Slashdot Mirror
Why Does Manga Succeed Where American Comics Fail?
Otaku_0245 writes "I read a really interesting article at slushfactory.com entitled 'Why Does Manga Succeed Where American Comics Fail?' discussing/comparing the comics industries in Japan and the US. It's basically a 3-way conversation including Frederik Schodt (author of 'Dreamland Japan' - one of my favorite books about Japanese pop culture), and very thought-provoking."
Why Does Manga Succeed Where American Comics Fail?
Because apart from a few good american comics, the rest are crap!
At least manga has more fun aspects to it...
IMHO, I think it has to do with the deeper stories about mans plight with technology and how it seems to be taking over our lives. Plus it seems the artistry is a little more alluring. Don't get me wrong, Comics are great in thier own right. It just seems that people can get a little tired of super heroes after a while...
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
Since when did American comics fail? Last I looked Spiderman, Superman, Batman, X-Men and many others were on just about every newsstand. Not to mention MAD and other, more satirical comics. I, for one, read hundreds of comics set in the X-Men universe when i was younger (The New Mutants, X-Force, Cable etc). On the other hand I've only read a couple of mangas and wasn't too thrilled. Not to say manga is bad, just it's not very appealing to me. I found the storylines a lot more "real" in the X-Men Marvel universe, ironically. It spoke about real political and environmental issues affecting America today, whereas a lot of manga seems to be more about internal or personal issues... Perhaps traditional "geeks" can identify more with the latter, but for me tackling racism and the political environment head-on was a lot more interesting.
Personally, I think it's all in the binding. In japan, you can get them as books (same size, etc). In america, they are this large thin peice of crap that will tear by looking at it.
It's people's perception of it.
I find it amusing that the title of the post is "why does Manga succeed where American comics fail," and yet the first answer to the first question in the article basically states that the manga industry is falling into decline in exactly the same way that the U.S. comics industry has.
It's simple, really. Manga is no different from American comics, in terms of writing quality and artwork. It's simply a matter of what's in style. Manga, like Anime, has enjoyed quite a lot of success in foreign markets like the U.S., where it is something of a novelty.
People enjoy the exotic flavor of things like this. Often times this is augmented by feeling like you're in part of a niche audience - it makes you feel like you're clued into something that everybody else is ignorant of. But these are not good foundations for any business that desires longevity and stability.
Manga is just the hip new thing, that's all. It's what's in style. But it is already starting to wear thin (Let's face it - there's only so far you can take an industry when everything is drawn with so little variance in art style). So I think this is a loaded question - manga has nothing to teach American comics. If anything, American comics have learned the hard lessons first, having had a lot more experience dealing with a fickle readership. I think they could probably teach the manga industry a lesson or two.
You don't ever watch movies? You browse the web in Lynx? The pictures are just a different medium. Comics aren't supposed to replace books, they're supposed to augment them. They're just a different way of telling a story. Some people like books, other people like movies, other people like CDs, other people like comics. None of them are any "less" than the other, it's just whatever you prefer. Comics have their place, and it's not just a "kid's" place.
I was never a hardcore comic book reader, but there were a bunch of American comic titles that I used to read back in the late 80's and early 90's. Around the early 90's, though, things started getting ridiculous. Comics wanted to be treated as *visual art*, they got much more expensive and "collectible". That first issue of McFarland's Spiderman comic was the beginning of the end. That thing was what, twenty pages long and cost three bucks? But the picture sure were pretty, and the paper sure was glossy. *gag*
Now, you can't even buy comics at the convenience store any more- at least not many of them. They're marshaled away in specialized comic book stores, where collectors go to peruse.
Manga, however, has always taken the opposite approach, the one American comics used until the time period I just described. Manga keeps things cheap, fun, and disposable. For the equivalant of a few bucks, you get a couple hundred pages of manga. Easy to pick up and put down, and it's not "collectible", so you can carry it anywhere. The stories are pulpy and fun, and they don't try to be more than they are. Sure, there are some though-provoking plots (Shirow, etc) but it never takes itself too seriously like a lot of American comics do.
(I know there's plenty of exceptions to the things I talked about. I'm talking "in general", not "absolutely and completely")
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
The first is variety. There is manga about everything: Sports (pick your favorite), vampires, giant robots piloted by 14-year olds, biker gangs, romance, religious themes, (and, yes, porn)...the list goes on and on. It's true that US comics aren't just superheroes, but American comics don't exist in the variety of genres that manga does.
