Rocket Bomber - 5by8

Manga isn’t growing by leaps and bounds anymore; it never was a license to print money and now the initial boom (which I’ve dated to 2004-2007, though others say it started earlier) is settling into something more like steady single-digit growth.

Steady single-digit growth isn’t just good, it’s excellent. We all need to get our heads to a place where we can agree on that, instead of obsessing over what the fan world used to look like and lamenting the crash of the anime DVD market. It’s a shame, that, but manga isn’t anime and with Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan all partnered-up (or getting into the game themselves) the books will be available for quite some time.

quick review for those who haven’t been reading my stuff for the past year:
Between the 5 of them, these companies account for about half of the US book business. [48.8% – Source: Michael Hyatt, Dec 2006] Each of the 5 also acts as their own distributor, shipping new titles direct to book stores. Since not everyone is going to know this off the top of their head

• Random House = Del Rey
• HarperCollins partnered with Tokyopop
• Simon & Schuster partnered with Viz Media
• Hachette = Yen Press
• Macmillan partnered with Seven Seas
  The only major player not in the game is Penguin. see also: 5by8 #25, Squeeze Play, on publishers and licensing, and 5by8 #26, What’s the Target? on publishing and sales.

We can discuss which third tier (or major) manga publisher is going to go under or is struggling or might not meet their deadlines (or has never met their deadlines) but at $10 a pop and with this much publishing muscle behind it, manga as a category isn’t going anywhere.

Steady single-digit, year-on-year growth is a Great place to be.
Got it?

Good.

##

Making the books is only half of the equation, though: Retail is suffering a bit.

Let’s start with conditions on the ground:

I had occasion over the weekend to visit not one but two of the bookstores closest to my home — neither of which is actually the bookstore I work at, handily enough, and also handily: of the two, one is a Barnes & Noble while the other is a Borders.

Survey Says…

At Barnes and Noble I encountered three bookcases full of manga, each 6+ feet tall and containing 7 shelves. You’re thinking, “Only three bookcases, eh?”

Here’s a tip for all you would-be-experts who are looking to compare bookstores: the key figure is linear feet. At this location, each shelf is 4’ long, so the 21 shelves gives us 84 linear feet of shelving. (plus other displays, see below)

Borders is better, and looks a lot better at first blush: 12 bookcases, 4’ tall, 5 shelves each (except for the first one, which only had 4 to accommodate taller hardcovers and art books on the top shelf). Each shelf was only 3’ long, though, so Border’s 59 shelves ended up being only 177 linear feet. —4 times as many bookcases (and 4 times the footprint — that is to say, the square footage of carpet occupied by the section) but only twice the linear feet.

While my local Borders has double the shelving compared to it’s closest competitor, the local B&N, there are two other merchandising points to consider: at B&N, every shelf was packed— if you pulled out a volume it was iffy that you’d be able to reshelve it. Borders, at least my local Borders this particular weekend, wasn’t just loose, it looked a little weak: bare wood showing in spots and one or two titles shelved face-out (instead of spine-out) on each shelf.

This particular B&N also had two spinner racks for new releases (one each, Viz and Tokyopop: room for 40 feature titles on each), along with half of a display table (the rest was non-manga GNs) and an endcap. As a bookseller, I can tell you the titles that overflowed onto the table and endcap weren’t there because someone thoughtfully selected titles for recommended reading — they ran out of room, and shunted the new stuff (and stuff they had in quantity, and omnibus editions that were just taking up too much space) onto displays because there wasn’t room anywhere else. Borders… doesn’t have to do this. There aren’t any ancillary manga displays at Borders — at least at my Borders — but they’ve twice the dedicated shelf space and it isn’t quite full at the moment.

Don’t get me wrong, Borders is still stocking more manga. Complete or near complete runs of things like Hana-kimi, Red River, Prince of Tennis… hell, for Red River or Prince of Tennis you’d be lucky to find the first volume at B&N, more likely you’d see just the most recent volume and that’s about it.

