When you examine the history of anime and manga, particularly in the US, the importance of Pokémoncan’t be overstated. Those first adventures spawned a sprawling multimedia franchise that continues to this day and helped give rise to both the anime boom in the US and made publisher VIZ a manga powerhouse
During a recent interview, Dallas Middaugh talked about those days in the early 00s, when manga and anime were shifting from a niche market to one of the fastest-growing mediums in the world. Middaugh was there to watch it happen, as he was Director of Sales and Marketing at VIZ Media from 2000 to 2003, right when manga was exploding.
“It’s really fun to talk about those times because it was the Wild West for manga,” Dallas Middaugh explained. “What had just happened was, in the late 90s, Pokémon had come along, and it had really just caused an explosion. I mean, we’d had Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon. These things were all starting to show up on TV.”
But it was Pokémonthat deserved a lot of the credit for transforming the manga market in that era. “VIZ, for their part, I think it’s okay for me to give away numbers 20 years later; literally went from being a company that made like $4 or $5 million a year to grossing over $120 million a year, in one year. Because of Pokémon. You just can’t understand how fast that market was growing.”
On the back of that success, manga has become entrenched in the American publishing industry. While VIZ Media was an immediate beneficiary of the Pokémon craze, pop culture as a whole has never been the same since