The second is literacy. People like to claim that Japan has a huge literacy rate; I don't have any figures on how true this is. However, most books are damn hard to read, especially if you're interested in something likely to have uncommon kanji like sci-fi. (I recently brought a copy of the Japanese translation of the Heinlein book _The Door Into Summer_ to the school I work at, and many of the teachers had trouble with it.) On the other hand, manga is very easy to read. A lot of the time, you don't even have to worry about the kanji, since it's accompanied by furigana. The fact that the story is a combination of pictures and text makes reading a lot less mental effort (which is good, because it's likely you're already mentally exhausted from school or work). In America, there doesn't seem to be a functional difference in the level of literacy required between a comic and a novel, so there's not as much reason to shell out $2 or $3 for a 20-page comic (with advertisements) when you could get a paperback for twice or thrice as much.
Sono koro, bokura wa, sore ga sekai no shinjitsu da to shinjite ita.
The funny thing, is that many of the reasons proposed for the success of manga are not present in France. Comics are not cheap (most of them are real book with some hard cover) and to big to read in the train (standard european comic format is roughly A4). Yet they are very popular.
Not true at all. It is NOT socially acceptable for a middle-aged businessman to read Sailor Moon. Sailor Moon is for preteen and early-teen girls. Not only that, Sailor Moon ended years ago... Nakayoshi (one of a thousand phone-book sized manga anthology magazines that gets printed every week) replaced it with another story.
The middle-aged businessmen are reading a class of comics made specifically for businessmen. They are aptly called "Business Comics". Now these comics aren't necessarily ABOUT business (although a huge amount of them are), but they are tailored to the businessman market.
Women have their own kind of comics (Women's Comics). Young men have their own (Youth Comics). Boys, girls, etc. of all ages have comics tailored for their gender and specific age group.
Basically walk down the aisle of your local Barnes & Noble, and imagine *EVERY* story there done as comic books. All the biographies, the historical fiction, the "true crime", the romance, the mystery, the documentaries... All of them written much as they are, except as comics. THAT is what comics are like in Japan.
Just about the only thing you WON'T see as comics in Japan are scholarly works -- i.e. things which are meant to be totally informative rather than entertaining... On the non-scholarly end though, even some of the informative stuff like instructional "HOW-TO" books are sometimes made as manga.
What you see outside of Japan is in fact a very small subset, mostly geared at the "otaku" (geek/freak/fanboy|girl) market (which I am a part of, but have no illusions about).
In the U.S., yes comics are either trash or treasure. If you are a mainstream kid, they are cool. Mainstream adult, garbage. Fanboy adult, treasure. An audience of children and fanboys is pretty big, but when your material is not varied enough and prices for each book are high, you will attract zero new readers.
In Japan, EVERYBODY reads manga. It appeals to everyone. The appeal explains the saturation. The saturation explains the print quality. The print quality explains the cost. The cost explains part of the appeal.
The disposable manga marketing model is so profitable because of Japan's disposable culture. Don't fix or keep old things, especially at the cost of living/storage space, if newer and better things can be had cheaply. This profitablity attracts publishers big and small, which creates a demand for artists and writers. There's your variety. Think American comics industry in the 1980's on a bigger scale over a much longer period of time (decades).
The article points out the collector mentality that American comics fans have. I share this mentality, because I like to think of every purchase I make as SOME kind of investment. I also have a huge house and ample storage space for my stuff (in the bay area, it's a wonder I can afford food, but yes, my house is quite respectable and my collection is as well). So comics are expensive, because as a collector, quality media production isn't just a premium, it's a requisite for purchase. Problem here? Joe Blow sees the price tag and walks away from the neewsstand thinking, "I miss my 60 cent Uncanny X-Men books." No new readership? Then regardless of how shiny your book is, you will get no new readership.
Schodt had the whole thing covered. As I see it, America will never have the same level of saturation for this type of media as Japan. Their culture and the publishers' understanding to their culture facilitate high consumption rates. America isn't Japan. The differences shouldn't cause concern for anybody but Marvel and DC.
Donald Richie has lived in Japan for over 40 years and is a well known cultural critic, specifically movies (I believe he did the commentary track on the Criterion Seven Samurai DVD and was interviewed extensively for the Kurosawa documentary on 20th Century Masters on PBS). He has also written several books on Japanese film and its stylistic differences from the rest of the world.
I think a very specific point in his A Hundred Years of Japanese Film (which I recommend regardless) might answer this. Richie says that one of the fundamental differences between Japanese and Western (specifically American) cinema is the drama that they are derived from: Japanese plays (Noh, Kabuki) are presentational while Western plays are realistic.
Ok so what does that mean? Well in Western drama (and which was then carried over into Western cinema), there is an assumption of naturalism: things are as they seem, as they are in the Real World. Japanese drama though, with its stylized movements, its paramount importance of placement means that in many ways the form of the style dictates much of the logic.