Speaking of Tokyopop, (we weren’t, but I can’t think of a clever segue) I also saw a near-complete run of Chibi Vampire (all the manga volumes, though not all 5 novels) and Fruits Basket at Borders, and a healthy sampling of other series (DNAngel, Rave Master, Kingdom Hearts — and the OEL series Warcraft and Warriors) and most representatives from the popular back list (Live Hina, Chobits) — I don’t carry a title list in my pocket (hm. maybe I should…) and I won’t claim encylopedic knowledge but there were enough Tokypop titles in evidence that I can’t corroborate previous reports of Tokyopop being ‘stripped’ from shelves.

At least here in Atlanta, I’d call both of these locations average, if not representative. I’d have to plan an excursion (several, in fact) much farther afield to be sure, and I’m not going to spend that much in gas —this week. Maybe next year.

—A quick, non-scientific sampling of my shelves at home shows that each linear foot holds 17-18 volumes of manga. Calling it 17 and rounding down to the nearest hundred: my local B&N is stocking 1400 volumes, plus whatever is on the spinner racks et al. — so 1500 volumes plus — while my local Borders has room for 3000, and even at only 75-80% full (which is where they’re at right now, I reckon’) they’re still stocking 2200-2400 books. Someone else can tell me how that translates into titles stocked — I didn’t bother to count how many different series were on the shelves, or multiple copies of the same book; I was strictly looking at fixtures
— if pressed I’d say about 200 series at either store (Borders has more complete runs)

##

When considering retail space for books, there are 4 things to consider:
1. Linear Feet of Shelving
2. Location Location Location
3. Footprint
4. Category Adjacencies

Actual shelf-feet is most important, as this translates directly into the number of books shelved. The location (where is the manga: up front, near the coffee shop, near the newsstand, or in back on the 2nd floor?), footprint (how much of the square footage of the store is used) and category adjacencies (is your manga next to sci-fi or kids?) also matter, but it all differs wildly from store to store — and to a limited extent all that doesn’t matter: fans will find manga wherever you put it.

But honestly? Give manga a dedicated space near the magazine rack, toward the front entrance or coffee shop if you can swing it, and don’t hide it either in genre fiction or next to the kids dept. (oh sure, the kids are buying it, but they don’t associate Kingdom Hearts with Judy Blume, the Boxcar Children, or—godforbid—other Disney books.)

Forget for a minute that manga look like books. These are periodicals —in the original meaning of the term: items printed periodically; volumes in a series and coming out multiple times a year. Your customer base comes in at least once a month, and while they’ll find manga in that furthest back corner if that’s where you insist on placing it, you’re only getting the trufans if you market it that way. Really, what you need are the 6-19 year olds who don’t know they want manga yet — but will buy it if they happen to walk by it (“oooo… Naruto! And Bleach! And Vampire Knight, I don’t know what that is but it sounds so cool! and this looks cute but, um, …what’s a Shugo Chara?”).

##

Here’s your homework:

• Field Trip! Go to your local. (no need to make a special trip, I know you’ll be in sometime this week or next for your fix)
• Count the number of manga shelves
• Estimate the shelf size. If you can’t do this by eye, there are some handy rulers just to hand at most bookstores: the ‘standard’ manga size (Viz/Tokyopop/Del Rey) is 7½ inches high, a copy of Shonen Jump (or a DC/Marvel GN) is 10 inches high. Or use a 'cloth yard': for most folks, stretch out your arm and from the tip of your nose to your finger tips is going to be 3 to 3½ feet. (If you plan on using this method I hope you can think of a casual way to employ it; I don’t advise sticking your nose on the bookcase)
• (hint: I think for a lot of the chain bookstores, shelves are either 3 or 4 feet long)

• And then… math. (Sorry, but the math isn’t too bad): # of shelves x length of shelves = linear feet of shelving.

• linear feet x 17 manga volumes per foot = total number of manga.

