We caught up with TOKOPOP CEO Stu Levy to talk about the market and TOKYOPOP. In Part 2, we talk about the company’s ongoing equity raise, that big 2025 loss, and plans for the future. In Part 1 of this two-part interview, we talked about the U.S. manga market, why digital isn’t as big here,, and Tokyopop’s bestsellers, present and future.
ICv2: You recently did an equity crowdfunding campaign. Can you give us some context for that? What has TOKYOPOP’s capital structure been? How did you get to this point where you decided to raise money in this way?
Stu Levy: We’re still doing it, actually. We’re coming up to the point where, very, very soon, we’ll be announcing the final close date, which, legally, I’m not allowed to say until we officially announce it, but I know when it will be. It doesn’t go on forever. It’s typically for a certain period of time, longer than a Kickstarter but not forever.
We started sometime in May, if I recall correctly. It’s been a really awesome ride, to be blunt. I personally have learned tons. The folks on my team that are working with me on it have learned a lot. We’ve learned about how to do a raise and what that means, from basically becoming transparent, filing with the SEC, going through compliance, getting corporate governance stronger.
We’re a small company. We’re not the size of a company that’s able to do an IPO. It’s a little bit like training. It’s like you want to one day be in the World Cup, you can start by playing youth soccer. A little bit like that.
It’s been healthy for our company to do it. It’s not cheap, just to be clear. It’s super-expensive. In the end, the money that you raise actually costs you a lot. The cost of capital is very high, of course. In our case, we’ve done well with it. We have raised more money than we spent. Still, it’s expensive.
In parallel, we’re actually out doing a strategic round right now, which hopefully will close by year end. We’ll see. We’ll be raising real growth capital with that round. These two complement each other.
It’s also been about outreach to fans. We spoke about identity and why fans want to own a book, a physical book. It’s the same reason they might want to buy a special acrylic that a creator made or a unique vinyl figure that has a limited run or even a tennis shoe that’s sporting a favorite artist. These kinds of things are all about identity. They’re all about your own taste. They’re about showing off who you are personality-wise.
I believe that our role at TOKYOPOP, in the future and now, is about connecting fans and creators. It’s always been that way, but as retail distribution had been very, very structured and before technology allowed people to connect more directly, it was hard to really bring a creator together with a fan.
We would sometimes, as you know, bring them to Comic-Con or certain events, like do a meet-and-greet at a store. Now those barriers have really broken down. Creators and fans can connect. A creator can also put out their works much easier. There’s so many ways they can put their creative vision out to the world to see.
Whether it’s through a comic or through a video or through music, there’s so many places. They can create; they can build up a fandom. What is still tough for those people is, how do you turn that into a real business? How do you take your creation and make it bigger than it could be just on your own?
The role of publishers and companies like TOKYOPOP are to connect those fans, those creators with their fans, and those fans with the creators in a way that builds out the business opportunity for the creator and a lot of exciting product and community opportunity for the fans.
Then the Reg CF [Regulation Crowdfunding] is a big part of that, being able to invite fans to become owners, being able to show, “Hey, you guys can join us at TOKYOPOP.” Hundreds of owners have joined. You’ll know the statistics when we disclose them publicly, which we’re legally required to do. They own stock in the company just like me.
That means that we’re on the same page. We’re in sync. We’re welcoming them into not only what we’re up to, but we’re doing meet-and-greets. We’re doing sneak peeks. We’re giving them perks. To us, it’s more than just “They have a share. They’re a shareholder.” It’s really about being part of TOKYOPOP and being an owner.
At the end of this process, the strategic raise, the equity crowdfunding, what will the ownership look like? Will you still have majority control?
We will see what happens on the strategic side because it’s really less about the Reg CF side, the individuals. That is a smaller amount in the end, even with hundreds of people. They’re putting in $500, $1,000, something like that. Whereas a strategic round will be — we’ll see — hopefully millions of dollars. Then those strategics will own a bigger chunk.
The plan right now is certainly not to give control over. I’m a young, healthy entrepreneur and want to keep hustling. I’m not as young as I say, [laughs] but I still have a dream. I want TOKYOPOP to continue to innovate in the industry.
