The Japanese market for manga is worth hundreds of billions of yen and is a crowded field for many young Japanese illustrators to break into. And if you're coming from overseas, there are even more obstacles.
Fredric Toutlemonde, however, has been successful in tackling those obstacles. Ten years ago, the French amateur cartoonist launched Euromanga, a small publishing company whose aim was to introduce European comics to Japanese readers.
"For the first four years, I put out a magazine of the same name," Toutlemonde tells The Japan Times. "Now I only publish books, about four to six volumes a year."