I’m not doing it (enough on my plate as is) but it might be interesting if someone could take these instructions and see if internet volunteers might be willing to take the 15 minutes to survey their local and post a short update (zip code, Store name, # of bookcases, linear feet of shelving/# of manga volumes) just to see if there might be a way to track what the retail penetration of manga actually *is*. We can trade anecdotal stories all we like, which is fine, but if you wanted a pseudo-scientific metric, here’s your metric.

maybe set up a wiki. Wikis are ‘web 2.0’ and all that.

(And this would work for any genre/format—say, Graphic Novels, mayhaps—though the volumes/ln.ft. constant would be different.)

Until some other blog or individual takes on this project:
go ahead and post your own observation in the comments. If enough (i.e. more than three) people do it, maybe it can serve as both a starting point and inspiration for someone who does have the time to follow through.

[Editorial Note: I’m still working on moving archives over from comicsnob.com; if you’d like to read previous 5by8 columns a handful are available here, though all older columns (#1-#27) can be found at Comicsnob]

originally written for and posted on Comicsnob.com [Dec ’06 – May ’08]

The first of several columns where we look at just how American anime & manga fandom developed — to the point where today we use the phrase otaku, we know what it means, we know it’s not complimentary, and we still describe ourselves as otaku anyway.

The Ages of Fan I — that guy Tezuka

Of course, those of the modern generation of fans bear little resemblance to myself (broke, alcoholic, 30 y.o. otaku fanboy loser… hm. actually, I think I’ll put that on a t-shirt) just as the fans of my ilk (which we’ll likely refer to as the Robotech generation in some future post; I was 11 during Robotech’s first run) bear little resemblance to our forebears, the the brave pioneers who got hooked on Astro Boy, or Speed Racer, or Battle of the Planets, or Star Blazers, or… well I suppose this is why we are inaugurating this mess as an ongoing feature here on 5by8.

But as our first column on this topic we won’t yet be looking at these American shores, but rather across the Pacific and back through time, past even Astro Boy, to the dark and dismal days right after the giant buzzkill known as World War II (the obvious nadir of Japan-US relations, except it wasn’t… odd that) and more importantly back to the dark ages before manga. Back to 1947.

Manga, as a word, predates 1947 by at at least 150 years. Translation is always a tricky science, but the definition I most often see for manga, particularly in regard to the earliest efforts, is “whimsical pictures” …or dare I say, cough “comics,” if one cares to scratch even a millimeter into the entymology of that equivalent English term.

However, 1947 is the date I cite as the origin of manga because of that guy Tezuka and his book Shin Takarajima, most often translated as “New Treasure Island”.

Here’s why:

New Treasure Island was a cheap one-off targeted to kids, sold not through bookstores, but rather through toy stores. It was an akahon (a “red book,” so named from the garish red ink used on the covers) printed on cheap recycled newsprint rather than the more expensive rice paper used for the “real” comics of the day.

Here’s the thing: as a cheap one-off, it was free from a lot of editorial oversight, so Tezuka could tell the story he wanted. (Then as now, some publishers and editors seem certain that they know better than anyone else what is salable.) Additionally, at roughly 200 pages, it offered the kids some real value for thier lunch money. (also as opposed to the other manga of the day). And even though it was cheaply printed, it was expertly edit: for the time done.

- Are there other Japanese comics that predate Tezuka? Yes.
– Are there manga—that is, extended storylines— that predate Tezuka? Yes.
– Were there other artists with cinematic sensibilities making comics in Japan, even as far back as when Osamu was a kid? Well, yeah, actually there were.

Did any of those turkeys sell a million copies?

Now ya see, this is were the deification and installation of Tezuka at the head of the manga-ka pantheon really begins to get some traction. New Treasure Island sold 400,000 copies during it’s first print run, and I’ve seen uncorroborated but plausible sources that indicate that they sold twice that many in subsequent reprints. (over 60 years, in reprints… I’d bet it’s sold two million, easy)

Let me backtrack a half step, and go back to “Cinematic sensibilties”. Osamu Tezuka was a movie fan going way back; (if internet sources are to be believed) due to a connection of his father’s, he used to watch movie reels all the time, including Disney and Fleischer Cartoons. Whatever the provenance, it’s hard to argue with the printed record: Tezuka’s work certainly reflects a debt both to the cinematic arts and to western-style animation of the 30s and 40s. We can note the use of a “camera” perspective; with pans and close-ups, panels unfolding in “slo-mo”, and a rather definite break with the proscenium arch utilized in so many comics up to this point.

