My journey started many, many, many years ago with an amazing product called Comic Studio. Every major manga artist in Japan was using it but no one had even heard of it in North America or Europe. By 2003, Celsys, the creators of Comic Studio, wanted to reach new audiences. They wanted Comic Studio to be introduced to the world and pinned their hopes on a newly minted product manager... little ole me. At the time, I had little to no knowledge of the manga, comic or even graphics industry. But through trial and error, sheer effort, help from amazing colleagues at e frontier America and friends from TOKYOPOP, we began understanding the industry. We renamed Comic Studio to Manga Studio to celebrate it's Japanese roots and focus on the "Cool Japan" movement at the time. Soon after, artists from all walks of life and a large contingency of aspiring manga creators quickly accepted Manga Studio as great addition to their graphics toolkit. They loved the product, the penciling and inking tools were out of this world. They created communities and rallied around the product. From that enthusiasm, user feedback, CLIP STUDIO PAINT was eventually born. Today CLIP STUDIO PAINT is the premiere tool for all artists, illustrators, manga and comic artists who wish to create art from start to finish. But there's still lots of work to do and Celsys has asked me and the team at Graphixly to carry the baton and help further increase the reach of CLIP STUDIO into new industries and to new artists. So the journey continues... and I am looking forward to you joining us through this new chapter.