How will these American manga-influenced stories differ from the non-superhero titles that are already quite common, if not by aping manga’s visual style?
One, they’ll have to be accessable. That’ll probably mean in the same format (size) as current manga and in the bookstores. Yes, y’all have listed a whole bunch of indy titles, but the only way to find them is braving a comic store. Most people will not do that (heck, I won’t do that and I’m interested in comics. I hate the cooler than thou vibe in most stores). For comics to have mainstream succes, they’ll have to be in the regular bookstores. We’ve hashed out the availablity of Marvel, etc. in stores but indy comics have never been other than some rare titles like Maus and Love&Rockets anthologies. But sneaking onto the racks with the manga is the perfect way to do it.
And, this is a bad way of putting it, but it’s always seems to me that indie comics try to hard to be “meaningful” and make a point. It’s understandable since there aren’t all that many and it’s not easy to publish here, that the artist wants his work to be important. I’ve seen issues of most of the comics you listed in an earlier post and they haven’t appealed to me. I’ve been a comics fan from way back but once I grew out of Spiderman (which I think I mostly liked for the soap opera-y aspect of Peter Parker’s life), the next step to indie comics just wasn’t interesting.
Most manga isn’t trying for "importance, it’s just there to tell an entertaining story. Maybe it’s a cliched romance or an office workers’ travails or a new mom, or maybe it’s a high school tennis team (The Prince of Tennis is hugely popular in Japan right now among both boys and girls). I like the everyday, lonely people finding love genre so much, I’ve learned Japanse to read them.
Entertaining stories that appeal to teens and preteens will establish a base of readership that may migrate over to the more meaningful works. Or not. Plenty of women read the same romances over and over again, I believe Harlequin is already planning to give it to them in manga form, that’s exactly the type of thing that will open up comics to a whole new audience.
The problem is an American comics industry that seems to be unable to reach readers beyond hard core fans and appears to be doomed to extinction much like the pulp fiction magazines of the 30’s and 40’s. And its extinction could happen with frightening swiftness. Pulp magazines were still going strong in the late '40’s but had virtually disappeared by the late '50’s.
Rumiko Takahashi is responsible for Inuyasha, and while the series is entertaining in a 14-year-old girl kinda way, she should have wrapped it up about 40 volumes ago. At this rate, my grandchildren will still be reading about Inuyasha and co. hunting those damn jewel shards in 60 years.
Creators don’t tend to stick with an ongoing series forever (limited series are another story, and don’t forget that Marvel and DC releases plenty of those, too). I think that’s mostly just because comics and manga are published differently. Spider-Man is open-ended; he’s been around since the '60s and has seen lots of writers come and go. But then you have Savage Dragon, which creator Erik Larsen has been on since day one and is still with to this day.
You won’t get any disagreement from me. Trying to ‘hip up’ the classic characters manga-style is just pathetic. It pisses off oldtime fans, does nothing to interest manga fans, and just reeks of desperation. I’m a big fan of American comics, and I think the artform is beautiful. There’s also some manga I appreciate, though I’m very picky – Demon Ororon and Samurai Champloo are two favorites. Nothing quite combines the sublime with the idiotic the same way manga does. But I get tired of endless merry-go-round debates about why manga is Teh Roxx0r and why Western comics suck. It always comes back to the same points – that comics are juvenile and substandard. You can point out intelligent, evocative, mindblowing series with incredible art that have wons oodles of awards, and people will still say, “Yeah, well, but…” and it’s right back where it started.
Like Antartcic Press?
Who have been doing just that since the 80’s, & even though they have a good fan base, many comics shops don’t even carry them.
Why? I dunno. 
I took a look at some of those artists and some other mentioned later in the thread. They are talented and draw quality work, but they weren’t what I was referring to. This image screams aesthetic beauty to me in a way that I’ve never seen in American comics. But that may just be my preference.
nods Okay. But was their relationship the focus of the story, or just an afterthought (as many superheroes’ private lives seem to be).
Blue Monday heavily borrows from manga in terms of style.