What else can we blame on Tezuka?

Big Eyes. Yep, that was him. Though as I noted in 5by8 #1, he borrowed that from American cartoons, so it’s always interesting to hear Americans complain about manga, but not Mickey.

There’s gender-swapping characters, from Metropolis (1949). Someone else may have thought of it, but I think this is the first manga instance in print.

In 1950, there was Jungle Taitei (aka Kimba) — which was the first long-running serial. Today most of what we call manga are serialized in chapters, running for months or years. [edit: good point, but proven to be false at its base by comments on the original post]

In 1954, Princess Knight, the first Shoujo manga—from Tezamu, and presumably ever (at least according to wiki)—premeired.

And shonen (or seinen) comics were of course developing: “the appearance in 1959 of the two weekly children’s manga magazines, Shonen Magazine and Shonen Sunday, served to firmly establish the sort of manga culture we see today.” Just as most manga are serialized—anthology magazines like these are where they’re first printed.

In the meantime, we should note the women comickers of the magnificent 24s (from the 24th year of the Showa Era, alternately known in English as the fabulous 49ers) were just starting to grow up and read comics; as well as the genesis of the first “manga” generation, those lucky fanboys born in 1950. I’m sure we’ll touch on both of these later.

All this is about Japanese comics and fans, though: ’63 is the date of note for American audiences, and Astro Boy on American TV is where we’ll pick up the column next week.

Further reading and references:
Wiki: Manga
Wiki: Shoujo
Matt Thorn — Mangagaku: A History of Manga
Web Japan: Manga
Locus: Manga
Paul Gravett: Manga
Global License: Manga
Kyoto Manga Museum
wagging the dog

Matt Thorn (see also, here) was kind enough to comment on this post at Comicsnob.com — since his comments added so much to the original post, I politely requested if I could copy said comments here.

Matt is a good guy, he said yes.

Comment from Matt Thorn
March 29, 2007, 9:57 am

A few corrections, if I may.

TAGAWA Suihou’s Norakuro (”Stray Black”), which was serialized from 1931 till 1941 in the boy’s magazine Shounen Club, sold far more copies in its various manifestations than all of Tezuka’s akahon combined, and even in 1950, when Tezuka made the move from the less-than-respectable akahon to the respectable Tokyo-based children’s magazines, Tagawa and his character were far better known in Japan than Tezuka and anything he had made until that date.

“Expertly done”? Well, that’s a subjective matter, but Tezuka never allowed the original version of New Treasure Island to be reprinted. The version included in the Complete Works series is one he drastically redrew many years later. If you want a better idea of Tezuka’s technical skill at the time, find the reproductions of such works as Chiteikoku no kaijin (”The Mystery Men from Beneath the Earth”). His work was crude, and didn’t hold a candle to that of such prewar artists as Tagawa and two of my own favorites, OHSHIRO Noboru and MATSUMOTO Katsuji.

Jungle Taitei (”Kimba the White Lion”) was not the first extended serial. Even before Norakuro, mentioned above, there were plenty of hugely popular serials, such as MIYAO Shigeo’s Manga Taroh (1912) and KABASHIMA Shoh-ichi & ODA Shohsei’s Shoh-chan no bouken (”The Adventures of Shoh-chan,” 1923). Even if you limit your definition to long manga with a clear beginning, middle and end (as opposed to episodes that go on and on with no clear end in sight), Ohshiro had the jump on Tezuka by at least ten years, with such works as Kasei Tanken (”Mars Exploration”) and Kisha Ryokou (”A Train Journey”).

