Mahjong Pros Launches Manga Imprint With Eight Mahjong Titles
An English-language publisher is staking a lineup on a manga genre that has decades of Japanese publishing behind it and almost no translated presence in English, so the imprint is a test of whether that gap is a demand problem or a distribution one.
Reporting from 1 source: Anime News Network.
Mahjong Pros, a company founded in 2022 to teach mahjong to anime and manga fans, has moved into publishing with an eight-book manga imprint. Founder Harrison Doan said the Western market treats mahjong manga as a subject while Japan treats it as a structure of storytelling, covering horror, political satire, comedy, BL, and yuri. The lineup runs from high school comedy to biography.
The company started in 2022 as a teaching project aimed at anime and manga fans who wanted to learn the tile game. Its publishing arm now has eight books announced, each carrying a mahjong tile on the cover.
Doan traces his own entry through manga: he read Reform with No Wasted Draws - The Legend of Koizumi in high school, then taught himself Japanese mahjong, and later learned the Chinese and American versions. The titles he cites as reference points include Akagi and Kaiji, and he points to mahjong references in Higurashi: When They Cry - GOU and Shirobako.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.
Sources
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