Whoosed a bit. I was referring to Bastard!!.
American comics aren’t unworthy - I haven’t taken that stance. I know many people who love American comics. I’ve spent a good part of my time special ordering manga at a traditional comic book store. For me, I just personally like manga better. I’d rather watch Vampire Hunter D than the Fantastic Four movie - the medium doesn’t influence me. I’m interested into getting into Sandman, but I just don’t have the money right now to dive into it.
What I see in popular American comics is such a focus on superheroes and saving people. That isn’t my thing. I know there are comics you can find that focus on more mundane things, but the average person is stuck in the superhero stereotype of comics. The same thing with manga - people are stuck in the big-eyed kids stuff stereotype.
I’m 19. Most people my age wouldn’t care at all about Superman and Batman if it wasn’t for the movies in the last 15 years, and the teen targeted Smallville.
With superheroes, the emphasis should always be placed on, well, heroing. A certain amount of soap opera is included, but the plots revolve around action, heroics, and the effects on the hero’s psyche. If you’re willing to look at a HIGHLY unconventional superhero story with a homosexual romance at the center, check out Peter Milligan’s Enigma. Or Top Ten. Or Age of Bronze, which is a retelling of the Trojan War complete with Achilles and Patroclus.
The movies. And the animated series. And the live action series. And the video games. And the prose novels. And the audio books. And the action figures. And the freaking underoos.
And the comic books which are no where near as unhealthy as some of you are saying they are.
Ah. Okay.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing American manga anytime soon, if that’s the case.
The companies with enough clout to get their stuff into stores will be reluctant to take a chance on a genre they aren’t sure they can sell if it doesn’t have obvious artistic merit.
They already know they can sell “dumb” stories with superheroes, why take the risk to sell “dumb” romances? Especially when they’re already offering “smart” ones. Hell, what artist would want to do it?
Well, the reason is because it’ll be selling even more comics to a whole new demographic. Face it, the majority of novels sold in the US aren’t highly acclaimed literature, they’re things like Dean Koontz. And I guarantee you the average Dean Koontz fan isn’t going to be picking up “A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius” anytime soon. Plus, your average young reader doesn’t start out with Pynchon, that’s the final destination, not the beginning.
But, the pulp stuff provides opportunities for young artists to get their foot in the door and gain experience. More opprotunities to have their work seen. Maybe they’ll graduate to more complex works or maybe they’ll be happy with relatively simple works that are popular.
Plus, even the “smart”, highly acclaimed comics aren’t easily available. We’re going to see American manga but it’s probalby going to come from companies that are currently publishing translated manga. They know the format and will have the clout to get new product on the shelves next to the Japanese manga. I know one company (CPM or Viz maybe?) has already announced they’re looking for American artists to creat new titles.
Oh yeah, I totally understand that.
But the thing is, people working in comics, both artistically and in the back offices, are interested in superheroes. It’s what they know, it’s what they like. When they’re interested in doing something else, when they aren’t being hacks, I mean, more often than not they want to do something “important”. If they had interest in these other genres, but not a drive to make “art”, they’d be working at media more profitable than comics or manga.
And frankly, the same goes for the readers. I can go for any drama you could name, if it’s done well enough. And I’m not saying I don’t like more popcorn stuff myself. I subsist on a steady diet of superheroics and I make no pretense that most of it is fine literature. But my patience for works of, shall we say middling quality, outside of the genres I really like is quite limited.
If disposable sports dramas and romances are what it takes to support the really worthy, Eisner-award quality, stuff as well as the superhero smackdowns I favor, then I’m all for it. Just don’t expect me to read or support those lines. And don’t hold your breath.
(and don’t start using manga style art and idioms on stuff I’d like to read. I can’t stand them)
I was just making a list of companies that went under during that time period. Charlton was always an industry bottom-feeder, but the market had previously been robust enough to support companies like that. And Warren’s end also conicided with the disappearance of other publishers’ black-and-white comics magazines from the newsstands.
