Note: this is an old article and probably needs some historical context. The jist is that at one point this series was extremely popular and a hot seller for DMP, driven off the popularity of the mangaka’s other work Ten Count, and they tried to either save a buck or speed up the printing process by using the “print on demand” method, which gave them questionable results that were much-lampooned online at the time. June later lost the license to this series and SuBLime republished it in omnibus format in a rare license rescue endeavor, making June’s edition not as valuable or sought after as it used to be.
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Thanks to Seven Days, I haven’t heard so much hullabaloo about the reprints of a yaoi series since Junjo Romantica. The yaoi forums and blogs I follow lit up with more fife about this than CNN did about the most recent North Korean nuke launch. And you can guess which one was a more important issue, I’m sure. But seriously, I wanted to know if the quality discrepancy was really as big as people were saying. If you’re a regular reader, you know that I buy/sell/trade a lot of yaoi and manga in general, and I just happened to have the reprints come down that stream last month. So I decided to compare them to the original printings in my collection and inform you on the findings. Are you in the market for this ridiculously expensive and sought after series thanks to Ten Count, and aren’t sure how many fecks to give about the issue? Hit the jump to find out!
Typically with books, each print run yields the same product. They made more because they ran out, and you’re getting the exact same product whether it’s the first or the seventh printing. But sometimes, reprints are of a different quality due to using different methods or materials. Publishers are constantly trying to balance variables – the more books they order, they cheaper each book will be. But they don’t want to get 500 books and only sell 120. Small publishers in niche markets often don’t even reprint a book to begin with, even if it sells well – the cost is just proportionally too high for them. This is why a lot of out of yaoi titles are only printed once, and demand is usually higher than supply once they go out of print, driving the prices up.
Ok, I know this sounds like an intro to an economics class lecture that you definitely slept through, but I have a point, I promise. With the mega popularity and high ratings of Ten Count, Rihito Takarai’s older work Seven Days quickly sold out. But to print more of the original run via the same method requires an upfront investment. How to circumvent that? Enter Print on Demand, a process that allows very small quantities to be printed – instead of being tied down with inventory, they only have to print a book when it sells! Amazing, right? Well, mostly – there’s downsides to weigh. The profit margin isn’t as good, and there might be a quality trade-off, but if you’re strapped for cash, this is probably the better thing to do. And I think we all know how strapped for cash June is, if number of Kickstarter campaigns is any measure – all DMP cares about is the more profitable Project H, where their core customer is lonely men whose main hobby is throwing money at porn in between splurging twice a year for every single lolicon doujinshi that crawls out of Comiket (I am fully aware that I am a hypocrite, btw – if every fujoshi was as perverted as me and amassed a yaoi collection the size of mine, publishers wouldn’t have this problem). Truthfully, I suspect the issue is not that simple though – June can’t keep anything in stock to the point that they have probably lost all bargaining power to control the profit margin on their licenses, and I am willing to bet that Taiyoh Tosho was probably hoping to get SuBLime or someone to publish it instead. That’s just a guess, but I bet their profit margin would have been so crap on a full print run anyway that they decided why bother. So here we are.
At first glance, the covers look the same. In fact, you probably can’t tell which versions are which in my graphic at the top. But, you can tell a difference when you compare the spines – the reprints are thinner, due to the different paper used – it’s whiter, heavier, and looks like the kind that won’t yellow with age – oversize 90s Viz titles use something similar I think.
On June’s website, they state that there is ‘banding’ going through the book, but they have no pics of what this means, so it probably leaves people wondering. The fact that they mentioned it at all lets you know that people said something about it, and I was naturally curious what this mysterious ‘banding’ looked like and how bad it was. So I held my breath and opened both volume 1’s side by side –
– and thought, hey, there’s no difference. The way people were talking it was like they published it backwards and upside down or something (or, God forbid, left to right). Maybe if I look closer…
…eh, I don’t know if I’d call it ‘banding’ but there is definitely some kind of odd overall texture pattern in the reprinted version. Still not that big of a deal, really. The good thing is that it only affects shaded areas. White parts of the drawings are not affected, and this applies to most of the faces and skin.
So that’s that for volume 1, sorry if you were expecting, like, crude penis drawings to be randomly watermarked on the paper like in that episode of The Office (except in this case it would probably be neither noticed nor unwelcome), or encoded subversive messaging from the Illuminati that appears when read upside down. I don’t even think I would have noticed this texture difference if I had gotten the reprints first, to be honest. It’s not that unusual for manga to have screentones that resemble something like this. So I was pretty underwhelmed by the ‘qualitative differences’ so far.
Now, the second volumes, side by side. Page 1:
…OK, evidently a different ballgame. And yeah, that’s pretty annoying, and definitely noticeable. Looks like either this printing place and/or the process altogether needs some quality control, because I mean, Volume 1 looked ok, right? What happened with Volume 2?
However, as before, this ‘banding’ only affects backgrounds and shaded areas, not faces or skin (unless it’s in shadow, which isn’t the norm). To be honest, it still doesn’t really bother me, especially since it doesn’t affect the faces. The image of the title page above is actually the most noticeable one I could find, so it’s not really any worse than that, and to me it still looks like it could be screentones. It doesn’t necessarily give them a pass, as I think it’s noticeable enough for it to look like a printing error, and in some darker panels it can probably be distracting. However, everything is a damn spoiler nowdays so I didn’t want to include too many images from the second volume. Still, it doesn’t really bother me or hinder my enjoyment of the story in any way, so if you can live with some extra texture in shaded areas, you will probably not really care either way. However, if you’re one of those people that is picky and has to have everything perfect in your manga collection, save yourself some OCD and get the originals.
Even with this “inferior” printing method, Seven Days still sold out again and is now out of print again, probably because June decided to stop printing them altogether due to this issue. They’re still mysteriously unable or unwilling to fund a real press run at this time, which they should have done to begin with – surely they saw how many hits the page was getting and how many people signed up for the ‘back in stock’ notification, so this is further evidence that the issue is more complicated, as I ventured to guess above. Which means one easily has to pay $100+ for a set on the secondary market (and, you’ll definitely want to get them both at the same time, because Vol. 2 is night impossible to come by on its own for a decent price). There is yaoi that lists for high prices, and there is yaoi that sells for high prices, and Seven Days is in the latter category. So, both versions are out there, and unless you’re buying from someone who knows and mentions which edition they have, you won’t really have any idea which one you get. Interestingly, both print versions seem to be going for the same high price currently, so either people don’t know or don’t care – probably a mix of both.
Thanks for joining me for my first BLurb feature, in which I drink shittier wine than usual and thus write more bullshit than usual. Have any opinions on the Seven Days reprints or an idea what I should write about next? Hit me in the comments!