the homogenization of the U.S. manga industry

By some fluke, manga is more popular than it's ever been in the U.S., yet less alternative manga is being published now than 10 years ago. Pulp magazine (RIP) was an important vector for the dissemination of alt-manga in the U.S., but it folded in 2003. In 1996 Comics Underground Japan was published, and Secret Comics Japan came out in 2000, but since then there's been a total drought of such survey volumes of important, alternative manga, with the exception of Japan As Viewed by 17 Creators, which has a totally different flavor. Even horror manga can't, for the most part, sell in America anymore. Dark Horse cancelled (or at least "indefinitely postponed") publishing Junji Ito's Museum of Terror after just three volumes, the primary publishers of Hideshi Hino in America folded, etc.

The wane of alternative manga in the U.S. is contemporaneous with a huge boom in mainstream shounen/shoujo fare. Manga like Naruto, Fruits Basket, and Bleach have reached unprecedented levels of popularity in the U.S. even while publishers like Viz have appropriated the clever Japanese system of charging readers on two ends (once for the Shounen Jump subscription, again for the tankoban). Nowadays manga that doesn't hew closely to the established genres or sub-genres has little chance of being translated and published stateside. The overall effect is a homogenization of what's commercially available here. If you want shounen action, there's a plethora of series; if you want shoujo romance, you can take your pick; even slightly more obscure tastes, e.g. for yaoi, can be accomodated. But if you want something to really surprise you, if you want to read authors who radically disregard the normative laws of genre, good luck.

There are a few notable exceptions. Viz has been willing, intermittently, to publish indie manga like Sexy Voice and Robo and their upcoming omnibus reprint of Tekkon Kinkreet. Fanfare/Ponent Mon is closely associated with the somewhat pretentious school of "La Nouvelle Manga," but their release schedule is sparse (seven or eight books a year) and their business model is horrible (print books on super high quality paper that gets oily fingerprints on it just by looking at it, charge an arm and a leg, and then distribute them almost nowhere).

My questions are manifold:

1) Why is it so hard for anything that strays too far from the popular formulas to sell here?

One of my pet theories is as follows. Prestigious indie comics have taken off in America (e.g. Maus, Jimmy Corrigan, Eightball) in the past decade, to the point where now Time includes graphic novels in its end-of-year best-of lists, and the New York Times prints reviews of comics without blinking. Yet there is little cross-over between people interested in "quality" American or European comics and the few of us interested in "quality" manga. Why is this? I have no idea. Surely anybody interested in the possibilities of the medium should explore beyond the Western canon, right? Then perhaps a first step would be something like what Drawn and Quarterly has done with Yoshihiro Tatsumi's works: sell quality "underground" manga to the people who care about quality, NOT the people who care about manga!. The assumption subtending this marketing tactic is clear: market on the basis of a taste for quality rather than a taste for comics of a particular national origin! The precedent is obvious! Who do you think tends to line up at Hirokazu Kore-eda screenings? Fans of art cinema, or fans of anime?

2) Why, at a time when the U.S. manga industry is more successful than ever, and ostensibly has the most capital it's ever had, are publishers more afraid than ever to take risks on alternative, critically acclaimed manga (e.g. the stuff that used to get published in Garo and now gets printed in periodicals like Ikki)?

I think they aren't giving readers enough credit. I followed a pretty conventional trajectory, from consuming superhero comics as a kid, to discovering anime and manga as a teenager, to wanting something more and subsequently discovering the trailblazing work being done at the margins of the medium, by artists like Junko Mizuno, Taiyo Matsumoto, and Jiro Taniguchi. Publishers should expect the same thing to happen en masse in the next decade. Just as the average video game player is now in his late 20s, at least some of the kids currently devouring Naruto will soon be looking for something more. If there's alternative, more "adult" manga to be read (and by "adult" I certainly do not mean "adult" content like sex and ultraviolence), these people will read it. If there isn't, then they'll think manga is something they have to "grow out of" like sugary cereal and Saturday morning cartoons and the U.S. manga industry will, ironically, have subverted itself...

