Why Are Manga Succeeding and Comics ... Not Succeeding

Cafe Society
101

Here’s my take on comics history. Dates are not exact, apologies to any obvious omissions.

In the twenties, thirties, forties and fifties, everybody in all age groups read comics. Why not? They were made from cheap paper stock, varied fictional subject matter, recycled material and tapped into a wide newsstand distribution network and is itself an inexpensive, essentially disposable reading form. It was profitable, ubiquitous. Certain of its genres are particularly American, too: the western, the urban “noir” crime story, the pulp heroes, and the superhero. They appeal to young and old. Comic book circulation, like radio audiences, is in the millions.

Dozens and dozens of comic book companies are formed between the 1920s and fifties: Warren, Timely Comics, National Periodical Company, Atlas,

Of particular interest at this time is an upstart company called EC that essentially croners the market in titillating gore and horror comics.

Frederick Wertham publishes Seduction of the Innocent and blames comic books for the post WWII rise in juvenile deliquency, among other things. This ultimately leads to congressional hearings in which the entire industry is blamed hysterically for misguided youth.

The voluntary “Comics Code Authority” is formed. Many, many comics for years submit to this organization to affic its stamp of approval on comics. This event, and the aftermath that followed, more squarely affixes to the minds of the American general public the idea that comics are for kids and teenagers, effectively limiting its appeal to post-collegiate adult consumers. You’ll find in other societies around the world, (perhaps most particularly in some European comics markets and Asian manga cultures) this particular stigma did not exist much. It is at this point that circulation numbers most noticeably begin to fall.

Publisher William Gaines closes shop on EC and its entire line of horror line and begins a new, successful periodical, MAD Magazine. By dealing in satire obstinsively targeting high school students, college students and adults he sidesteps the comics code authority entirely and studiously builds a subscriber base in the hundreds of thousands.

Timely and National Periodical, having learned the lessons of EC, submit wholly to the Comic Code Authority, toning down their few horror and weird comics.

Timely eventually becomes Marvel Comics. National Periodical Company becomes known as DC comics, after its flagship title, Detective Comics, (and perhaps, Askia suddenly thinks, to take advantage of EC’s brand name recognition and former popularity.)

By the sixties television begins its ascension as America’s predominant media form. Comics responds by co-opting it, publishing monthly comics starring TV and movie stars. Dell and Gold Key comics in particular lead this trend, publishing dozens of comic versions of then-current TV shows.

Like all things publication costs and production costs begin to rise: salaries increase, paper costs more. Comics, in selling and promoting primarily to children’s budgets, begin to slash content in order to stay affordable.

I feel I should mention something here about how underground comics of the 60s and 70s pissed off authorities again with periodic rounds of censorship. Even under the auspices of comic book shops, some shopowners are still being persecuted. No other American media form has been prosecuted and censored this way. These costly court battles encouraged mainstream comics companies to stay away from anothing remotely resembling controversial material.

New media concurrently emerge to compete for the consumer dollar: firstly, home cable with uncensored movie content is offered to the American home; secondly, the arcade game market is developed; after the success of Star Wars the summer movie blockbuster event is born; later, the home video / and role-playing board gaming market is born; finally comes the internet, and its de facto home porn delivery with uncensored content. Comic book readership responds to the immediacy of these experiences by increasingly dropping comic book reading as a habit, comic book companies try to co-opt these new media whenever possible.

In the 80s, comics systematically undergo a rigorous makeover. New technologies are employed to make comics look better, print better, use better paper stock. All of this made comics jump sharply in price. It also helped make newsstand sales still relevant, although with fewer and fewer active readers, fewer and fewer newsstands offered as many comics as they did even twenty years earlier. More and more often serious comics fans went to the direct market and comics lost their former ubiquity. While, both comics companies and newsstand distributers mutually parted ways, I still feel comics companies did not do enough to insure comics stayed as widespread visibly as they once did.

