Any chance the Heroes manga will be licensed by Viz?

[GreatSaiyaJeff]

Not sure if this has been brought up yet has there been any word on why Viz hasn't localized this manga yet? Is it because it is tied into the Heroes games which never made an impact here?

[Aim]

It’s strange, for a “sister company” of shueisha, I would have thought they wouldn’t need permission to translate it. Regardless Viz for some reason won’t do other manga so I highly doubt they’d ever translate it.

[Robo4900]

Which one? There have been several, dating back to at least 2012.

I would guess Viz have no intention of licensing any of it, since they've failed to do so for the past decade. No reason to expect them to change.

[TobyS]

Which one? There have been several, dating back to at least 2012.

I would guess Viz have no intention of licensing any of it, since they've failed to do so for the past decade. No reason to expect them to change.

There should be some kind of system where if the give up doing it someone else is allowed!

[VegettoEX]

There are a lot of assumptions that get thrown around, including (but not limited to):

• "Viz doesn't want to license them"
• "Viz can't license them"

The fact is, we just don't know. We have no idea if Viz has no interest in licensing them, we have no idea if they've ever tried in the past, we have no idea if Shueisha doesn't want them in English, etc. Any of those could be true, and any combination of those could simultaneously be true. Additionally, none of that could be true.

What we do know is that a bunch of stuff that's not available in English has absolutely been made available in other languages: Dragon Ball SD is available in Germany, and Dark Demon Realm Mission is available in Spain, just for two quick/relevant examples.

That means Shueisha IS OPEN to licensing this stuff out... to some degree. A degree we know nothing about, and to which we probably never will.

Think about the bonkers situation with Neko Majin Z 5 -- yes, just that one chapter -- being printed in the October 2007 issue of Viz's Shonen Jump print magazine, and then... *crickets*... absolutely nothing since. Was it a test to see if there was a huge response to it? Did Shueisha mandate it? Did it come packaged with some other acquisition? ‍

Again, we have no idea, because we're not privy to their business plans or marketing decisions. We can ask, and lord knows people do, but they're also not going to necessarily give an answer that might paint them in a bad light, the product in a bad light, their corporate owners in a bad light, etc. They also won't answer questions regarding something they're actively working or negotiating on.

The best you can do is just regularly (and politely) remind them that you know these products exist and that you would love to see them officially in English directly from them.

---

So long story short, yes, there's a "chance" because there's a chance anything could happen, but we literally have no idea what or if or why or how.

[Cold Skin]

The question of publication rights in foreign countries and the negociations that go along with them always seem to be more complicated than you'd think.

For as much as we manage to get in France on various DB medias, there are examples given by officials about specific products that failed to be green-lit when other products of the same line could be green-lit without a problem.

- All Anime Comics from the Dragon Ball Z series and the Dragon Ball Z movies have been released. However, the Anime Comics for the TV specials (Bardack, Trunks and GT) were stated by the official translator to be apparently very hard to get greenlit and there is still no announcement for them, perhaps not ever in the future.

- The French anime publisher Kazé that released the long version of Battle of Gods along with The Plan to Eradicate Super Saiyans and the Episode of Bardack said back then that they were delaying the release of that Blu-ray package because they were also trying to get the long version of Resurrection F with Trunks telling the story of Goku VS Freeza, instead of the theatrical version. However, the product ended up being released with the regular version, indicating the negociations somehow failed while the rest could be green-lit and dubbed (even game-exclusives like The Plan to Eradicate Super Saiyans).

There will always be mysteries as to why some specific releases are very hard to get even when the local publisher is interested and asking for them, with rights being sometimes completely different from one specific product to the other very similar product, and negociations failing when you'd think "but they said yes for the rest and that's pretty much the same kind of stuff, so what's the big deal?"

Those licensing arrangements work in mysterious and apparently very complex/unpredictable ways.