The Perils of Investing In Tokyopop
I swear, I don't mean to keep picking on Tokyopop.
It's just that this company has done so many notably dumb things over the years. It has failed so many goddamn times. It has screwed over so many goddamn people. Yet it keeps coming back like a manga-publishing cockroach, even if its current form is naught but a shadow of its turn-of-the-millennium glory. For the last decade, it's been fairly easy to ignore them unless they pull something audacious like a sketchy charity book for Ukraine or bringing back their controversial Rising Stars of Manga program.
So you can only imagine my surprise when a link came across my social media feed advertising Tokyopop not as a manga publisher, not as a multi-media company, but as a potential investment.
Their sales pitch is a seemingly simple one. Any wanna-be investor can purchase private shares in Tokyopop itself. These shares are just $5 apiece, although they must be purchased in bundles ranging from $1000 to $12,500. In return, Tokyopop will use these funds to expand their business model into anime production, merchandising, and "live experiences" such as ticketed exhibitions and special events at conventions. This will supposedly allow them to increase their value four times over in the next four years, based on the projected rise of various trends within the larger international anime and manga market.
Upon first glance, all I could do was laugh in incredulity at the audaciousness of their pitch. In fairness, I might have also been laughing at company founder/CEO Stu Levy, whose bizarrely tall hair, poor dye job, and military-style jacket makes him look both vaguely sinister and trying (poorly) to look like he's not pushing 60 as he walks and talks past a bunch of flashy Japanese storefronts. The more I looked into this matter, though, the more my laughter turned to legitimate concern. I may not be an expert in investment or business accounting, but you don't have to be to recognize the many flaws in Tokyopop's proposal. If anything, this scheme has inadvertently revealed just how cynical the company has become and how precarious their situation may be.
The first thing you need to understand is precisely what kind of product Tokyopop is offering. These shares are legally classified as Class B private shares. While they can be purchased like your standard Class A, publicly traded stock certificates, they function quite differently. They generally do not pay dividends. They grant the holder little to no say in corporate board votes. They are trickier and more expensive to handle, usually requiring the services of an outside financial advisor. They are not ideal for short-term investments, as cashing them out early often comes with additional fees. They function more like a savings bond than anything else, an asset meant to sit and collect value in the long term inside an investment portfolio. Ideally, at some point the company that issued them will either go public on the stock market or get bought out by a public company, and at that point the holder can either cash their shares out for big profit or convert them into even more valuable, conventional stock certificates.
It's not the most common form of investment out there. It's something that's either done on a very small scale (say, as a reward for long-term employees at a smaller company) or a very large scale (as a way for very large corporations such as Google to offer a lower-cost option for potential investors that doesn't dilute their public stock value). It's an investment with few opportunities for big payoffs and a higher-than-average risk of failure, since there's no guarantee that the company issuing them will continue to grow in value, get purchased, go public, or outright continue to exist. If the issuing company goes into bankruptcy, Class B shareholders are unlikely to get back any portion of their investment. If they shut down entirely, that investment is lost completely.
So to put things bluntly: Tokyopop is asking you, Joe Schmoe Investor, to give them thousands of dollars upfront on the hopes and wishes that maybe it will still be worth something five to ten years down the line. Maybe they'll go public someday! Despite no manga publisher ever doing such a thing! Or any American publishing company to my knowledge! Maybe they'll finally be a big multi-media corporation! It could happen! It's not as if Tokyopop's own financial report paints a picture of a company teetering on the verge of disaster, right?
...right?
So as a legal requirement of this venture, Tokyopop had to file an SEC report that included (amongst other things) a summary of their finances over the last two years. The picture it paints is a poor one, as Tokyopop went from a $1.8 million dollar profit in 2024 to losing nearly a million dollars in 2025 despite making over $2 million more in book sales. To be fair, some of this is due to factors outside of the company's control. For example, the roughly $2 million dollar increase in product costs is likely due to increased tariffs, higher shipping rates, and increased printing costs, something every American publisher is dealing with these days.
Less explicable is how they managed to lose approximately $2 million in cash from one year to the next. If you dig a little further into the report, the cause seems to be their choice to sponsor a Naruto exhibition in Berlin last fall. While I'm sure there were plenty of Berlin-area Naruto fans who appreciated it (even if by all accounts it appears to have been seven rooms of graphics and recaps tied to a gift shop), it's an odd choice of an event for Tokyopop to sponsor. There's not much money to be made in exhibitions, doubly so when neither their American nor their German branch publishes Naruto.
Yet it's precisely the sort of thing that Tokyopop wants to use the money from this venture to pay for. Nestled within this report is a table breaking down how Tokyopop wants to spend the gains of this venture, depending on whether they reach their minimum goal of $10,000 or their ultimate goal of $1.2 million. You will note that in both cases, less than half of that money goes towards the licensing and production of manga - y'know, that thing that Tokyopop was founded to do. The rest of the money will go towards getting into anime production, developing and selling merchandise based on their licensed properties, and producing more live events, as well as supporting them in their efforts to break into other European manga markets.
