At WizardWorld Chicago, Tokyopop announced five new manga titles, DNAngel, Candidate For Goddess, Girl Got Game, One, and Mink, which the manga giant will publish in 2004. Yukiru Sugisaki (Brain Powered) is responsible for two of the new series, the nine-volume fantasy adventure DNAngel and the action-packed science fiction saga Candidate For Goddess. The Candidate For Goddess series should benefit from the fact that the anime version (known in the U.S. as Pilot Candidate) had a run on the Cartoon Network. Both DNAngel, which features lots of romantic confusion, and Candidate For Goddess, with its cast of young male and female pilots, should appeal to female readers.
The other three new series Tokyopop announced are even more obviously targeted at Tokyopop's growing audience of female consumers. Shizuru Seino's Girl Got Game is the gender-bending saga of a teenage girl who has to pretend she is a boy and compete on the boys' basketball team. One is a shoujo romance series by Lee Bin about love among aspiring musical prodigies, while Megumi Tachikawa's Mink is a combination 'magical girl/pop idol saga' from the creator of St. Tail. Studies have shown that women (and girls) are much more voracious readers than men. The five new manga acquisitions announced by Tokyopop in Chicago indicate that the publisher is intent on providing plenty of new material for a growing audience of young female readers.
