In Japan, manga are a thriving concern, a huge publishing industry that everyone reads and enjoys. They are growing not only in Japan, but in the US market as well. You can now go to Borders, Barnes and Noble and what have you and buy plenty of manga titles.
In the US, comics are a shrinking art form. It used to be the big publishers’ titles could be picked up at every drugstore and grocery store you went into. Now it’s all internet or specialty comics shops. I don’t know of anywhere else to get 'em.
I know this board is full of fans of both art forms, does anybody have any theories about why Japanese manga are kicking ass and US comics are getting their asses kicked?
American comics are stigmatized as entertainment for teen boys – “BAM! POW!”, superheroes, and scantily-clad women. Not going to appeal to a highbrown audience or females. It’s a shame because their are tons of hidden gems that are thoughtful, beautifully-drawn storytelling that get ignored.
Manga feels “fresher”, perhaps, without the reliance on superheroes, and the storylines and art tend to appeal to women as well as men. Lots of anime was adapted from manga, and vice versa, so I’m sure the anime fandom brings in a lot of fans.
Heck, I’ve seen a few threads on the SDMB with people asking, “why does anyone read comic books?” and it doesn’t matter if you point out Watchmen, Sandman, Maus or any number of others, they stubbornly insist on viewing comics as a lowest-common-denominator kind of entertainment, like one step up from softcore porn. Odder still when you consider how insanely popular a lot of the recent movies adapted from superhero comics have been (c.f. X-Men and Spider-Man); people love the flicks but feel no need to read the comics.
I can see the size of the Manga section at B&N, but what I don’t know is how large their sales actually are. I never see anyone picking one up and buying the thing either.
Publishers Weekly puts graphic novel sales at $245 million in the U.S. with manga sakes at $145 million. Nor does that appear to include regular comic sales, which from extrapolating a few numbers I can find appear to be as large as the graphic novel sales. So the comics industry runs a half billion a year or three times manga.
So manga is hardly kicking comics’ ass. It’s nibbling at a tiny corner of the overall market.
Anybody have a cite of how individual titles do? Who the audience is? What ages they are? How the sexes divide? Anything solid?
ICv2.com would be the website to check, since it monitors trends and sales of graphic novels, American comics, and manga. A little searching within their site should yield all kinds of statistics on demographics and sales figures: http://www.icv2.com/index.html
I think the major difference is that the Japanese see manga as a medium, with stories ranging from giant robots to martial arts action to comedies to romances to stories for kids to porn. There is literally something for everyone in manga, and adults and children alike realize this.
In America, comics are still seen as juvenile; poorly-written and crudely-drawn trash meant for children and immature teens, or worse yet, socially maladjusted adult nerds in perennial states of arrested development. Most Americans see comics as a genre rather than a medium – all comics have to be the same, and the majority are adolescent power fantasies in the form of superhero stories. Critics point out that while there are too many superhero comics, there is still a lot of great stuff out there covering subject matter as diverse as any manga, meant for all ages. Hell, even among the superhero stuff you’ll find some modern classics that in a just world would be considered “literature.” But it will take major reconditioning through marketing and public relations to change the American public’s mind about comic books, and the major publishers seem more than content to just keep selling to their loyal (though ever-dwindling) niche audience, rather than reaching out to the mainstream.
Not a cite, mostly just anecdotal evidence. I’m in Borders at least once a week with the girl child. According to her, “the number one selling manga in America is Fruits Baskets, which is for girls. It says so right on the books.” So there ya go. I do know that aisle is full of girls about her age (13), and there are a few books she’s had to have ordered because they’re constantly sold out. So I’d say their target audience is adolescent girls.
I’ll bet if you did a bar graph of manga sales vs. comics sales in the US over the past 20 years, the bar representing manga sales would be growing steadily, if not rapidly … probably quite rapidly … and the bar graph representing comics sales would be shrinking. How much I don’t know. Point is, manga sales in Japan, a nation noted for its high literacy rate, remain very strong and are making inroads in the US market. US comic sales seem to be shrinking, unless niche marketing and sales via the Internet are doing better than I would assume. I’m sure there are folks here who can disabuse me of these notions if I am wrong.
More possibilities – Including superheroes
More varied art styles
Often more plot and less soap opera
Endings
Released as books with few to no advertisements instead of dinky 20 page suckers that are 10 pages of advertising
etc.
American comics–Marvel, DC, etc.–pretty much gave up on the “casual reader” in the late 70s and decided to focus on comic book shops. Instead of attracting new, young readers (aside from half-hearted attempts like Marvel Adventures and all of DC’s Cartoon Channel/Bruce Timm knockoffs, which get maybe 2% of the companies’ energy and promotions), they focus on pumping older readers for more and more money. Between numerous Batman and X-Men spinoffs, Archive and Absolute editions, etc., the major companies realistically expect their older readers to drop around $200/month. If I were an 11-year-old today with a vague affection for superheroes, I’m not sure how I could afford to get in on this hobby or what the appeal of doing so might be.
Manga, instead of cannibalizing itself by competing with its own spinoffs for a dwindling audience, appeals directly to readers who don’t read comics, don’t like superheroes, and don’t visit comic book shops. Ultimately, Manga publishers aren’t going after Spider-Man’s readers, they’re going after The Babysitting Club and Sweet Valley High’s. Their demographic is young, female, and book-oriented. Comics’ demographic is 30- and 40-something males who live in their parents’ basements, and that’s a sucky demographic to keep chasing.