It was after a series of high-profile auctions in which certain vintage comic books sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars that I recall a groundswell of interest in comics not as reading material, but investor material. Thus was born the comics speculator boom of the late 80s and early 1990s. The tragic flaw in the speculator boom is that it was NOT focused on the content of comic books, but flashy event driven marketing gimmicks designed to sell titles to novice and casual comic book fans who believed that by purchasing comics thay will be investing in something that will appreciate in value virtually overnight. Comic book companies themselves begin conspicuously selling books emphasizing their collectibility and price guides are formed that give the erroneous impression that books are worth several dollars ACTUALLY more than the price paid just a few months earlier. This led to such instant classic events such as the death of Robin, Superman’s death, Spider-Man’s wedding, the Hulk’s cure, foil covers, multiple covers, variant covers and in one mind-gogglingly stupid innovation, variant interiors. The short lived excitement and sales cannot sustain itself as more and more collectors find that making lasting money selling comics won’t happen.

During the boom, the ugly side of the business becomes apparent. Marvel Comics in a ballsy but ultimtaely stupid move essentially doubles their monthly titles in an attempt to “squeeze out” competitors from the limited retail shelf space of comics shops and the few places that still have . The content of many of these new Marvel titles is extremely iffy, however, and does not bring in new readers.

The speculator boom busts. The short lived attractions of the comic book speculator boom implode, nastily. Start-up companies formed out of this boom close shop:

The effect industry-wide is devastating.

(Okay, I’ve been typing this for more than 45 minutes… I need to wrap this up.)

Blah blah blah… rise of indie comics and superstar creators since the 80s…

Blah blah blah… grim and gritty superhero era…

Blah blah blah… manga influences certain American creators…

Blah blah blah… still, a new generation of editors did make attempts to create more diverse story genres. Rise and fall of Epic line, Star Comics, Helix Imprint, VERTIGO, MAX and Marvel Knights…

Blah blah blah… increased use television and movies using comics characters for source material…

Blah blah blah… cautious evidence of comics as a medium for tV and movies to adapt interesting stories…

Blah blah blah… the Hollywood / comics connection…

Blah blah blah… superhero comics still intricably tied to the medium, but some new rumored TV and movie projects may help break out of this…

Blah blah blah… comics online… both serial and daily strips…

Blah blah blah… comics sales may be endangered by new trend of illegal comics file-swapping…

Blah blah blah… on the other hand, .cbr may interest fans in new kinds of stories beyond superheroes…

Blah blah blah… I’m starting to realize I’ve done a piss-poor job of explaining how manga’s history sidestepped a lot of the hysterical self-censorship, prosecution, censorship, persecution and greed that undermined American comics to its current state, and comics would be better off if they adapted the pulp tactics of, say ANALOG and ASIMOV Magazines. Oh well. See, THIS is what happens before coffee and just free-associating writing with no writing plan.

102

HEY!

As stated above, it does exist.

The company that makes it is a niche, but that may change.

103

Askia hinted at it, but I’d like to talk about the big dirty open secret of current comics: It isn’t about the comics.

Warner Brothers (who own DC) and Marvel Media (Marvel’s corporate mother company), and to a lesser extent smaller concerns like Dark Horse are interested in the comics as a means of developing intellectual property for use in more profitable media, such as movies and television. Making any money on the comics themselves is just gravy, really. It’s no accident that many TV and movie people moonlight as popular comics writers (like Judd Winick, Jeph Loeb, Paul Dini, Kevin Smith, and Joss Whedon), and that comics have become increasingly more “cinematic” in format and tone (although some would say it’s the other way around).

That doesn’t mean that the creators (and immediate corporate handlers even) aren’t interested in putting out quality stories, they do the best they can. What it means is that expanding into diffferent genres and even expanding the reader base isn’t a concern.

I hope that the recent burst of non-superhero comics movies (ranging in genre from Men in Black to A History of Violence) will change that a bit.

Oh, and Askia’s right about the censorship. Overzealous DAs love to prosecute comic store owners for obscenity for selling material to adults that, if a movie, would be R-rated at worst.

