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I remember reading some years back (and I'm pretty damned certain that it was on this site) that the Japanese Prime Minister said ─ I think it was a speech ─ in which he spoke of new economic opportunities presented by a growth in the manga industry. I thought he was spouting nonsense. I guess I was wrong.....

The first time was last year?

Did manga not outsell western comics back in the anime/manga boom of the 00s?

Seif wrote:

The first time was last year?

Did manga not outsell western comics back in the anime/manga boom of the 00s?

Not consistently the way it has the past few years. You can thank the far more direct distribution methods for that. It’s not just what’s being written, it’s how you get it to the people.

I once read the rant of a comic book fan that went something like:

Comic books nowadays are too bleak, cynic and take themselves way too serious, heroes literally stop on their tracks to discuss if they should stop a villain that is using an ice bean because his plan to freeze the Earth could help stop global warning.

Somebody who enters a comic book store and wants to read about the guys he saw in movies, but what finds is that Captain America is a fascist, Ironman is in coma, Hulk is dead and Thor lost his powers and an arm.

And then 5 months later nothing matters because everything just get rebooted.

Minos_Kurumada wrote:

I once read the rant of a comic book fan that went something like:

Comic books nowadays are too bleak, cynic and take themselves way too serious, heroes literally stop on their tracks to discuss if they should stop a villain that is using an ice bean because his plan to freeze the Earth could help stop global warning.

Somebody who enters a comic book store and wants to read about the guys he saw in movies, but what finds is that Captain America is a fascist, Ironman is in coma, Hulk is dead and Thor lost his powers and an arm.

And then 5 months later nothing matters because everything just get rebooted.

I agree with the bolded part but the first part is some serious exaggeration.

As a Pole I got first introduced to comics through European (including Polish) comics like Thorgal or Asterix (or Tytus, Romek i Atomek) and I always preferred them from the cape stuff - the only USA comic I loved as a kid was the Duck Tales. Manga scratched the same itch that Franco-Belgian comics did, except with bigger cultural success, that's why it grows so much. Domination of superhero stories suck the air out of the room in American comics' scene, preventing growth of fandom with varied tastes that manga and anime cultivate together.

I bet few people become comic readers after watching the latest superhero movie, while anime is good in increasing readership.

Minos_Kurumada wrote:

I once read the rant of a comic book fan that went something like:

Comic books nowadays are too bleak, cynic and take themselves way too serious, heroes literally stop on their tracks to discuss if they should stop a villain that is using an ice bean because his plan to freeze the Earth could help stop global warning.

Somebody who enters a comic book store and wants to read about the guys he saw in movies, but what finds is that Captain America is a fascist, Ironman is in coma, Hulk is dead and Thor lost his powers and an arm.

And then 5 months later nothing matters because everything just get rebooted.

That first description seems very out of date. The really dark era of comics was like the late 90s to late 2000s where we got stories like Identity Crisis and Sins Past. I'd say these days it's the opposite where there's a lot of attempts to aim at younger demographics with characters drinking boba tea, taking selfies, talking about Tiktok, Twitter, and Instagram, and lots of series with more cartoony and softer styles. Newer characters like Kamala Kahn and Miles Morales are essentially self-inserts for Marvel fanboys and girls. Like, they took a huge MCU fan and then inserted them into the Marvel universe and they still act accordingly liking writing fanfiction, fanart, and shipping real-life characters which is pretty creepy but everyone just rolls with it.

The second and third parts are true, though.

Don't know about DC, but Marvel changes out the creative teams too much. Gone are the lengthy tenures. So there is no consistency of art and story. Nothing really matters anymore as someone else said above. Most of the characters have completely unstable personal lives as all the different writers throw everything and the kitchen sink at them. I am surprised that they haven't destroyed Reed and Sue Richards marriage yet.

AmpersandsUnited wrote:

Minos_Kurumada wrote:

That first description seems very out of date. .

I forgot to add that it was an old rant.

Hal14 wrote:

Minos_Kurumada wrote:

I agree with the bolded part but the first part is some serious exaggeration.

Actually, I did read the global warning chapter, it was Ms. Marvel's team, it was hilarious in a "So bad it's good way".

In the US, there was the pre-Great Recession manga boom of the 00's due to the rise of shoujo and female grazers in the bookstores, when they're finally able to tap into the economic muscle of grrrl power

(And then the bookstore crash and Great Recession happened)

I think the reason is pretty straightforward: Comics are way too hard to get into. They keep rebooting everything every 10 years and people are sick of following the same characters for decades. With most manga you start at chapter 1 one and that's it. The variety in stories also helps, and of course comic books is much more expensive than manga too.

It's unfortunate that it's not so much that manga as a whole is popular as it is that shounen battle manga in particular is popular. This aligns with anime as well. No sub-genre in the medium has remotely close to as many hours of content as it does. It's the only one that near consistently makes it to triple digit episode counts.

Hikaru Suzuhara wrote:

It's unfortunate that it's not so much that manga as a whole is popular as it is that shounen battle manga in particular is popular. This aligns with anime as well. No sub-genre in the medium has remotely close to as many hours of content as it does. It's the only one that near consistently makes it to triple digit episode counts.

Pursuing that line of thought, here's a link for those looking for something different.
https://www.cbr.com/fantastic-anime-hard-to-recommend/

So I sometimes find it odd that Manga is always compared to American Cape Crusader comics as if it was a zero sum game but Marvel, DC, Image, and etc. must really be kicking themselves seeing how manga may now account for 25% of the publishing market (which is insane to think about) and wondering where they messed up. And I want to add on some of what has already been talked about in this thread which seems less a discussion about how well manga is doing and more about the poor state of Marvel, DC, etc.
I remember talking to my friend who is a huge Marvel fan about the NPD book scan results of last year (https://www.comicsbeat.com/looking-at-npd-bookscan-2021-and-its-a-doozy/) and he said that people like him didn't care too much about the results since it didn't include single issue (aka floppies). My first thought was shouldn't there be a correlation between books sold to the number of floppies since people who buy the trades would have read the floppies. But according to him the floppy buyers are often collectors getting the various different covers for the issue. Which I think indicates the issue with Marvel, DC, etc. making their "product" for collectors which is probably coming at the expense of their writing and stories, especially when you consider how often writers and storylines change over (and how so many storylines intersect). He, also, mentioned that most people read digital, which is fine until you realize that a company is probably earning more on physical copies than on the digital copies/subscriptions.

And an other weird discussion I have seen is those bemoaning that people thinking American comics=Super heroes. Obviously, that isn't true when there is Saga, Locke and Key and so forth but they have almost no presence in the cultural zeitgeist. And if you were to walk into a bookstore (I used to work at one) you never see teenagers in the section selling western comics. I think it has to be linked with several changes happening at the same time. A)There seems to be less comic book stores than previously so kids are less likely to start reading floppies (which isn't a guarantee of buying the trades as mentioned earlier), B) the pirating of manga may have made it more accessible which helped with popularizing the medium (I don't remember western comics as readily available), c) the lack of adaptations of non-superhero comics. This leaves us with a western comic book industry that is only known for Superheros, while the manga industry is known for a Bunch of genres (I still think there is a weakness with the seemingly heavy relance on Shonen battle series).

So yeah....sorry for the long post (especially for my first on the site), I just have let these thoughts fester in my head for too long now.

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