P.S. Originally I planned to write this in the Manga! forum, but the level of discourse is higher here and I've posted there about alt-manga previously and received little feedback.

>I'm not familiar with manga but I am somewhat more familiar with the publishing industry. I love it and I hate it. Books that sell are what the publishers will look to recreate—an obvious fact.

Something like David B.'s Epileptic would have never found a publisher had he not done well in his home turf, and then, I believe, he was tentatively brought to America. Same with Satrapi. It was a huge risk for the young American editor of Satrapi's work to buy Persepolis and translate it, even thought "Persepolis" had done well in Europe.

These authors would have been told that their works are interesting, but "we don't know how to market them." Or their works would have had all life edited out in the US by editors under pressure to make money and hammer them into established mold of a plot-driven novel--which they ain't.

I was incredibly relieved, crazy-ecstatic when I read David B. because I saw that his work fit no mold, had dozens and dozens of characters and threads to the story. It had no plot. Satrapi's was episodic.

What's absolutely gorgeous about Epileptic or Jimmy Corrigan is you just know editors had minimal or if anything at all to do with their works except for the packaging!

I was blowing some steam when I initiated the thread about "Mainstreaming a rebellious form of art." It was not a well phrased question, but there is something sacredly off-kilter, daring, and, yes, rebellious, about comics. I think we may be seeing a brief flowering of the type of work like David B., Satrapi, Ware before we will see the homogenizing that Metatext is talking about.

I want to thank this group for educating me on what's good and what available. I've learned a lot in a few months. I've read selectively, but I've read well.

Oh, yah, and if Metatext goes into publishing industry, I'll send you my manuscripts;)

They seriously need to translate more Osamu Tezuka works. Sure, I can get the entire series of Buddha in Australia (in English) and I have Metropolis on my shelf, but apart from that, Tezuka manga is hard to find, let alone find translated. Seeing the Tezuka exhibition in Sydney made me want to read more of his work, and because Australia is isolated, it takes a long time for comics and manga to get on the shelves in Bookshops.

I don't really have the energy for a serious discussion right now (sorry), but I just wanted to point out two things:

By some fluke, manga is more popular than it's ever been in the U.S., yet less alternative manga is being published now than 10 years ago.

It's not a fluke that manga is popular now. It's basically positive factors that came together. First, is the popularity of anime. I would attribute this largely to Cartoon Network, for showing it on Toonami every weekday, and then later, having it on Adult Swim as well. As for the reasons why? Well, Toonami was about action cartoons, and there's a lot of action anime. Plus, a lot of the people at CN really like anime. I don't think it's really more complicated than that.

Second, is the TokyoPop style. Manga have been published for years here in the U.S., but what really made it explode was the price point on TokyoPop's titles. They printed the books on cheaper paper, didn't flip the art (which saves money since they don't have to redraw anything), and the books just hit the magical "under $10" point. Books over $10 are generally considered an investment, a collectable. Books under $10, like mass-market paperbacks, are bought more for their entertainment value. You don't buy a cheap paperback because you think it will last through the ages. You buy it to read it.

even while publishers like Viz have appropriated the clever Japanese system of charging readers on two ends (once for the Shounen Jump subscription, again for the tankoban).

This really isn't all that different from American comics, where you can buy the monthly titles (which are usually printed on cheaper paper) or you can wait and buy the collections (printed on better paper). Some people buy one or the other, some buy both. I can imagine that's not much different than manga.

It's not a fluke that manga is popular now.

I wasn't saying it was a fluke. I was saying that the confluence of the two facts--an increase in the overall popularity of manga and a decrease in the amount of alternative manga being published--strikes me as bizarre. I find the reasons you suggest for the American manga boom quite convincing, actually. The Tokyopop price point is indeed a huge factor. And this is perfectly true, as well:

Books over $10 are generally considered an investment, a collectable. Books under $10, like mass-market paperbacks, are bought more for their entertainment value. You don't buy a cheap paperback because you think it will last through the ages. You buy it to read it.