104

Probably because it gets them some points with the voters for being anti-pornography, and comics shop owners don’t have the financial resources to fight back.

105

Actually, you made a pretty good point that I hadn’t thought of before, about Wertham’s little censorship trip forcibly infantilizing comics for decades. Thinking about it, SF and fantasy were once regarded much as comics are, but they were able to “grow up” in terms of content because they weren’t subjected to censorship as comics were. Makes me wonder if comics wouldn’t be a more widespread phenom in the US if they hadn’t been artificially restrained in topic by the censors.

106

Clarification: Comics PRICES stayed the same for decades, but the page count graudally reduced over the years. Marvel’s first titles in 1961 were 22 pages of story for 10 cents, and that went up to 12 cents a few years later.

As I mentioned before, the number of outlets carrying comic books had been decreasing over time before the 80s, and comic books never entirely disappeared from newsstands and other traditional outlets. Indeed, I bought a good chunk of my Marvel/DC comics through the 80s at a newstand that never stopped carrying comics (even though other stores where I bought comics either stopped carrying them or went under). It’s just that any growth at that time was happening in the direct sales market, which the companies liked because they were not paying returns for unsold material.

107

So? Marvel wasn’t going to go under with or without the Star Wars license. Marvel published plenty of other titles in the 70s that while not selling gangbusters made a profit. IOW, they didn’t need to have their “bacon” saved.

108

Beg to differ. Comic industry people work on superhero titles for the major companies becaues that’s how they can make a living in the comics field. And they certainly know and like more than just superhero comics. Even if they are fanboys from way back, they grew up reading comics in an era when Marvel and DC had more genre diversity. Quite a few people at Marvel/DC got their start at other companies working on their own non-superhero stuff. (Oni Press in particular has been a farm system for the majors, sending up Rucka, Simone, Vaughan, Winnick, DeFillipis & Weir and a few others I’m forgetting. Someone like Colleen Doran, who’s been doing A Distant Soil for years, has made it clear that she can only publish irregularly in between assignments from the big companies, becuase that’s what pays the rent. Look at Crossgen from a few years ago, or look at Kurt Busiek, who might as well change his name to “Mr. Mainstream Superhero”. He’s won Eisners and done “important” stories, but that’s for his work in the superhero genre (Marvels, Astro City). When he goes outside the genre, he does stuff like Conan, Arrowmsmith, or Shockrockets!, which are all quality enjoyable books but not particularly “important” or “art”

109

Consider also cartoonists and comics writers with TV and movie projects like Dwayne McDuffie, Aaron McGruder, Reginald Hudlin and Christopher Priest are all tentatively tapping into a very old black comic book fanbase of readership and a much younger potential fanbase of would be African-American cartoonists, filmmakers, and screenwriters, folks like John Singleton and John Ridley, and fanboys Samuel L. Jackson and (reportedly) Jada Pickett-Smith (who wrote Menace #1 with Rob Liefield those 45 minutes Awesome Entertainment wcame and went.) This has the net effect of bring a completely different sensibility to comics and doing something which has happened only haphazardly and rather paternally in the past: bringing a completely different ethnic perspective to superhero stories and comics in general. In fact, had Milestone Media been established just five years before during the mid-to-late eighties instead of right in the midst of the comic book speculative craze, I daresay I think it’d be around today.

110

Not to nitpick, but I thought I might add some comments on comic book history.

First of all, comic books did not exist in the 1920s. The comic book industry effectively jumpstarted with the publication of Famous Funnies in 1935. Famous Funnies was essentially a reprint package of popular newspaper comic strips, but the publisher soon realized that it would be cheaper to pay for young wirters and artists to produce original material. Famous Funnies become New Fun Comics (to emphasize the originalness of the material), and when that became a big hit right off the bat, a line of companion titles were launched: Detective Comics, Adventure Comics, Action Comics, etc. New Fun Comics became More Fun Comics (and, oddly, was dominated by the very grim Specter and Dr. Fate). In case you haven’t figured it out, the company in question was called National Periodical Publications. However, that name was somewhat obscure as not never was prominently featured on covers or mastheads. The company would soon unoffically be known as Superman-DC Comics, since its titles had an identifying blurb “A Superman-DC Comic” in an indica in a corner of their covers.

