In the category of "This makes Mugen's head hurt"...

[telophase]

Apparently Japanese manga will never make it big in America because Americans don't eat rice, among other things.

I think my favorite bit is where he says that Americans don't like teenage angst. Now, please excuse me. I have to go eat sushi while reading Judy Blume and Sweet Valley High.

Comments

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Also, while scorning nudity, incest, and violence in manga, I plan to console myself with the sweet innocence of V.C. Andrews.

... I had to check the date to be sure this hadn't been written three years ago. Since, um, he clearly hasn't been looking at bestsellers lists lately.

I still laugh at all the academic papers I've been reading which happily proclaim c. 1999 that shoujo will never get published in America because it's so alien-looking and everyone knows American girls don't read comics anyway, but honestly, at least I can see why everyone thought that way at the time.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

He's 20. I realize I am old and doddering by the standards of anime fans, but I am pretty sure that I knew how to spell "dedicated" and how to spell check by the time I was 20.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I checked his info - he's 20 years old, and I'm wondering if he reads much outside of whatever his favorite genres are. So much popular fiction is precisely teenage angst, even when the characters are nominally adult - Mercedes Lackey leaps immediately to mind.

Yeah, sure the majority of Americans will never read manga, but the majority of Americans don't do significant amounts of reading at all, IIRC.

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

The majority of Americans don't read comic books. What does it matter whether the majority reads manga or watched anime? It's a relatively small market.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

It doesn't seem like the anime/manga market is a subset of the comics market, though -- it's an overlapping set and I'm not sure how big the overlap is. Most of the manga market growth of the past two or three years seems to have been bookstore-driven.

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

True; I know a number of people--mostly kids--who read manga but not American comics. I just don't think the manga market is ever going to get bigger than the comic market. Or if it does, it probably won't stay bigger. It's faddish right now, but I don't see anything inherent in manga that would make it more appealing to the American mass market than the very wide variety of comic books already being published in America. I tend to think that ultimately, the most consistant manga and anime buyers will be the same core group that's been watching/reading/buying for a long time--people who like cult science fictiion and comic books and so forth. (However, unlike Kris whatsisname, I don't think this has anything to do with manga's Japanese-ness. I just doubt comic books will ever be as big in America as they are in Japan, whether they're American or Japanese in origin. Television is another matter, but anime will not reach a wider audience the way most of it is marketed and distributed right now. It's still too expensive and too obscure.) However, I speculate with no facts whatsover at my disposal. So if you know more than I do, I'll take your word for it.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I think the manga market is different than the comic market, so we can't really say what it's going to do in relation to the comic market. They're so big at the moment because they're tapping into a market that comics haven't been - girls and young women. I agree that the manga market right at this moment isn't going to be like this in the future, but I don't think we can predict which way it's going to go or what it's going to end up like at this point.

It certainly won't get as big as it is in Japan. IIRC, manga is something like 40% of all the printed matter produced in Japan. It requires some major cultural shifts in who words-with-pictures is interpreted as appropriate for to get anywhere near that amount of the market, and I don't see it happening.

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

I may yet have to eat my words.

My perspective on comics is pretty skewed by the fact that my little sister and I grew up reading the thousands of old comic books my father had in our basement (giving me l33t mastery of old school comics canon with which to trump my friends who didn't even start reading the X-Men until after my dad had abandoned it in digust)--even though I know intellectually that comic book readers are mostly male, there's a part of my brain that goes "pft! Girls read comic books," even when the only other girls I ever used to see in the comic book shop were standing by the door, waiting for their boyfriends. This female manga audience thing is shiny and new, and you're probably right that we can't predict where it'll end up.

Hopefully with a bigger market than my conservative guesses. The more translated manga there is on the shelves, the more I can feed my lifelong "Asian stuff" fetish with my comic book habit.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I can tell you one thing: the people I see reading and buying manga in bookstores, purely going by demographics, are not the same as the people I see buying American comics. Let me put it this way: when was the last time you saw a clutch of giggly Hispanic high school girls laying down their allowances in a comic book store? I never have, which is not to say that it doesn't happen, but only that the manga audience does seem different.

The other reason I don't see manga in the US as being just a fad is that it isn't just one series that's popular. When the Harry Potter series is over, there's nothing left to buy if all you liked was Harry Potter. But if Harry Potter (or Inu Yasha) was what got you hooked, but then you started buying fantasy (or manga) by a bunch of different people, and enjoying it, and coming back for more, what you're now drawn to is not the popularity of a particular thing but an enjoyment of a certain genre. That tends to be much longer-lasting.

[mistressrenet.livejournal.com]

The markets are very different-- especially because US bookstore chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble caught on the manga fad quick and comic books stores mostly dropped the ball completely.

IMO, anime's how manga's going to get a place in American culture and keep it-- how many people know or care where their cartoons come from, especially kids. Did this guy sleep through the Pokemon fad?

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

I've now gotten several good reasons why I'm probably wrong about the manga market being small.



Y'know, I was just in my local comic book store today. Their manga section is generally comparable to B&N's, and they have all the available volumes of a title on the shelves more consistantly, but I noticed a sign on the manga shelves that said "All manga always %10 off." That tells me they must be getting serious competition from the local chain stores on manga, because they do not have the resources to toss around discounts like that for no reason.

[mistressrenet.livejournal.com]

Really, if he wanted to be smart about it he'd point out that Americans don't read books. Woes.

Yeah, it's growing-- it's big news in the book trade because sales have been pretty flat. There's more and more space in the trade magazines devoted to manga in the past 2-3 years.

[mistressrenet.livejournal.com]

Word.