First shoujo manga? Nope. Shoujo manga had been around since the late 1920s. In 1934 Matsumoto had done a wonderful “graphic novella” (Nazo no Clover, “The Mysterious Clover”) that was a variation on the Scarlet Pimpernel scenario, in which the protagonist was a young girl. I strongly suspect that Clover was the model for Tezuka’s Sapphire, though I have no evidence beyond superficial resemblance. Matsumoto had another popular shoujo manga serial, the adorable and still-funny-today Kurukuru Kurumi-chan (1938)

The Wikipedia English-language articles about any aspect of manga history, particularly shoujo manga, are wildly wrong, and should be taken with a hefty grain of salt.

My own explanation for Tezuka’s “god” status is that he was the first manga artist to infuse his stories with serious themes that left a lasting impression on readers. What old-school manga artists and editors found shocking about his work was precisely that they were moving and dramatic, were reluctant to draw simplistic distiinctions between good and evil, and did not always have happy endings in which good triumphed over evil. When a very young Tezuka showed New Treasure Island to the famous elder cartoonist SHIMADA Keizoh, Shimada was horrified. “It’s your right to make this sort of thing,” he said, “but I hope it doesn’t catch on.” Of course, it caught on big time, and kids who grew up reading Tezuka, unlike children before them, became hooked on manga and continued to read them well beyond the age when they were expected to “put away childish things.” It was the themes–serious themes about the human condition–that made him a god, not his technical skill or innovation.

Finally, I’m pretty sure I was the one to originally identify the first “manga generation” as being born after 1950, my rationale being that they were the first to grow up reading weekly, rather than monthly, children’s magazines. (To my knowledge, no Japanese manga historian had ever made that clear connection between the first manga generation and the rise of the weekly format.) You can read the original and widely-plagiarized article in which I first made that assertion (publicly, in English) here:

http://matt-thorn.com/mangagaku/history.html

Comment from Matt Blind
March 29, 2007, 2:47 pm

Mr. Thorn:

You are, in fact, my source for the phrase “manga generation” and I had planned to cite and or quote your article when referencing those individuals in later columns. (If I get back to Japan– My thought is to focus more on North Amercian fandom, but the series needed to start somewhere.)

Being a lazy blogger, my primary source for quite a few of Tezuka’s “landmarks” was wikipedia; of course I did other reading (as much as one can, on the internet) but fell back on their dates and conclusions.

Obviously, trusting wiki has many problems, and I appreciate the corrections.

I’d refer all our readers to Matt Thorn’s article & site: while I was merely trying to fill a thousand-word opinion column, he has experience in the field and tackles the issue at hand with more academic rigor (as is evidenced in his comments here). That, and he was one of the sources I’ve read, if not this week for the column, than certainly within the past year. I should have included a link –yet another oversight I’m glad he corrected.

Comment from Matt Thorn
March 29, 2007, 7:24 pm

Thanks, Matt. And please call me Matt. (^_;) Looking forward to your next column.

Japanese comics and cartoons have been around for decades. The occasional anime even found its way to American TV, more than once and at least once a decade, going back to Astro Boy and Kimba in the 60s.

Japanese comics, in recent years, have become just as much an American phenomenon and are slowly transforming the business, not by being revolutionary (in my opinion; they’re still just comics) but by making the most of existing trends in the print industry, and riding a wave of popularity generated by other aspects of consumer culture.

And the supply is merely rising to meet demand: We want more manga, we’re buying it, so more and more shows up on the shelves.

But where did the demand come from? And why now?

(cue another rambling, random walk down pop culture history with a few attributions but also a fair amount of opinion; I do try to be consistent, if nothing else)

Where and why? Cable TV, the Internet, and DVDs.

(There are other factors to consider, like the popularity of a certain plumber in an ongoing series of his own video games, but I don’t know that Mario is generating a lot of manga …maybe some dojinshi, but I really don’t want to know if there is such a beast.)

Manga rides piggy-back on popular anime. A TV show gets the folks interested in the manga (usually because someone like me is out there telling folks that yeah, the show is good but the original manga is way better) and while sooner or later we’ll have converted the guy or gal over to a being a manga fan, and dare I say manga snob, it was the TV show coming on five days a week that got them hooked.