(Superman-DC had a sister company called All-American Comics that featured a similar lineup of superhero heavy anthologies (All-American Comics, Sensation Comics, Star-Spangled Comics, Flash Comics, etc.) All-American published All-Star Comics, home of the Justice Society of America, which prominently featured All-American’s big guns (Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Flash, Hawkman), but also characters from the Superman-DC side of the aisle. In any event, the two compnaies merged when William Gaines sold his interest in All-American and struck out on his own to found Educational Comics. After his untimely death in a boating accident circa 1950, the company passed to his son Max, who shortened the name to EC Comics and changed the company’s direction.)

Lots of comic book companies did start in the 30s and 40s. (Not so much in the 50s, as comics were already declining in total sales even before Wertham and the Comics Code.) However, Atlas and Warren were not two of them. Atlas is what Timely called itself in the 50s. Warren did not get started until the 60s and in any event published black-and-white magazines.

111

You ARE nitpicking! But I don’t mind.

Well, I say I’m still right but I’m barely correct. I’ve seen Sunday sections of newspapers from the 20s of Ohio State University’s archives in their Museum of Cartoon Art, and some look just like oversized and sometimes tabloid sized comics to me. And according to my copy of A Smithstonian Book of Comic Book Comics, edited by Michael Barrier and Michael Williams (my companion to a similar Smithstonian book about newspaper comics) it says in the introduction on page 9: “The Sunday comics section-- very thick and colorful in those early days – was itself a comic book of a sort. But just as the comic strip took a curiously long time to assume its definitive shape, so too did the comic book… (snip) They first reprinted newspaper comics in books (both hard and soft covers) making what one might call early comic books. In 1929, one publisher tried something different – a weekly publication made up completely of new comics. Called The Funnies it died after a few issues, perhaps because it was tabloid size and looked too much like a Sunday comics section.”

You’re absolutely right about Famous Funnies being the turning point for comics, though. This book also states that the decline in popularity of comics was directly attributed to Wertham’s witch hunt, which effectively ended the 16-year popularity of comics, which sells in the millions, and had comic book burnings and distributers refusing to sell books.

You’re absolutely right about Atlas/Timely and Warren.

I’m glad you resurrected this thread because it brings up a few more possibilities about manga I hadn’t considered.

The wikipedia entry on manga had a statistic I never heard of before: apparently, one week’s average manga sales in Japan currently exceeds an entire year’s worth of American comic book sales.

Also: manga are black and white and mass-produced on cheap newsprint and published in phone book sized anthologies. Since the late 1970s American publishers have tried “glitzing up” comics with better paper stock and color, (I remember when Baxter Press first came around!) more expensive cover stocks and whittling down page numbers. There’s really little return on your investment compared to manga: we seriously expect comics fans to pay $3.00 for a 22 page pamphlet, when a paperback bestseller of 300+ pages can be had for about $5.00!

112

I’ve heard (but don’t know for a fact) that in Japan, comics don’t bear the juvenile stigma they have in America. A professional adult on the subway can read a manga without people assuming he’s retarded.

Wish we had that here.

113

Back to nitpick comics history again! Then I’ll talk about Japan

First off, I mixed up Max and Bill Gaines in my previous post. EC was a very influential company, but they never cornered the market in anything…Bill Gaines was very committed to quality and didn’t want to expand the staff beyond the group of talented men he had assembled. I don’t think EC ever had more than 12 titles on the newstands at once and maybe half of those were horror. It was imitators flodding the market that acutally did the most damage, as a lot of those titles were poorer quality and even more graphic and sadisitic.

