tankobons(manga volumes)
2) his art is pretty retro, but there are people who like that style
3) price - since the X series is less popular than the classic mega man, and the art style might not be for everyone, we'd expect this series might not sell as well, so we might have to raise the price a little if we did this series.
I have checked out some of it though. It's definitely a little more old school that our other manga series, but it has its own charm. Story wise I'm afraid I haven't read enough to comment yet. "
"If we did do the X mangas, I'm pretty sure we would do them in the 5 mega-volume collection format. But even in this format, there would still be a lot of investment needed.
By investment meant I meant not only the cost of licensing fees, but also the cost of translation, lettering, printing etc. Even if we licensed only the first MMX mega book as a test run, that book is huge, like almost 600 pages (I have a copy on my desk here actually heh). Just the first volume be about as much work as the whole Megamix series. So there's that to consider.
On MMX's popularity, there are definitely tons of X fans out there, I know, and they are a dedicated bunch. But as a spinoff it's always going to be less popular than the core series. We can see this with our two mm complete works books. Released at the same time, same price, similar contents, MM Classic OCW is selling better than MMX OCW. Neither sells BAD, but there is a gap between them for sure. So when thinking of X manga, we have to assume that sales on it VS the classic Ariga stuff will have a similar sales gap. Also a longer series with a more expensive price point per volume (regardless of page count) affects sales as well. It's a much tougher sell to the casual buyer.
But even with all that, it's not to say any of this is a deal breaker, it's all just things we have to keep in mind."
he also made mention of the Ikehara ones.
"While this is also a very retro looking series, I find the Shigeto books look a little more polished than the Iwamoto X mangas, more like the work of an old master like Osamu Tezuka. But that is just a personal opinion, to the many readers they probably both look like 'old manga'.
It might sell better than the x mangas, I'm not sure. But with this series would come new hurdles. We'd have to really reasearch who owns the rights these days. I'm not sure it has ever been republished since it's original run, so those coudl still lie with Kodansha. There's also the problem of finding usable files, the original manga was probably printed with film output not digital. Some of the artwork is getting close to 20 years old, and it's very likely the original art is no longer in scanable condition(if it still exists). Our most likely choice we be to have to scan the artwork from the original books, which means finding 20 year old copies in good enough condition to scan. We have done this before but, it's a lot of work. The Rockman X and Megamix series are pretty old too, but they have both been reprinted over the years (both within the last 2 years even) so those files are readily available.
So, no plans on this one right now, but I am a fan of the art. Let's see how the Ariga books do first heh..."