Some of our most exciting times are ahead of us and not behind us. We have a legacy, but I don’t believe TOKYOPOP is done with the legacy of the past. There’s still some really, really cool things ahead that we will be the first guys and hopefully the best guys to do.
As part of the equity crowdfunding raise, you released financials. What those showed was that in 2024, you had a big profit. 2025, that flipped to a loss (see “Tokyopop Raising Equity“). Without getting too far into the weeds, can you lay out the picture of those events and where you are now?
First, if anybody wanted the proof, it’s proof that if you want to be in business for yourself and you want to be an entrepreneur, the comic book business is most likely not the most stable of them all.
[laughter]
In Japanese, in fact, they call the entertainment industry as a whole mizu-shōbai, mi-zu-shō-bai, which means water business. There’s a few reasons for that, but generally, it’s because you can’t really grasp it. It’s up and down.
IP means intellectual property, but it’s an intangible asset on your balance sheet. It’s not like a building or real estate. When you’re dealing with this intangible asset, the water business, that means that sometimes it hits and sometimes it fails, and your numbers will go up and down. Look at Disney, look at these big guys, some years they’re killing it and other years they’re struggling.
In our case specifically, we did great in 2024. Then in 2025, we took a good amount of that capital, and we placed a big bet, we took a big swing at the experience business, which we wanted to be in. An opportunity came our way through Sony Music. We decided to be the exclusive Naruto exhibition promoter and producer in Europe, and we did it last year.
It was the first time we ever did a big, big, big event like this. It was a three-month experience, 10,000 square feet, started in an empty warehouse. We built out this massive exhibition with props and immersive theater, an audio guide featuring the original voice actors in both English and German, a beautiful book, a little merch shop, just the whole thing. It was a great experience. We still have a plan to release the making-of videos so people who didn’t attend it can actually see.
We had tens of thousands of people attend, but what we didn’t quite realize, because it was our first rodeo in that regard, was how expensive it was going to be. Just the sheer cost of building, especially in today’s world with materials… We did it in the city where I live, Berlin, Germany, and material costs are super-expensive.
You’ve got the Ukraine-Russia war. You have gas costs, as you know (fuel costs have gone up tons) and labor shortages. There’s just not that many people to do construction out here. All of that hit us.
We underestimated the cost of the buildout. Our KPIs [Key Performance Indicators] on the revenue side were on the low end, but they were within our range of goals. We got killed, crushed, on the cost side.
We made this beautiful event. Fans loved it. People were crying. They were moved and touched. In the end, unfortunately, we lost our shirt from a financial perspective, but we consider that to be an investment in our future because we learned tons.
It certainly won’t be the last time we ever do an experience. The next time we do it, we will know what not to do and how to approach it so that it can be a profitable thing. That was 2025. We had to take a big hit on our financials as a result. It wasn’t due to publishing loss.
In 2026 or 2027, are there things of similar scale planned?
No. Experiences and events in general are such a continuum. You go from a small pop-up, which we do even now. We do that in the States with partners like Kinokuniya. We’re doing that here in Germany with partners like Thalia. We’ll do pop-up-type events.
A massive exhibition like we did, of that scale, is not in the immediate future, but we do like the space. We love the ability to connect with fans. We think that when a fan is passionate about the show, about characters, about a world, there’s nothing that matches the feeling they get when they can actually live in that world. I went to the Harry Potter one in Japan, actually. It blew my mind, some of the stuff they had. That’s a much, much more expensive experience.
I like the experience business. It’s just, when you do it, it’s a bit like making a movie. You’re not really supposed to fund 100 percent of the movie production. There’s ways you’re supposed to make a movie from a financing perspective and work closely with a team of investors. The next time we do take on a big project, it will be different than the way that we approached this one.
I believe that the experience that we got and all the lessons we learned, you can’t learn those lessons just from hearing about them. It’s like when you’re a parent (and I have a four- and a six-year-old) and you tell your kids, “Hey, this is how it’s going to be. Be careful,” it’s not going to stop them from putting their hand in the fire.
