Canadian manga lovers, rejoice! TOKYOPOP expands e-commerce operations into Canada

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Canadian manga lovers, rejoice! On Tuesday, November 4, 2025, the United States-based manga publisher TOKYOPOP announced the expansion of its e-commerce operations into Canada. This means Canadian otakus can now order TOKYOPOP’s diverse selection of manga, light novels, and official branded merchandise directly from the publisher’s website. Explore the full selection now at www.tokyopop.com.

Viewing manga publishing as a way to create a catalog of content for the digital space that could be used as a bridge between Japanese and American audiences, Stu Levy founded Mixx Entertainment (now TOKYOPOP), which he defined as “a mix of entertainment, mix of media, and mix of cultures,” in 1997. Starting with only four officially licensed manga titles — Parasyte, Ice Blade, Magic Knight Rayearth, and Sailor Moon — Levy, in collaboration with Kodansha, introduced to bookstores the idea of selling translated manga in the original, right-to-left format. Although booksellers initially responded with skepticism, “unflipped” manga — published with uniform size, design, branding, and pricing — proved to be a winning model that placed the publisher at the forefront of “The Manga Revolution” in the early 2000s and forever changed the manga publishing landscape in the U.S., with many North American manga publishers eventually following TOKYOPOP’s lead.

While manga’s popularity has waxed and waned in the intervening decades, in recent years, manga titles have often topped the bestseller lists of graphic novels and comics in the American market. Similar to the recent trend in the American market, manga sales in Canada have also increased, rising by 31.8% between 2013 and 2017, per BookNet Canada. According to the Canadian Leisure & Reading Study 2024, 19% of Canadian adult readers reported reading comics or graphic novels, with “East Asain Style” stories accounting for 67% of all sales and 53% of all library loans – indicating that manga titles make up a significant proportion of what adult comics and graphic novels readers are enjoying.

In fact, BookNet Canada reports that all five of the top-selling comics and graphic novel titles in Canada in the second quarter of 2025 are manga titles and include Jujutsu Kaisen, Volumes 25 and 26 by Gege Akutami, Solo Leveling, Volume 12 by Chugong, Chainsaw Man, Volume 18 by Tatsuki Fujimoto, and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Part 7–Steel Ball Run, Volume 1 by Hirohiko Araki. Likewise, the top titles borrowed from libraries are also manga titles, such as Akutami’s Jujutsu Kaisen series, the My Hero Academia series by Kohei Horikoshi, the Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba series by Koyoharu Gotouge, the Naruto series by Masashi Kishimoto, and the One Piece series by Eiichiro Oda.

With this announcement, Canadian fans will be able to directly purchase their favorite titles from the publisher’s catalog, which features a wide range of manga, including popular romance titles from its LoveLove imprint, as well as licensed graphic novels and manga-inspired works based on franchises from Ubisoft, Capcom, Disney, and Mattel. The publisher’s growing lineup also features a new line of branded merchandise that includes advent calendars, playing cards, SD figurines, and tote bags, all based on popular anime, manga, and manhwa properties, such as Attack on Titan, Dr. Stone, Fairy Tail, Tokyo Ghoul, Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, Sword Art Online, On or Off, and Star Crossed.