EC was also noted for their sci-fi and war titles. Mad actually began as a comic book, but was switched to magazine format after the Comics Code came into effect. EC actually continued publishing comics post-code: the sci-fi titles continued and Gaines tried other stuff, including a surreal title about pychoanalysts and a pirate title (which became the basis for the pirate comics in Watchmen). However, sales were not the same, and after the Code rejected a story Gaines was exceptionally proud of, he cancelled his line of comics to concentrate on Mad.

As for Wertham and SOTI, I think you’re overstating the effect of Wertham somewhat. It’s not the he singlehandedly convinced the moms of America that comics were for kids and for kids only. The era of comics having a truly wide age readership went through the Depression and the War. But when G.I. Joe came home he traded in his service uniform for a gray flannel suit, moved to the suburbs, and left comic books behind.

And although the bleeding didn’t really start until the after the Code went into effect, sales were slumping after the end of WWII. Publishers didn’t stop publishing superheroes and moving into other genres looking for the next big thing becuase they were bored. Fawcett, one of the giants of the Golden Age, got out of comics entirely in the early 50s. (Yes, I know DC sued them over Captain Marvel bieng a ripoff of Superman, but judgement in the suit was never handed down as Fawcett capitulated and decided to abandon not only the Captain, but the rest fo their line as well.

114

Well, I was criticized in Japan by my Japanese boss in my otherwise all-Japanese office for presenting an unprofessional image for leaving manga on my desk while I went out to lunch…and I used to read comics on the New York subways all the time (They make a great shield against pahandlers and prosleytzers.)

115

The art in american comics is very different than in manga, and I prefer the aesthetic appeal of manga. The art of american comics can be nice but I’ve never seen a picture that really took my breath away or a scene that was so amazing that I cried over it no matter how many times I read it. I particularly enjoy Boy’s Love manga which is male homoerotic stories written by women for women. That just couldn’t be found here in the states in any form other than fanfiction until very recently. I used to work in a comic book shop and I would read various american comic titles when work was slow. The female characters never really appealed to me, the guys weren’t very hot, and they just didn’t do the trick for me compared to the manga I read. X-men and Sandman were the only two works that I liked enough to buy and I’ve lost my X-men comic over times. It’s a different style and I don’t think that manga are better than american comics or vice versa, I just prefer the style that can be found in some manga.

116

I’d still like to have a graph chart to clarify this. Cold statistics can quell a lot of confusion.

I have a few thoughts on this matter:

The simple animation style and the more easily rendered characters of manga are what this generation has basically grown up on. Manga can have incredible take your breath away imagry, but it also has quickly decoded cues for the reader (indications of anger or laughter or just about anything you can think of, manga has distilled to its most indicative, simplistic representation).

American comics, with their hyper-realism is more complex to decode, because expressions, body posture, and the like are realish, as opposed to real or simplified. They also spring from a different artisitc well, and can be infamously difficult to follow, while manga is so much about function and form, American comics have become overly-artsy.

** Bear in mind these are generalizations, and exceptions can be found in both.**

Finally, I agree that there is not only more availability, but there is more variety in manga. If you have a fuzzy fetish, there is probably a manga for you. If you are an overly-romantic tween girl, there is also probably a manga for you. Manga also have a rating system that I’m pretty sure flies right under most parents radar. They look at it and think of “BeyBlade” or “Battle for the Planets” or whatever they’ve seen on TV and don’t realize there is a rating system or even that there are purely adult manga out there that they wouldn’t let their kid touch for love or money.

However, one look at the cover of “Witchblade” and they immediately decode the sexual implications (which are so much less than some manga) and then get to tie in the “Witch” bugaboo and right away, they declare it off limits (why aren’t more kids buying this?). Don’t get me started on all of the overly-sexual poses and costumes they stick on their heroes these days (To think that at one time Wanda’s red one-piece bathing suit was shockingly sexy). American comics shoots itself in the foot in a number of ways because they have insulated themselves into a self-absorbed industry:

1.) people won’t buy black and white comics
2.) people buy comics for the art
3.) people want a vast universe of interconnected stories and characters
4.) people want high quality paper and collectability
Imagine if the plate manufacturers reached the same conclusion because some people are collecting plates for their art or special characters on them? We couldn’t eat off our dishes because they’d all be collector’s editions.