As for the reason for that decline, I don’t think that anything in particular happened in the 70s and 80s to cause it. I would say certain long-running trends caught up with the comic book industry around that time…
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Suburbanization: America’s gradual shift from urban to suburban decreased a lot of outlets for comic book sales. Car culture and the decline of mass transit led to fewer newstands. Supermarkets and big chain pharmacies replaced mom-n-pop neighborhood groceries and corner drugstores. And shopping centers dependent on vehicle access replaced neighborhood shopping streets/districts.
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Something I call the Nickel Hershey Bar Effect. For decades, Hershey’s flagship product was the Hershey Bar, which cost 5 cents when launched and for decades thereafter. Hershey held the line on the price , even as the size of the bar shrank to little more the size of a credit card. When Hershey bowed the inevitable and doubled the price (while increasing the size), there was a large backlash and loss of sales, which allowed Mars to pass Hershey in total sales.
Something similar happend to comic books. When they first appeared in the 30’s, they cost a dime, which was more-or-less the same as other entertainment options of the period (magazine, movie ticket, a few songs on the jukebox). They also contained 80+ pages and had a variety of features, so they provided significantly more entertainment time for their cost than they do today. While other forms of entertainment got more costly over the years, comics prices stayed at a dime. This was done by reducing the number of pages down to 64, then 56, then 48, then 36, then finally the modern size of 22 pages devoted to one feature (or perhaps a lead feature and one backup). Once that size format was reached, there was nothing left to do but to increase cover prices. But the public, used to regarding comic books as an ultra-cheap form of entertainment, resented price increases and sales dropped, which led to further price increases (comic prices quadrupled from the late 60s to early 80s). Attempts to deliver more bang for the buck through higher page counts fell flat. My mom refused to let me buy DC’s Dollar Comics (even with my own money), thinking it a waste to spend a whole dollar on a comic book. Of course, that Dollar Comic contained more pages and cost less than 3 regular comics, but that didn’t matter cuz comics are cheap. Even today, if you ask most non-comics readers how much comics should cost, their suggestions will max out at one dollar.
Or Jaime Hernandez’s Locas (from the *Love and Rockets * anthology), the epic coming-of-age story about two young women, Maggie and Hopey, who are best friends and on-again/off-again lovers, growing up and having adventures and looking for their place in the world and ultimately finding it… with each other. This is not a superhero story, not even close, but I’d be lying if I said there are no superheroes at all.
I doubt that. Especially since Marvel was outselling DC at the time they acquired the Star Wars license. Just a nitpick.
Saying Marvel was doing fine because they were outselling DC is like saying the Knicks are a good basketball team because they have a better record than the Charlotte Bobcats. Star Wars and the Uncanny X-Men revival were about the only big successes Marvel had going for them in the late late 70s
So let me see if I got the history straight. Comics started out really cheap, 10 cents a pop for an 80 page comic, and stayed that way for decades. Production costs went up and publishers held the line by cutting content, going down to 22 pages per book eventually.
Then in the 80s comics lost their newsstand distribution – there’s some dispute here, but I like the “newsstands weren’t buying” theory because I can’t see a publisher voluntarily giving up that kind of distribution unless sales got so low that they HAD to or go broke.
The publishers went to newsstand marketing, and to keep themselves in the black, killed all their titles except the superhero titles that were their best sellers. The lesser known publishers who were selling more marginal titles went under at this time. Going “superhero” only saved the big publishers, and I imagine the success of movies based on comic titles must have helped a lot, too. In fact, I wonder if comics might be as obscure as, say, slash, if it weren’t for the publicity generated by movies.
In the 90s, for reasons I don’t quite get, there was a boom in comics. How big a boom I don’t know. Did it return comics to the kind of numbers they had when they were successfully distributed via newsstand? In any vent, there was a bust, but the bust didn’t wipe out comics, just kinda took them back to the state they were at prior to the bust. They’ve bene growing steadily but not booming since, with many more titles and a wider range for subject matter since the niche market gives comic publishers greater latitude to publish. But it’s still a niche market … if it weren’t for movies, it would only have the Internet and specialty stores to promote it.