The success of anime properties like Pokemon is the obvious first place to start looking; in fact, Pokemon has been gracing kids’ TV sets since 1998, so it may in fact be the first exposure to the so-called Japanese Visual Aesthetic that many of us had. Pokemon aired on ‘regular’ TV, though (via WB affiliates from 1999-2006) and it’s been marketed to hell and back and is as “American” as pizza by this point.

Just a few years further down the time-line is the broadcast in 2001 (on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block) of Cowboy Bebop. Here’s a neat trick that some of you might not have been aware of:

Bandai first released the Cowboy Bebop DVDs back in 2000.

Immediately after seeing something cool on TV, the kids could watch it again (or catch up on missed episodes) right away. The availability of anime on DVD (…and the website of that name has been posting updates since 1998) combined with the healthy “mainstream” (read: Basic Cable) exposure of really good anime titles have done a lot to kick the industry into high gear. Manga benefits because long-running favourites like Dragonball and InuYasha also have long print runs, and once the kid gets a taste, she’ll likely want more.

##

We all know I love to reference Bebop in these columns, but other anime on CN pre-dates Adult Swim by about three years, starting with DBZ in the Toonami block, like Pokemon débuting back in ’98. Following the success of that craptastic action schlocktacular (why no, I’m not a fan, though I can see the pre-adolescent appeal) they also broadcast G-force, Gundam Wing, Tenchi in at least three flavours, Blue Submarine no. 6, and Outlaw Star, and I know I saw at least a few of these because I was (and am) a big fan of Batman: The Animated Series and it was airing right alongside for many of those years

…But Bebop always sticks in my memory as the title where anime came of age. (DBZ probably had a bigger impact)

##

Anyone who has bought anime on VHS knows deep to their marrow just how much better the DVD versions are. I tip my hat to the brave and hardy fans who were making do with tapes, but man, I don’t see how anyone managed in the days before the dual-language options. (And dubs — for all their current faults — are so much better as well)

The DVD experience has done a lot for movie collectors in general, and anime in particular, but for the poor kid stuck in Peoria in 2000 without access to a specialty shop, how did he get his anime fix?

Internet.

Well, maybe not a kid; but a smart young man in his late 20s with no girlfriend, a decent tech job, a correspondingly large disposable income, and fond memories of Robotech? Behold the birth of the North American Otaku. The same web sites that carry anime DVDs also began stocking manga, so there you go. Anyone looking for info on his favourite titles would turn to Fan sites and semi-professional review sites, and all the DVD sites I’ve visit carry news and reviews on both. And if a story is really compelling, I know that I look for as many versions of the story as I can get my hands on.

Anime is merely the thing that opened the door for manga, since once the format took hold (and gained a foothold in the chain bookstores) it has taken off in leaps and bounds and is not only generated more and more licensed and translated Japanese titles being released each year, but also Korean manhwa and OEL titles. But I think that the existence of anime on cable and DVDs, along with the influence of both on-line shopping and on-line fan communities are the reason we see the revolution now, as opposed to 10 or 20 years ago.

originally written for and posted on Comicsnob.com [Dec ’06 – May ’08]

So I was reading the first of Bob’s most excellent field reports from Cool Japan 2007, and latched onto a point from Dr. Kern’s presentation, comparing manga to earlier Japanese kibyōshi (Edo era woodblock prints). I can see parallels, certainly, but I wouldn’t draw a direct line from one to the other. Well, neither did Kern: it would be unfair of me to say so, even for the sake of the rest of my argument.

But… are comics and manga just the latest iteration in a long line of previously existing graphic art, worthy of note in fancy wine-sippin’, hors d’oeuvre-munchin’ gallery shows, or is it just another crude, crass, mass entertainment medium that is fittingly ignored by anyone but fanboys and otakus and other losers (like the guys who write reviews for pretentious, high-falutin’ comicky web sites)?

Part of the appeal of comics (and manga is just another word for comics) is that it is a new artform— though yes, comics do draw inspiration from the past, and in fact we’ve been scrawling things down on every available surface ever since some prehistoric Frenchman just had to brag to everyone about how badass a mammoth hunter he was, so there’s a lot of past to draw on.