This has meant that many things that are considered avant-garde (i.e. Adult) in the West (Expressionism, Surealism) are actually incorporated into all levels of entertainment in Japan.
An example would be a sword fight. In the West when someone is hit with a sword they are expected to bleed normally, scream out, and fall down dead.
In Japan you can have someone hit in the throat with a sword, stand there, say something ("The irony... to hear it from my own neck"), then a gyser of blood shoots out, and they tip over silently (ala Lone Wolf and Cub). Where in the West this would be seen as an experimental choice, in Japan it is commonly accepted.
This is important for anima as animation is a stylistic choice. So fans of Japanese cinema would have no problem accepting it while a standard Western audience, with their realism indoctrination, have trouble accepting such a Fantastical step is Adult entertainment. The touching adult morality of Neon Genesis: Evangelion is thus less than the realistic dopiness of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, based purely on how the form of each is perceived.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Only they're talking abount manga.
Blue hair says "fun"
Manga is usually in black and white.
exaggerated high-pitched squeaky voices mean "happy".
If you hear voices coming from manga, you may be having a psychotic episode.
In every single case, the guy who likes Anime has some sort of difficulty dealing with or confronting women sexually.
I think the whole point is why is it different in Japan, where just about everyone reads it (or watches it in the case of anime). Married, single, male, female, old, young.
I sense a great deal of anger in you. I don't quite understand it; are you terrified of the weaknesses you think anime displays because you worry about seeing those weaknesses in yourself?
No joke, the Japanese read more comics because of their lower rates of literacy.
No, this isn't because they're stupid or their education system is poor, it's because of the complexities of their written alphabets. The Japanese have 4 written alphabets in regular use: 2 phonetic ones, hiragana and katakana; the chinese alphabet, kanji; and the english alphabet, romanji.
The problem is that the more high-brow the text, the more likely it is to be written in kanji. Kanji is a one-symbol-is-one-word system. You have to have a bloody large vocabulary to make any sense of it.
These comics tend to be written in one of the phonetic kanas (hiragana or katakana), so they're easy to read and accessible to anybody with a gradeschool education. This makes them more popular.
Just imagine if all English books were written in Shakespearean english, or worse Old English. How popular would comic books be with adults then?
Even those who purport to understand Japanese culture around here (and then proceed to talk about manga as child porn) are so off base I just had to act...
The Japanese consider their culture to be nearly impenetrable to westerners. Even if you go in with an extremely open mind, there are many aspects to the culture that we, as westerners, could probably never understand. Simple direct observation of the culture from within (yes, you have to actually *go* to Japan to understand this) along with said open mind doesn't hurt, though, and having a Japanese wife certainly helps too.
Looking at manga in terms of western comics is completely misguided from the start. Manga in Japan is simply the way quite a lot of literature is presented to the public; it's the accepted method of reading most less serious fiction and non-fiction for both children *and* adults. How-to books, instruction manuals, even novels come packaged in the same artful style and the variety of subjects is endless. There's not what you would even call a "manga industry" in Japan in the same way as there is a "comic industry" in the US - the manga industry is simply the Japanese publishing industry. They obviously have non-illustrated books too, but illustrated literature is a standard, accepted form of literature in a way that it is not here. Manga in Japan is quite literally everywhere - it's not something you go to the "manga shop" to buy. You couldn't get away from it if you tried.
Many of the causes for manga's success listed in the linked article are actually effects. The fact that there is so much variety in subject matter is less a reason for success than it is an effect of the cultural acceptance of the legitimacy of illustrated literature. The Japanese are very visual people, and I would argue that their alphabet itself - which is itself entirely symbolic - is one of the root causes for this. In other Asian countries you see similar phenomena (illustrated literature is very popular in Korea as well, for example). The Japanese are used to looking at iconography and determining meaning from it - it is necessary for them to get through life - whereas we largely are not. I would argue our brains are wired more for conceptual analysis than iconographic analysis; we assign meaning from text and speech rather than visuals.
It's also completely untrue that there's no collector culture in Japan. The fact that many "manga" books are disposable doesn't mean they all are. You may buy a disposable paperback at an airpot to read on an airplane here but that doesn't mean that hardcover first printing of "A Farewall to Arms" you've got at home is in the same category. Again, this just shows a lack of understanding and acknowledgement of the fact that the "manga industry" is simply the publishing industry in Japan - the variety in manga extends not just to the subject matter but also to the durability of the literature. My wife has illustrated books of Miyazaki stories that she's had since she was a kid, and most Japanese people I know are the same way. And these are not even otaku - hardcore fans - who actively collect as much of this stuff as they can.
