Worlds Within Worlds...

I posted a little while back about Steven Grant's column on manga. FigNewton posted about it here, which started off an interesting discussion on the American industry and other stuff.

Let us commence the quoting!

Frankly, I don't understand why the American comics producers are acting like jealous older sisters instead of welcoming the manga and then piggy-backing in the doors that it opens that comics could never get opened themselves.

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The stories and plot devices in many American comics are cliched and overused. (Of couse I'm speaking of the so-called big hitters, Superman, Batman, X-men and so on.) A story that never ends leaves little room for fresh ideas. You can only kill a character so many times before bringing him or her back. The same enemy can only try to conquer and enslave earth so many times before readers stop caring.

With manga, not only is there a much wider variety of reading, but the story can and will end. Plot devices are no longer a forgotten art. Building up to a climax in a story occurs. The components of a good story are in place and leave manga with the potential to capture a reader.

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I await the day that the american comic book industry grows a clue. You would think that with the widespreed and massive success of manga in Japan they would just happen to pick up on a couple of the core ideas and apply them to the US market.. But nope. The clue branch has yet to manifest on the tree.

Ever wondered why manga REALLY sells well?
Price.

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The disheartening thing about the whole "fad" argument is it's even being presented by smaller publishers that don't have 60 years worth of a character being published and focus on small releases that do indeed have planned stories with beginning, middle, and end - publishers who don't do superheroes. There really is a diverse domestic comics industry outside of Marvel and DC that's never been able to breach the mainstream awareness that publish excellent comics.

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But as the article you linked points out, Tokyopop (and Viz and the other manga companies) are actually doing a very good job of creating fans--which are the people who will keep buying when the collector's bubble (though there is no collector's bubble to burst for manga) bursts and the 'cool' factor wears off. In particular with the variety of titles they offer, American manga companies are following the Japanese model in creating a generational linkage. That is, there are titles I buy just for myself. And there are also titles I buy to share with my daughters and other titles I buy just for them. That means that it is at least possible that those daughters will grow up, graduating to their own older titles and at the same time sharing downwards to their own next generation in turn. That's how it works in Japan and how genre fiction has worked in the US. American comics has not--because 'mainstream' comics so clearly target a single demographic and once someone passes out of it, they are not passing it on to the group coming up into it. And I'd argue non-mainstream comics have largely done the same thing even if the demographic is somewhat different from that of mainstream comics, its still aimed a single demographic and doesn't allow transition in of the next generation.

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I feel that manga's appeal to female readers is the driving force behind the popularity of manga. I've been reading and collecting comics for almost 20 years. I remember going to comic conventions and being about the only female there. This has changed drastically. My nieces wouldn't be caught dead reading X-Men or Batman, but they race to the bookstore every week to see if there's a new Peachgirl or Naruto on the shelves.

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Just as a side note, I think that the fact that manga has a definite end has equal importance in another way: it has a definite beginning. The longest running comics can't possibly fit all their backstory in while still telling a satisfactory story, so new readers have no incentive to pick up a new title when they're going to be completly confused by what's going on. With manga, you have a definitive starting point.

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[In response to the last quote] This quote I think is extremely true. Not to mention that there are at least two-five titles on the market at the same time, all with different story threads, all using the same characters. With manga, there is one linear story that is published in one publication from the beginning of its run to the end. It's not as confusing.

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What I found most interesting is his claim that all the "good" manga has already been licensed, and soon only "bad" titles are going to be licensed. While I do think we're going to be getting more bad with the good, there are thousands of titles out there that I imagine manga companies haven't even considered, and there has to be more than a few "good" ones in there that won't be brought over here for years, if ever.

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I'd simply like to add that not only is there a "beginning" that usually gets resolved to some "ending"--there is more consistency in that the creator/author/artist is usually the same individual throughout the manga. In many (most?) mainstream American comics, writers and artists tend to be with a single title for a short amount of time. And with these changes, often the quality and consistency of the title suffers.

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It's a good thing I can think of a couple examples that are not in that trap at least. Oni Press, for instance, which has resized many of its titles in the smaller format. I've seen their Courtney Crumrin advertised right next to manga in Waldenbooks, in fact. And Dark Horse is chock-full of creator owned titles in those veins which they can piggy-back onto their manga, right into bookstores. The other side of the coin, though, is even if those domestic non-superhero publishers take advantage, will enough of today's manga fans care about them?
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I'm wary when manga, like anime before it, is championed for reasons like style and content at the expense of the credibility of non-manga (especially domestic) material. And I don't think it's inappropriate to acknowledge that some people buying manga right now are doing so because it's different and new and foreign, (like so many other cultural/media importations over the years, fads or otherwise,) not necessarily because of its content. Manga to me has no greater variety or quality of content than some American stuff I've been reading for years. But it's marketed so much better, and that's great. So it's not that manga is the fad, it's that some of its demographic and credibility may be. Which makes sense; while many new readers who enjoined out of the reasons above will stay, enough may not that will create a plateau of sorts in the industry, especially if it gets too crowded with publishers trying to make a quick buck and flooding the market with "bad manga". It's booming that fast right now. But I don't see it crashing; fortunately manga shares some of its fanbase with another booming cultural fanbase, long suited to sustaining a similar market, and one that is always generating younger fans: anime.

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I read that line and broke out laughing just thinking of the stuff I have on my hard drive that isn't licensed yet, and yet must be "bad" since all the good titles have been swept up and are being published now. :D The rest of his article is really well written though, and makes a lot of good points.