When I worked in a comic book shop we rarely had any female customers purchase comic books. Women, on the other hand, accounted for roughly 50% of Manga sales and their ages ranged from early teens.
As someone has mentioned, there’s are many different genres of manga, and there’s almost something for everyone. There’s ninjas (cool ninjas anyway), detective stories , just plain werid stories (See Death Note), samurai flick, werid samuria flicks (See Samurai Champoon), sports (Slam Dunk) and almost anything else. You can almost find anything represented in manga, from heart-wrenching love stories to Iron Chef-style cooking compeititons.
And nowadays, its seem that anything from Japan or Korea is automatically cool.
There are very few Humor titles in comic books (oxymorons, anyone?).
There are no real non-comics humor magazines in the US anymore, unless you count the rapidly-withering Mad.
But Mangas aren’t afraid to laugh.
Personally, I’ve never liked comic books. Or graphic novels. Or manga. I prefer animation. That said, one of the reasons I’ve never picked up a comic book series is because of how freaking complicated the backstory is to everything. It’s all been retconned and rebooted and re-thised and re-thated and thus it is impossible to really be able to jump right in and figure out what’s going on. Manga, at least, often doesn’t have that, or at least not to the same degree.
Your comics sales graph is way off – looking at the last 20 years, comics sales went up steadily and significantly in the late '80. In the early '90’s, they skyrocketed for a few years, but it was unsustainable. Sales did drop significantly (some say disastrously) in the mid’90’s but after a couple years they started going back up and have been steadily increasing ever since, especially in the last five years. The real problem is distribution, which is hideous. But anecdotally, the retailers that don’t have their heads up their asses are going gangbusters right now.
In the comics fan community, trust me, all we ever do is worry about how manga is taking over the medium. But it looks worse than it is, especially to someone who doesn’t read comics. That’s because manga’s primary distribution channel is bookstores, where you find yourself regularly, so you see what sales there are. Comics’ distribution channel are comics stores, which you never find yourself in, but trust me, they’re moving. It’s an open question as to whether comics would be better off if they moved a greater percentage of their sales from the LCS to Borders, but I’ve been pretty much convinced that the bookstores might be good for growing business but the medium needs the professional comic book retailer now because if they’re at all good at their job, they can upsell you on stuff you wouldn’t have tried by yourself. Without that cross-pollination the medium really would be in trouble.
This is false. US comic readership waxes and wanes. It exploded in the early 1990’s due to the creation of Image comics and comics speculation. It then crashed, hard, but it’s been growing back ever since. The last couple of years have been paticularly kind to comics, perhaps because of strong support from the recent quality superhero films. We’re far from the spectacular years of the Golden and Silver Ages, true, but then again, so is Manga.
Anyway, it’s definitely true that Manga outsels US comics in the bookstores. Why?
Convienent packaging. Thankfully, US comics are learning and trade paperbacks are on the ascendency. Ten years ago, only the most memorable or popular stories made trade paperback, now pretty much everything does. I’m following entire titles by waiting for the trade collections, instead of getting the pamphlets. Marvel has even copied the exact shape of Manga digests. It’s possible that the Pamphlet form comic will die in the next two decades, but Marvel DC et al will still be going strong selling larger paperbacks. Manga cleans up in the bookstores, but DC and Marvel Superheroes still rule the roost in monthly pamphlet sales (yes, Manga is availiable in such forms).
Less cultural baggage. Anything manga can do, American comics have also done. Romance, fantasy, science fiction? It’s all there, hell, you don’t even have to go to obscure indy companies to find it. The idea that all US Comics have to offer is superhero slugfests is a fallacy, but it’s such a common one that it’s difficult to market the alternatives.
Easy tie-ins from other media. Many quality manga have a corresponding anime, and vice versa. This is practically expected. US comics have their movies, but the non-superhero stuff’s connection to comics is oft ignored (see Men in Black, Road to Perdition, A History of Violence). I hope Sin City will help reverse this trend.
Japanophilia. Manga is cool because it comes from Japan. US Comics aren’t cool becuase they come from the US. In part, it’s a fad. I’m not saying that manga doesn’t have some quality stuff, but I look at my local Borders, and I see that the Manga section not only easily dwarfs the US Graphic Novel section, but is very close to being as large as the Science Fiction or Mystery sections, I severely doubt that this trend is sustainable.
It’s the mentality of everyone seeking the best market. Instead of each store trying for a good mix, they see one hot category and think “Why bother with the others?”
This is like saying “Low fat is hot, so I just won’t stock the other varieties of pretzels”
I’d take that observation a step further and extend it to the still-evolving graphic novel form – a medium that seems to want badly to become a genre (subject matter: small, dark psychodrama – visual style: a little more latitude, but keep it recognizably quirky).
As for the socially maladjusted adult nerd demographic, I’d say it imforms the graphic novel both in creator base and audience. It is “for” them as completely as early TV comedy was “for” the children of urban immigrants. Any further artistic possibilities in it probably won’t be explored until that first generation of creators spawns a second one.