I can't help but feel that there are better uses of that money, considering how thin their margins were before. The most obvious answer is putting that money back into the books: buying better licenses, using better materials to print them, hiring actual localizers instead of relying on low-rate, no-name, scummy translation agencies. He could also use that to pay back the approximately $750,000 they borrowed during the early years of the pandemic from both outside banks and Tokyopop's own Japanese office, all of which are noted in the aforementioned report.
Indeed, a less generous person might accuse this whole scheme of being a way for Tokyopop to use this money as just another form of loan, no matter whether it's use to refill their company coffers or as a springboard to transform the company into the multi-media empire of Stu's dreams. It's not hard to imagine why the third-party accountants who reviewed their finances for this report noted more than once that they have "substantial doubt" of Tokyopop's ability to continue operations in their current state. It's not just about a lack of capital or the risk inherent in this whole investment scheme. It's that their priorities as a company are all out of whack. Instead of reducing their debts or prioritizing their product, they're gambling on their own future by using other people's money.
The only thing more questionable than Tokyopop's financial situation is how they talk about their future plans. I've already noted how little money they want to put back into publishing, but this is just one part of what Stu dubs "the IP Engine." According to him, this cycle begins with manga licenses that allows Tokyopop to buy their way into anime production committees and expand their consumer base through those prospective fans. Any successful shows would become the basis for flashy live events at major conventions and/or cities, something that would further raise Tokyopop's public profile and bring in more money. Of course, the real money would come from licensing and producing merchandise to sell to this newly expanded customer base, which would go back into licensing more manga to keep the cycle going.
I personally cannot imagine a more cynical and nakedly capitalist concept than the "IP Engine." It treats Tokyopop's entire comic library not as a curated collection of creative works but merely stepping stones to bigger and better profits, the fuel to feed this so-called "engine." You could argue that larger, more successful manga publishers such as Viz and Kodansha also do things like produce tie-in merchandise for their titles or sponsor special events such as pop-up stores or live events with mangaka. The difference with those companies is that have enough funds that they can spend money on these ventures without endangering their bottom lines. They have plenty of hit titles to market, whereas the best that modern-day Tokyopop can offer are a bunch of Disney tie-ins and Stu Levy's Nightmare Before Christmas fanfiction. Most importantly, they do not publicly act like their product is a burden upon them, something that Stu Levy has struggled to do for a long time.
It's no secret that Stu Levy has always wanted to be famous for something other than publishing manga. It's what has motivated him over the years to dabble in everything from writing his own books and comics, making his own movies and TV shows, or producing his own music. Unfortunately, he's pretty lousy at everything he tries so he's far more content to be a producer so he can plunder other people's ideas for profit with as little effort on his part as possible. Even as far back as 2006, he was all too eager to tell Publisher's Weekly how much he wanted to turn Tokyopop's library of titles into his own personal IP farm, but was held back by pesky things like the rights of the original Japanese creators and publishers. If anything, this latest scheme is Stu going fully mask-off. He no longer feels the need to keep up even the slightest pretense about caring about books (or about pretending that he's not still in charge of Tokyopop, despite announcements to that effect a few years back). All he cares about is his brands, his ego, and money.
At this point it is fair to ask: who the hell is this scheme even for? Who is Tokyopop's target audience? It can't be manga readers. Those old enough to remember Tokyopop's glory days are also old enough to remember their previous shutdown as well as all their other various follies and failings and would wisely stay away. Meanwhile, younger manga readers are even less likely to have money to spare for things like investment and grown up in a world where Tokyopop was little more than an industry afterthought.
Maybe it's for the venture capitalists? If so, it's hard to imagine them being attracted to such a small-scale investment. Those are people who want to make as much money as possible as fast as possible, people who prefer their investments to start in seven figures and go from there. Tokyopop's plan is about as opposite from that as you can get. Plus, Stu should know all too well these days how quickly outside funding can disappear and how little you can get from it even when it's there.
My suspicion is that Tokyopop's target audience are the wanna-be venture capitalists. These are the dudes who lurk around investment Reddits, the guys who have dabbled in things like cryptocurrency, NFTs, slabbed Pokemon cards and manga magazines, or memestocks but lack the connections and generational wealth to become a true venture capitalist. They may be passingly familiar with anime and manga but not deeply enough to be aware of Tokyopop's history. Most importantly, they are dumb enough to be swayed by a confident pitch and flashy graphics and not think too deeply about things like financial reports to worry about the state of their investment until it's far too late. Based on the comments left by such potential investors at the bottom the site itself, even they don't seem entirely sure about this thing.
scheme is not working as planned. There's the fact that they've already reduced the price of the lowest package from $1000 to $500, less than a month after the site's launch. There's the fact that they apparently sent promotional emails to anyone who has even the slightest connection to the company, including some of their most outspoken critics. They can plaster social media and digital newsletters with all the ads they want, but that's not going to stop me from pointing out how much those ads trade upon AI or images of their old days (which is obvious because they feature Princess Ai merchandise and advertisements for their short-lived promo magazine Takuhai) instead of any modern glories. As I write this, Anime Expo is just around the corner. I have no doubt that Tokyopop is planning to hype this investment scheme up alongside things like new manga licenses and a Kickstarter to reprint Princess Ai. Will any of it be enough to save Tokyopop from itself? Only time will tell. What I can say with certainty is there are far better, safer uses of your money than to prop up a dying, desperate, cynical manga publisher.
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