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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."
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...
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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")
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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).
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.