To be clear, on the financial side, you expect the Naruto situation to be a one-time situation?
That’s correct. I will say that I’m an entrepreneur, as you know, and I think that as an entrepreneur and as a creative company, you have to take swings. I’ll never apologize for taking a swing. When you take a swing and you miss, or you foul it out, or you hit a single, and then you get caught trying to run to second base, or you knock it out of the park, those are all things that happen in our creative industry no matter what. What’s important is you learn from the mistakes you make. You build on not only your knowledge but your assets.
Part of the future of TOKYOPOP will be about there’s a certain amount of IP that we believe that we can be more integrally involved in, and based on that, take a lot of the business know-how that we’ve achieved and apply that to a wider set of rights and a stronger, more central role in IP.
How we as TOKYOPOP are able to grow our business will depend on applying that knowledge to the assets that we can obtain. That, to me, is the key. It’s not about not making mistakes. It’s about applying those mistakes to future success.
In your equity crowdfunding documents, you laid out a number of areas where you plan to have TOKYOPOP grow. A few of the things you’ve announced this year are that you’re co-producing an anime, you took on a periodical comic publisher to publish and distribute their works, you’ve got a tabletop game going on, you signed a new license with Mattel. You’ve got a lot of stuff going on. What’s the overall umbrella? How would you describe this growth plan in broad strokes?
I would say that in general it’s about brand management. Up until now we have what I call four pillars of our business. The strongest pillar and the pillar we’ve been doing our whole career is publishing. That includes digital, so digital and print publishing.
Within publishing, like any publisher, yeah, you have a range of publications. We have novels sometimes. Of course, we have manga. Sometimes we have graphic novels. Sometimes it might be a big IP, like a Barbie or a The Nightmare Before Christmas, other times it could be a creator and we’re putting out their work. It’s all within the world of publishing. That’s always been the core pillar of the company.
Then the next pillar is anime production, film television-type production. This one is funded entirely by a third party. We have a partnership right now with a company called MBC [Group], which is the number one broadcaster and streaming company in the Middle East. They have a mandate to get very involved in Asian IP, and we are facilitating that for them. We have a partnership and, through that deal, we invest in productions.
We are also taking on productions that we lead. We’ve invested in five so far, where we sit on the production committee in Japan, which is a great experience. We’re on these calls. It’s all in Japanese. Luckily, I can speak Japanese. We talk about the particular show that’s being produced and how we’re going to position it.
The biggest one that we’ve done to date that’s coming out next spring is Eleceed, which is one of the top three action webtoons. We’re making it in Japan with Studio Dandelion, who did “The First Slam Dunk” movie, and is a great studio (see “TOKYOPOP Jumps Into Anime“).
We’re pretty excited. It’s been announced that it will be globally on Crunchyroll. It’s one of their big premieres for next spring. Cross your fingers on that one.
Doing more and more in the anime space, not just the manga space, is a key part of these four pillars. Then, of course, there’s merch.
We’re not the figure guy. We’re not Bandai. You’re not going to see us go out and become Good Smile or something. There’s a whole bunch of really cool merch that involves paper and paper-related type goods, like board games, trading card games, of course, collectible paper-type goods. You have acrylics. You have all kinds of cool things, and we’re involved in some of those. We have Advent Calendars coming out later this year for some of the top anime shows, like Blue Lock and Attack on Titan. We have playing cards, really cool anime playing cards that are selling really well right now. Just a range of stuff that we’re involved in.
We’ll also be building out a full third-party licensing program on the merch side. As we get deeper in with our IP relationships, you’ll see us get more involved in full brand management, which includes managing licensees, selling licenses like we did back in the day with Initial D and Rave Master and these big titles when we had booths at Licensing Expo. We’re getting back into that game to brand manage an IP.
Then, this events and experiences pillar is the last. Like we just spoke about, the way that we will do that will evolve over time. The point is, cradle to grave of an IP’s, we want to do less IP’s, pick and choose and really do them well, and be the key brand management company behind them. That’s the goal.
To go back to Part 1, click here.
For more ICv2 Manga Week – Fall 2026 coverage, click here.
Source: ICV2