But the comic book and it’s Japanese cousin are recent innovations (the dates I’m picking are 1933 and 1947, respectively, you can go to wikipedia or the reference of your choice and decide on your own) and while they’ve drawn from many artistic and literary sources, I’d say they’re related most closely to the other new visual media of the 20th century, the twin visual arts of cinema and television.

One twist to the debate that should also be considered is that comics are a consumer product, mass produced and marketed just like pea soup and laundry detergent. If you don’t think this has had a large influence on comics as art, then you need to go find a few internet forums where folks are (even as you read this) vehemently arguing the relative merits of fan service.

##

Let me cover that second point first.

I deeply respect Scott McCloud, and have often resorted to his definition of comics [wiki] when trying to relate my own paltry opinions on the medium, but I don’t recall McCloud ever bringing the aspect of reproduction into his discussions. It is true that a single, hand-drawn book would still be a comic (and maybe even a fine work of art) but the comics we consider when we start to argue about the relevance of the medium are all copies.

Cheap paper combined with advances in printing technology, and riding piggyback on the success of newspaper comic strips, led to the birth of the comic book. It’s disposable entertainment — like the pulp novels that came out during the same period, not intended as an archival medium for hand-drawn artwork, but rather as a way to separate nickels and dimes from the customer base.

People will still save and re-read their favourites, but the secondary market relies on the fact that most of us (or more likely, our mothers) will throw out comics when we’ve outgrown them. …if we outgrow them, but that’s a different column.

The need to make a buck (or franc, or yen, or won) drives the industry. The industry gets the comics into my greedy little mitt, for which I am thankful, and I happily fork over the $3 or $5 or $12.95. It’s the economics that has kept the floppy flopping for 75 years, has run up Action & Detective into the 800s, and propelled the ever-mutating X-men brand and its variants and offspring into the 1000s.

Economic success and artistic merit: there is a sliding scale, and any given artist or publisher may place greater weight on one but it is seldom at the expense of the other. No one (that I know of) is in the business to give away comics, except on May 5th. Small publishing houses are still businesses, and they are all striving for viability, and hopefully profitability: The ability to make copies and get them distributed is as much a part of comics as ink on paper. Even artists who claim to work only for themselves want to share the fruits of their effort, so at some point a comic will be reproduced and sold.

Web comics are an interesting variation, and at first blush might be seen as violating the economic model, but it’s just a artefact of the incredibly low reproduction costs (what’s the fraction of a cent cost of a page load?) and not anything new. The trick is not to get the image to the customer, but to convince the customer that they still want to pay you for it. Ads also count in that equation: an ad is still a cost to your customer (ref. Goldhaber, the Attention Economy).

##

Can a mass produced object also be art? Let’s ask Warhol and Lichtenstein. [wiki: Andy, Roy, Pop Art]. Not that calling something “Pop Art” immediately gives it artistic merit, and this is ground that has been covered before by people with more degrees and pretention than I can muster. Most examples of Art (hanging-on-a-wall-in-a-museum art) are single entities, or one of a numbered series of prints. 100,000 copies may be just a few too many to qualify as a limited ‘art’ run, though that is what most in the industry consider a success. (here’s a run-down from 20 Feb 07, source ICv2 News)

The comic is new as an artform. Yes, it’s at least 75 years old in it’s current form and folks like to try and find roots that are even older [wiki: Woodcuts, Ukiyo-e] and if pressed I might even go so far as to call the Book of Kells [wiki, with pictures!] and other illuminated manuscripts as being the earliest protocomics. But words plus pictures, even when combined, do not always a comic make.

I think folks who try to find the historic roots of comics miss the point that it is a product of technology as much as the output of an artist. Not just the advances in printing, but also in the new visual vocabulary that comics share with photography and film. When I review a manga and pull in terms like shifting camera angles and blocking, I intentionally reference cinema in an attempt to describe (via words only) the more complex relationship that the images have to each other and the story. [ref. wiki: mise en scène] The aspects of sequence, story, and visual dynamics are what make comics unique, not the static images of centuries past that have the occasional speech balloon or scroll.