I’d say it’s a picture of a medium either on the way out, or in transition. I’m not up on how manga are doing, but it’s hard to see how they’re not expanding in the American market with all the bookstore distribution they have.
I think a lot of that boom is owed not so much to new readership as to people of our generation (I’m 39) spending disposable income on a nostalgia item.
Out of curiousity, where in theories and timelines does the “collectible” trend of the…early 90s(?) play in?
You know, the “1 collectible card out of a set of 8” polybagged with every volume of every X-title’s multi-issue arc, the chromium/prismatic/gatefold/foil/limited-edition covers, the Death of Superman polybagged extravaganza with, among other things, a Superman armband, etc. Was this part of the boom Evil Captor mentioned, or did it help kill it?
I’ll admit that I had a poor sense of time back then (not much better now, actually), but it seemed like comics went from $0.75 for a “regular” issue to a $1.25 baseline price in the course of a year or two, with every other issue of every X-title or Image title running $2+ with some gimmick promotion as above.
Thank you. Reading this thread and hearing the same complaints/comparisons of US style comics vs manga over and over again was starting to get to me.
“Comics are too stupid and juvenile” … follwed by counter-examples
“Comics don’t have the same range”… followed by counter-examples
“Manga has continuing storylines” …followed by… you know
“Manga has storylines that actually end” …yada yada
This continues for awhile until the circle is complete with…
“Comics are too serious. Manga islight and fluffy” …which brings us back to the beginning.
I don’t read either very often and I buy neither but every blue moon or so I’ll borrow massive heaps of both genres from a friend and pour through them. This of course has the advantage that my friend has already waded through the and separated the wheat from the chaffso all I’m reading is the good stuff.
From this I’ve discoverd that the biggest difference… dum de de dum! Visual styles. Naturally there a high degree of varience within manga styles as within US comic styles though both have a number of conventions that are common to each.
Other then that, like everything else, ninety percent of both are crap. If you read manga you know enough to avoid most of the crap [aka stuff that doesn’t appeal to you]. If you read manga in the states you have an advantage in that a huge amount of the crap never makes it over the ocean. If you read comics you know enough to avoid the crap [stuff that doesn’t appeal to you] with the slight disadvantage to the newcomer that the crap is homegrown and thus widely available.
Distrubutors hated comics, because they took up space that could go to something more profitable, like girlie magazines. In 1980, a comic book retailed for, like, 35 or 40 cents, compared to $3.50 for something like Penthouse. And they couldn’t just distribute Batman and Supertman; they had to display 8 new DC comics a week, and 12 new Marvels. That’s a lot of rack space for a retailer who gets about a nickel per comic book, and could be getting 50-75 cents for some other periodical.
Also, newsstand vendors could return what they didn’t sell, and with that slim profit margin, they weren’t busting their asses to move the product. The late 70s saw the beginnings of the Direct Market, a growth of stores that specialized in selling comic books. They got their comics at a huge discount, as a tradeoff for not being able to return what was unsold. They were timid about buying marginal books, so in the early 80s Marvel started selling multiple versions of the X-Men (New Mutants, X-Factor, Wolverine minis). DC had been spreading Batman and Superman around to five or six books each (including World’s Finest and Justice League, which had both of them in them), but as late as 1979, Marvel’s worst-selling titles (Ghost Rider and Sgt. Fury reprints, IIRC) outsold DC’s top-sellers.
The bottom line is that Marvel and DC, convinced that they were soon to go out of business, stopped trying to get new readers from the general population and started to focus on getting their existing customers to buy more product and pay more for it. Manga publishers never hit this particular stage of development and appealed to a radically different audience. And while mainstream American publishers have flirted with Manga styles over the years, they never abandoned the practice of eating their own body parts to survive in the short term. X-Men originally competed with Doom Patrol. It eventually competed with Avengers and Fantastic Four. Now it’s competing with seven other X-Men titles.