In the last few years, companies like Tokyo Pop, Viz and Del Ray have become very serious about publishing Japanese and to a lesser extent Korean comics in the US. Both Tokyo Pop and Viz have been around for a long time, and never had much success but thanks to anime getting more exposure, manga and manwha have been doing very well here. In fact, they are doing better than American comic book companies.
It’s easy to figure out why Japanese comics can capture audiences that American comic companies never have been able to: manga spans an incredible amount of genres whereas the major American comic companies like to stick to super heroes. Yes, there are horror comics and the like thrown in there as well but a glance at Marvel and DC’s solicitations in Previews shows that their real focus is super heroes. Not only that, but continuity is such a big factor in these comics that it can be extremely hard to just pick up a comic and know what’s going on. Especially now that these huge “Summer Events” now very often span the entire year. Really, is it any surprise that a teenage girl is going to be more interested in Nana than JLA?
Manga has a great advantage over your general superhero fare because with some exceptions (ridiculous Shonen Jump titles) they exist to tell a complete story with a beginning, middle and end. Superhero comics–which are the bulk of Marvel and DC’s output–only end when the sales numbers are so low that no money can be made printing them anymore. This means that there is never any closure, and there can rarely be any permanent change (this is where the “haha nobody is ever really dead in comics except for maybe Barry Allen!” notion comes from). When somebody dies in a manga, they’re very likely dead forever. When Superman dies, you know what it might take a month or a decade but that he’ll be back at some point. Anything that drastically changes the “universe” is usually undone some way or other. No matter how well done, it’s just a matter of keeping up the status quo.
Beyond the structure, manga also spans many, many different genres. There are sports titles, titles for men, titles for boys, titles for girls, titles for adult women, etc. If you can think it up, it probably exists. Marvel and DC comics, well, not so much. They put out a few science-fiction and horror titles, but really it’s all superheroes and a lot of the things they prefer to think of as “non superhero” are really just heroes in disguise. This means that the market for the majority of Marvel and DC comics is very small, and generally men. There has been some attempt to draw in a larger market, but it really just shows how they don’t understand the world beyond their normal grasp. Marvel published titles like Runaways with the teenage girl market in mind, but they weren’t interested in it and it failed at bringing the elusive female audience to comic stores. This should really be no surprise, as these titles are created and written by men and there is no real attempt to actually reach out to young girls.
Now, seeing how manga is faring, the new big idea seems to be to get Japanese artists or those who draw in a “similar” style to do Western comics. This shows a complete failure at understanding what makes manga appealing–it’s not just the art. In fact, it shows the ignorance of American publishers of how many different types of manga art styles there are to just go grab someone who draws in a “similar” style off the street to do a book for them. Here are some examples of art from currently popular books:
Not very similar, are they?
Grabbing artists who draw in a “manga style” is insulting when it takes five minutes to look at all the different styles out there.
Not all American publishers are like Marvel and DC, and DC admittedly is moving more and more in the right direction (they have recently started getting actual quality titles for their CMX manga line, and they have had their Vertigo line for quite a while), so I want to make it clear that I am not lumping publishers such as Oni who put out many different genres of comics in with this rant. However, the big two are going to find themselves in trouble soon if they don’t start earnestly looking into creating comics that fall into genres outside superheroes and other manly man categories. If they want girls and casual readers to start picking up their titles, they need to stop being so concerned with the feelings of the dedicated super-fans and start creating titles about people who don’t wear tights.