Personally I used to collect X-Men, but after it merged out to about 10 series/mini-series, as a younger child I could no longer afford it, and began to lose interest in the titles I could afford. There's only so many times you can mutate/kill off the characters you love to read about before you throw the book on the ground and curse the writers for what they've done in the name of innovation and fresh ideas. The changing of some really good artists irked the hell out of me too... :(

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This is the reason I haven't got into US comics. I'd love to read X-Men and Spider-Man - I'm really curious to know more about the basis for the movies. But the only way I can get up to speed is to acquire and read hundreds of comics that have never been reprinted in graphic novel format. Sure, the best/most important parts are available as graphic novels, but there are dozens of them, and it's not clear what the best order to read them in is, if indeed it's possible to figure one out.

I'm not interested in just picking up a series from wherever it is at the moment. If I can't read the whole thing, or at least get a relatively good idea of the whole thing based on reading a lot of it, I'm just not interested. New fans just aren't in a position to become knowledgeable fans, which is very frustrating.

The only US comic I've read is Daredevil, because Daredevil's history is manageable, and there are lots of graphic novels. I'm gradually working my way through said graphic novels.

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In looking at manga vs. American comics, I think a big difference would be the variance in style and the audience it's intended for. Very few of the super hero comics appealed to girls. But now, more than half of the available manga titles there are, are shoujo. I know many people, who probably never looked at a comic book before in their life, are now reading Peach Girl or Mars, exclaiming how good it is. Is it marketed much better? Maybe. Now stores seems to have big signs and special designated sections full of manga. I never noticed that before with Marvel or DC comics. Most of the time, you had to go and search specifically for a comic book store to find the titles you wanted. Now, manga is available in the biggest, well-known bookstores and online stores around.

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While I can't say that the plot of Peach Girl will change my life, it was nice to be able to identify with some of the characters. Can I identify with Superman? I think I can feel empathy for him occasionally, but not really.....especially since he never gets older, never seems to learn from his past mistakes, and can't seem to stop from hurting the women he dates. The mainstay of the American comics market is the superhero titles. There are lots of indy titles too but enough of these are such crap or so not my cup of tea (are there any female comic artists that WEREN'T abused as children?) that it's hard to dive into that bucket very often. And let's face it, American comics are largely aimed at men so it would have to be a great story to even lug me in there in the first place. I can even get over shonen panty shots more easily than some of the stupidity I've seen in, say, Gen X :P. But that's just me ;). I like a good story, I like great art, and I want characters that I can relate to and don't start to feel contempt for after 20 issues. To me, this is more of why manga sells. Manga sell WELL because of the price ;)

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I think cheaper gets people to buy manga at all.

I mean $15 for a shitty thin book with like 100 pages is just insane (even if they are in colour), and that's what some US comic collections were (are?) like...

Same applies for the manga. I mean you don't need to be a rocket scientist to look at an ordinary paperback that costs $7 and has 400 pages, then you look at an old manga book which is $15 and has 200. It's just stupid. Now that manga costs $10, oh look, somehow it's not quite so insane any more.

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Marvel's Essential volumes are a good idea executed poorly. First of all, releasing a comic designed to be read in colour in black and white makes it kind of difficult to read. I know the size/price would have to be quite different for them to be released in colour, but I'd much rather buy them in colour.

More importantly, there just aren't enough of them for them to be worthwhile. They should plan to release all of a series (up to the point that they started collecting every issue into TPBs), and they should sort out a regular and reasonable release schedule to do it in.

Case in point: There is one Daredevil: Essentials book. ONE. It was released several years ago, and ends at issue 25, leaving all sorts of threads hanging. It's useful as a way to see what the comic was like when it first started, but as a way of getting up to speed on the story, it's bordering on useless.

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Personally I'd just like to tell all those people of the "I only read manga cause comics are superhero-crap"-faction to just have a look at the other parts of the U.S. market to at least have something to build an opinion on instead of just keeping a preconception (a hint: not even all superhero-type comics are really evil, even if I don't like them myself). And I'd like to tell all those people of the "I only read U.S. comics because mangas are just kiddy stuff or porn"-faction to just get a couple of the good story-driven mangas to at least have something to build an opinion on instead of just keeping a preconception.

Oh, and then I'd like to tell both factions (and all of the rest as well) that they should maybe take a look at the french market. NBM is putting out translations of some interesting bandes dessinees, and that's just the tip of the iceberg... =P

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It's not so much that superheroes are stupid, it's just that (at least in public perception, which is what's important here, we're not talking about people who read comics we're talking about people who DON'T) they take over the entire world of US comics. I mean there are plenty of manga series about magical girls, say, or about martial arts; but whatever category you pick, there are hugely more series that *aren't* in that category.

As for the franchises - yeah sure there are stories with endings within those, but it's still the same old same old franchise. If these artists and writers are talented then why can't they be allowed to start new series? Cyber said she was tired of Fushigi Yuugi - that's fine because, you know, it's *over*, and if you happened to like it then hey, the same author has written a number of different series after that. I think relying on a tired old brand name with 'Man' at the end is a shitty way to work - like I said, better to emphasise the *writers* and artists, not one story. (And better to give them a proper deal, too, so they own their work - is it still that work-for-hire shit?)

Errr.. I was only going to quote a couple of people, but it turns out there was a lot that was quotable in that thread. ;) Hopefully I didn't misrepresent anyone in the way that they are quoted. You're probably better off just reading the whole thread, but I know a lot of people go in for the cliff notes version (I am guilty of that in many cases..heh). Most of the stuff I didn't quote was discussions on whether price or content is the most important factor of popularity, some discussion on particular series, some arguing on how much thought most manga creators put into when the series is going to end, and thoughts on why people might watch a cartoon and not the comic.

A pretty civil and insightful thread I have to say. There has been some other threads lately in various anime/manga communities, but most of them have either had too much US bashing or are just the same old stuff, IMO. The fact that AoD has a lot of older and female posters probably helps a bit... ;)