That's precisely the reason that I suggested that the right tactic would be to sell alternative manga to people who buy alternative comics, and have proven to be willing to shell out large sums of money for quality. For example, on LT 794 users own Jimmy Corrigan, 791 own Ghost World, over a thousand own Maus, 757 own Blankets, over two thousand total copies of Persepolis and its sequel are owned. Because Yoshihiro Tatsumi is now associated with these "prestige" publishers, and his manga is being packaged like a typical Drawn & Quarterly quality title (his association with Adrian Tomine doesn't hurt, either), it has actually sold quite well.

This really isn't all that different from American comics.

Actually, I think it is, because the vast majority of manga in Japan is first available phone-book style, i.e. in the pages of periodicals like Weekly Shounen Jump. In other words, manga usually aren't collectible on the front end or at the initial tankoban stage. American comics have a much greater emphasis on collectibility. For example, Jeff Smith has said that people thought he was crazy when he first decided to periodically reprint Bone in trade paperback form. They said he would be undermining the value and collectibility of early issues. I think what you're talking about with regards to the American industry is a rather recent development. For instance, Marvel's Essential ______ (X-Men, Spiderman, etc.) trades only started coming out in the last decade.

Come to think of it, the "double-charging" method is a boon for people like me to don't subscribe to any of the manga periodicals, because it sets the price point for series like Death Note and Nana ridiculously low.

I wasn't saying it was a fluke. I was saying that the confluence of the two facts--an increase in the overall popularity of manga and a decrease in the amount of alternative manga being published--strikes me as bizarre.

Sorry, I had a brain fart when I was typing that message, as I meant to say that like breeds like, and the popular titles like Dragon Ball Z inspire the publication of similiar titles, like Naruto. Additionally, the more titles they can print and sell actually determines the cost of printing and thus the price point, and alternative comics aren't going to be printed in such large quantities, which makes them more expensive to produce, and which in turn means they might break that magical $10 price point.

> "Why, at a time when the U.S. manga industry is more successful than ever, and ostensibly has the most capital it's ever had, are publishers more afraid than ever to take risks on alternative, critically acclaimed manga?"

Easy answer to that. Market saturation. People aren't buying manga indiscriminately, so publishers have to look for what they know (or think, rather) will sell. Much as in any field. ADV are the prime example here. They bought up a load of titles, pushed them onto the market, and then found they weren't getting the sales they wanted. End result, they cut their entire manga line and went back to concentrating on DVDs for a long time.

You mention the Junji Ito and Hideshi Hino books. There's a simple reason for those not selling, I think - they don't appeal to the general public. Not much one can do about that, and if the publisher feels the market is too small to support them publishing a title, they're absolutely within their rights to not publish it. Not to mention that the Dark Horse manga books, by and large, are *over* the magic $10 price tag you mention, IIRC.

You mention the Junji Ito and Hideshi Hino books. There's a simple reason for those not selling, I think - they don't appeal to the general public. Not much one can do about that, and if the publisher feels the market is too small to support them publishing a title, they're absolutely within their rights to not publish it. Not to mention that the Dark Horse manga books, by and large, are *over* the magic $10 price tag you mention, IIRC.

True. Too true. Although it's worth mentioning that the volumes of Museum of Horror were more than 350 pages each for $13.95, which strikes me as a pretty good deal. I also wish the people who flock to all the horror flicks in America would also purchase horror manga, but I guess it's expecting too much to ask for those two demographics to have much overlap.

Well it has to do with the publishing companies themsleves. Tokyopop, Viz, and others are consolidations of agreements to bring work over between publishers, sharking risk and profit. D&Q has brought over some alternative work and just like when Manga first came over the alternative market will be slow and project by project until Japanese publishers see money already made.