Comics don’t need a historical precedent. I think there was a definite breakthrough in the artform when it moved from single panels with captions (even if they are pretty, or inspired) to something that moves across the page. At least, that’s my take on it.

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to answer the question posed by the title: Hell yes, it’s the best damn art you can buy for the cost of a Big Mac (or two White Castle slyders, for a price comparison that goes all the way back to the 30s). A comic can be great even if it isn’t high art, just as fast food is awfully tasty but by no means haute cuisine — I don’t think comics need to be held to any artistic standards but their own.

originally written for and posted on Comicsnob.com

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Let me take some points from column #1 and also from #10 posted just two weeks ago, mix, mash and compound those, and see if the end results give us a little more perspective on why the kids love the manga.

[you really should imagine your grandmother saying it: “Oh, that Matt, yes he and his little friends are really into the manga this year…”]

Now, I wasn’t really good at being a teen the first go around, and sort of skipped the young-man, seasoned-veteran, middle-aged, and respected-elder stages, to cut right to crotchety old man (even in my 30s… or 20s for that matter). I drink scotch (neat). I smoke a pipe. I complain about the damn kids, coming into my store, reading the manga… “oy, punk, you gonna buy that or are you going to gawk at the next 9 volumes, too? mutter, mutter I blame the parents, we never did raise that generation right…”

Of course, I kid. And I read manga that would make that 12-year-old blush to the tip of his ears and the ends of his hair. (and then if he’s smart he’ll start taking notes… at least until he figures out that real life doesn’t work like manga)

But it does seem like the manga (particularly the market drivers like Naruto, Bleach, and Death Note) (aside: but what do you do when those series end, Viz?) appeals to the kids with the disposable cash. I mean, my usual fallback arguments for manga-superiority are well and good and all, but let’s face it: Fine Lit, Naruto ain’t. I won’t say that mass produced or indy comics are doing it any better, but is that little fox-faced ninja really the spokesman for a whole format?

No matter that I think manga are the best thing since sliced onigiri, and perhaps in fact in spite of my opinions on the comics in question, the kids like manga.

As Chloe pointed out in the comments on 5by8 #10, manga retains a “gimmicky freshness” because, hey, it’s Japanese! and it reads backwards! wacky! and have you seen the eyes and hair on that one character!? …

For some of these kids, it’s just fun to find something new. If it’s something their parents don’t understand (or even better, something the ‘rents try to understand but don’t really get) then that makes it — whatever it is — even more appealing. Doesn’t really matter which it this it happens to be, just as long as it’s not your father’s Oldsmobile. This goes for music, clothes, slang–and increasingly, comics.

Manga is the alt-rock for a new generation. And manga’s shiny and new. (Because, you know, our alt-rock was U2 and those guys will still pretty much rock your damn face off. The kids have a lot to live up to — no wonder they’re grasping at foreign comics)

Back in my day, if we wanted to be geeks we had to make a deliberate decision to go the Roddenberry or the Lucas route (or, the Gygax route–which wasn’t cool at all with the chicks until Tracy and Hickman started writing dragon books) (not that S’Wars or S’Trek were much better… at least until college) and we knew that we would be forever marked. Nowadays, if a guy can talk Fruits Basket, and maybe throw in a little Antique Bakery, then for a significant fraction of female fanbase, he’s golden. Being a manga geek carries no stigma, yet.

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Of course I can’t be sure. This is just my take on it, and I am several degrees removed from my customer base when it comes to our divergent views on manga. I know why I read it, but since I’m not a 14-year-old, I can’t say for sure why they like it so much. Maybe between the Atlanta Comics Expo and Anime Weekend Atlanta I could get a large enough statistical sample. Assuming I’d bother (or the respective staffs would let me conduct a survey).

The difficulty in finding a “typical” manga fan also speaks to how diverse the genre is, and how it’s more like researching an entire industry or culture, as opposed to just trying to figure out who’s leading among DC, Marvel, & Image superheroes.

Why do the kids like the manga so much? Beats me.