Anyway, the main point is that it's a mistake to look at anything in Japan through western eyes. You need to at least *try* to look through Japanese eyes, as impossible as that is. There are things you can at least begin to understand if you attempt to delve deeply into the culture, but you'll never get close if you insist on looking through our perspective.
Japan is a nation that relies almost entirely on mass transit. People spend a lot of time on the train, or the bus, or waiting for the train or bus. Rather than sit around and be totally bored, many fill the time with reading manga. More recently, people are just as likely to sit and play games or message friends on their cell phones.
For the same reason the super-high-tech japanese cell phones and DoCoMo features haven't really caught on here in the US. While this might also work in New York City, the vast majority of the US is much more spread out. Most Americans own cars, and few outside major cities use mass transit. Even less use it for trips longer than a half-hour/hour (which is common in Japan). The critical mass for this sort of thing just isn't there.
I've built up so much character I have an alter-ego
Where exactly are American comics failing? I've been collecting for over twenty years. I trained up as an artist. So I know what I'm talking about when I say that the comics have never been more creative, better written, professionally crafted.
Manga? I just don't get the obsession. The plotlines are derivative of bad pulp sci-fi, pre-Campbell. The artwork is adequate for the most part, just as "American" comics are. The best art is fantastic, the worst abysmal.
The plotlines in the majority of manga and anime are hackneyed, especially painful since they are run through a language and cultural translation.
I realize manga and anime (I have to lump them together) have become a religion amongst geeks and kids, but its not because of quality -- they're cool because they're cool. Literature, they are not. For the most part. Just like comics.
I can't understand why bunny girls or twenty years out of date cybercowboys ripped from Gibson are more interesting than the tortured old man in "The Dark Knight Returns", or the reinvented heroes in "The Watchmen". Love and Rockets. Dork Tower. Men in Black. Liberty Meadows. Silly and sublime, ten cent junk or graphic novels, American comics have grown up in spite of great resistance from the public at large.
One can argue that manga can be capable of interesting stories, but that doesn't make it more successful. Remember, there is a large amount of manga that doesn't make it in the mass market -- misogynistic, violent, xenophobic, and adored by Japanese of all ages, byt not suited for our culture. We only see the tip of the iceberg, sort of comparable to thinking Brit TV is all Masterpiece Theater, when it's mostly bad game shows.
IMO, altho I've seen incredible artwork done by Japanese artists when relieved of the more everyday restrictions of manga, the comics I see daily are dull, unimaginatively drawn, with bad, bad, and I mean BAD writing with insipid plots. Remember Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is shit.
Manga... the characters all look the same. This is not a generalization -- they are intended to look alike. There's something weird about how the eyes are never drawn with epicanthic folds, considering that they are drawn for a Japanese audience. Running through the genre an obsession with young girls that would get you talked about, not to mention tracked by Ashcroft's goons, if you were drawing in the U.S.
I realize young fanboys and fangirls devour manga the way I used to chow down on Marvel, but that doesn't make American comics "bad". Young people like simpler stories. Manga returns to old comic roots by simplifying the artwork on one level yet showing sophistication in execution. American comics have evolved for an older audience now --there's no help for it.
I've listened patiently to plot breakdowns from rabid fans, and had my eyes glaze over. Let's see: a lone hero(ine) starts out from everyday origins to discover their hidden power that can defeat the demon which yadda yadda... essentially old Japanese folk stories rewritten, just as American comics repeat the Rugged Individualist meme from the old west. But cowboy stories have been done to death, and so has the Lone Ronin, whatever blue hair he wears.
That is a misconception. The expensive, coloured, thin ones were published before the manga explosion (triggered by publishing Dragon Ball under the Japanese formula, like it was discovered in France before - thick, black and white, low quality paper, cheap!). These are unsold artefacts.
The cheap thick ones were published after the manga explosion. And many series was relaunched (Akira, Alita, 3x3 eyes) under the Japanese formula, instead of the US/Euro formula and became hits.
There are 3 pulp style magazines around now in Germany, with serialized series:
Regards,
Marc
Japanese Manga is not just the actual manga that makes it popular, but the fact that it's from Japan gives it instant 'cool' status, and means it's better than some american/english nerd knocking it out, but it's a Japanese nerd.
The stories I have read are alright, and due to the complete head on approach that Japan takes when it deals with things, issues such as rape, child porn and violence are all in the more risque manga. Actually, when it comes to violent crimes like these, Japan is at the bottom of the pile for these crimes.
So yeah, I don't know how much of it is due to the automatic karma that being Japanese gives anything, or how much of it is due to the head on approach it takes. It hasn't made me read it to be honest, and I'm out here in this land, but it seems to be a winning formula!
-- [Mofette]
http://www.mofette.co.uk