American comics, I fear, (those who’ve spoken with me in other areas know what an old fart I am with a strong preference for DC’s golden age characters, full of love for American comics as entertainment and art) won’t peep out of their tower until the foundations have begun to wash away and the tower starts to tip.

There are any number of American comics that are still good reads, but they are failing to bring in the next generation, and are focused on sucking the last few dollars out of my aging wallet. Until that changes, they’re basically going to screw themselves out of existence.

117

Another thought on Manga:

There is a cultural component to American comics and also to Manga. Most people reading American comics should be able to pick out the cultural background and references, and even things that are based on our basic cultural identity.

Manga springs from an entirely different tradition, and, as such, offers a more unfamiliar fantasy than American comics. I think most kids don’t get the underlying cultural definitions presented in Manga, but they pick up on things as fantasy that may be an adaptation of some cultural thing.

To my mind, it makes the fantasy and environment of Manga much different than that presented in America. More unfamiliar, more other-worldly, and because of that, they become more interesting.

Just another log to toss on the fire of this discussion.

118

If the American response to manga parallels the response to anime, I can vouch for that with three very specific instances:

  1. A couple of years I was browsing in a major chain retailer of video and music in a mall store, and I noticed that they had “Cool Devices” (a hentai) shelved right next to “Dragonball Z”. There were several other similar instances in that store.

  2. More recently, I noticed “Fencer of Minerva” (also a hentai) shelved with mre gerneal sorts of manga (including Dragonball Z).

  3. A friend of ours found a copy of “Midnight Panther” (a hentai) in a bargain DVD at Costco, on sale for a dollar. A great deal, but somehow I doubt it was an all-adult bargain DVD bin.

Obviously the retailers in question had NO IDEA what they were selling. I doubt most parents do, either. But I don’t know that it’s a strictly Japanese thing. The Gor novels were widely sold as SF and fantasy when they were extant back in the 70s and 80s, even though they contained a lot of softcore sexual bondage, um, content. the covers almost always featured a woman in chains or ropes (mostly chains) and often not wearing much in the way of clothing. But the artwork was done in the STYLE of other SF and fantasy novels that were around at the times, and so they slid under the radar. (In fact, I once saw a copy of “Dancer of Gor” sitting in a rack of juvenile paperbacks at a local library).

If the people who sold the Gor novels were able to get away with it for two decades, why not comic publishers?

119

Concerning the “under the radar” status of manga and anime where they collide with the American cultural sensibility of “comics and cartoons are just for kids”: I wonder if that will be the next front in the culture wars.

After all, some of the major comic shop busts involved cases built around hentai. If the right (or wrong, depending on your point of view) people or watchdog groups discover the issue, it could be transformed into a national talking points issue a la the “War on Christmas”

120

I’ve been wondering about that, too, but then again, I find it incredible that it hasn’t already happened. I think the reason it hasn’t been taken up as a cause celebre is because the censorious element of the right wing understands that it leaves the right open to a certain amount of derision beyond what they’d get for censoring photographic images. “Look, those dinks can’t even handle dirty drawings.” I mean, one of the first arguments that would-be censors use is, “The women are all drug-addled sluts who are being forced into it by criminal masterminds! We must protect them from such abuse!” But it’s hard to argue this point with regard to drawings.

Of course, there’ll also be the “What about the chilllll-drun!” canard. But the liimited distribution of comics will probably work in their favor here. You certainly can’t say that they’re lurking in every corner store any more. They have to be sought out.

That said, the censorious are not rational people, else they wouldn’t be censrious. I’d expect them to jump on adult manga and anime just because they exist. So I still don’t understand why there hasn 't been some attempt to make a big deal out of it.