Purple Loli Behind the Slaughter
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Why is manga becoming more popular while Western comics are losing readers?
It’s cheaper, has better availability, is more varied, more consistent, and puts more of a focus on actual being a story.
Comic book prices are getting too high for what you get. Full color printing is expensive, among other issues (one of which will be touched on again in a moment), and you end up paying half the price of a paperback novel for couple dozen pages. Larger collections are slightly better in price, but manga is still cheaper; you’ll get around 200 pages for $7–8, and boxed sets can be even cheaper. You’ll often be paying 2–3x that much for a similar page count (maybe a little bit more) for graphic novel collections.
Availability is also a factor in this. Western comics has become a niche fandom that only really caters to existing fans. If I search manga on Amazon (as I did to get the prices above), I get a bunch of manga. Sure, there’s a few things I’d never heard of, but its mostly sets or new chapters of popular series, ongoing or past.
Western comics, on the other hand, turned into something that is sold at comic book stores, and basically nowhere else. Searching “Graphic Novels” on Amazon I had to scroll down a ways to see something that recognizably wasn’t a childrens book or an adaptation of a YA novel, and even then it was Watchmen, an older stand alone work. If I search “Comic Books” I get a bunch of “grab bag” scams, people selling their old collects, etc. What I don’t see, in either case, is the latest collection of Spiderman or Batman or whatnot being sold by the actual publisher… because the “comic book mafia” has basically prevented online sales of comic books.
These factors also create a cyclic effect. Less sales means economies of scale help manga more than comics (the fact that manga is sold in a format near-identical to paperback novels probably makes it even cheaper as well), further harming comic books pricing.
Manga also casts a much wider net. The major comic books make basically one thing; superhero comics. Manga does something for everybody. It’s got romance, drama, romantic comedy, slice of life, pure comedy, etc. and action to taste, with any mixture of setting and “adultness level” you could ask for, or mixed with any non-action style. Anyone who isn’t turned off by the format or Japanese style/culture can probably find something to enjoy. But superheroes as a genre are targeted mostly at boys and young men, and lately aren’t even doing a good job of that.
Which brings us to the last set of problems. The comic book industry has become an impenetrable mess, and has lost its target demographic and is chasing ghosts instead of trying to bring them back. I’m a dude approaching 30. I’ve been in the sweet spot for what should be the comic book demographic for the majority of my life… and I’ve never bought a comic book, and have only read a couple graphic novels. And even then, one was because it was by the same author as the comic a movie I’d liked was based one, and the other because I was bored at a summer camp.
As an aside, I think that’s also part of the problem; there’s a gulf between superhero comics and other western comics that doesn’t seem to exist in manga.
Most of the popular comic IPs have existed for around half a century, which creates a set of major problems. There’s no good starting place, a lot of trash, and a daunting backlog. I think that, in general, there gets to be a point in any medium where a series is so large that it’s imposing to join the fandom, and most superhero lines are long past that point; there’s a feeling you aren’t a True Fan unless you’ve read/watched/played everything (whether personal or enforced by elitists within the fandom). For a small series, that’s doable, but the larger it gets, the harder. The fact that a lot of it is old or crap doesn’t help; do I need to read the crappy comics, or the old and dated one to be a True Fan? Manga doesn’t suffer from this. Only a handful of series have run for decades, and even then it’s all under a single line for the most part. Something like One Piece remains a lot more approachable than Spider-man because there’s only one continuity, and it’s all just one long story; there’s not half a dozen alternate universes, reboots, and the starting point isn’t 50 years old.
Manga retires old properties. They might redo something really old, like Dororo, but that’s small potatoes compared to the constant churn of relaunches in comic books. If you do want to get into a decade old property, it’s all right there. Relatively shorter runs, and the fact that they’ll be by a single author for the entire run, helps ensure some level of consistency.
This finally gets into the final issue with Marvel and DC; they give old characters to new authors, who aren’t writing for the characters, but for themselves. In manga, old characters get to retire. A series finishes, and they finally reach their goal or whatever. A new series starts and must prove itself on it’s own. An established author might get a little more notice than a new one, but the story itself has to draw in new fans. But comic have turned into IP holding companies, selling Superman to Superman fans, and so on. The character is what gets people to pick up the comic, and that leads to authors abusing the series they’ve been given to write ideological tracts with superhero branding to help them sell, rather than write compelling new stories to get people interested. This is also why we see “race lifts” of old characters (gender and sexuality swaps as well); the quality and quantity for price means that new IPs don’t sell worth a damn, so the only way for them to add a more diverse character is to slap an existing IP on top of them like an ill-fitting glove… at the cost of further pissing off the existing fans.
This problem ties into a bunch of the other ones. Many of the new writers and artists suck at writing and drawing. Their messaging means they aren’t drawing back the prime boys and young men demographic, but instead chasing a demographic that isn’t interested in superheroes, resulting in a product neither group wants to read. Roll all that together and you’ve got a dumpster fire where they can’t sell comic books to people who are stuck at home with nothing else to do, in an era where superhero movies are breaking box office records.
It’s cheaper, has better availability, is more varied, more consistent, and puts more of a focus on actual being a story.
Comic book prices are getting too high for what you get. Full color printing is expensive, among other issues (one of which will be touched on again in a moment), and you end up paying half the price of a paperback novel for couple dozen pages. Larger collections are slightly better in price, but manga is still cheaper; you’ll get around 200 pages for $7–8, and boxed sets can be even cheaper. You’ll often be paying 2–3x that much for a similar page count (maybe a little bit more) for graphic novel collections.
Availability is also a factor in this. Western comics has become a niche fandom that only really caters to existing fans. If I search manga on Amazon (as I did to get the prices above), I get a bunch of manga. Sure, there’s a few things I’d never heard of, but its mostly sets or new chapters of popular series, ongoing or past.
Western comics, on the other hand, turned into something that is sold at comic book stores, and basically nowhere else. Searching “Graphic Novels” on Amazon I had to scroll down a ways to see something that recognizably wasn’t a childrens book or an adaptation of a YA novel, and even then it was Watchmen, an older stand alone work. If I search “Comic Books” I get a bunch of “grab bag” scams, people selling their old collects, etc. What I don’t see, in either case, is the latest collection of Spiderman or Batman or whatnot being sold by the actual publisher… because the “comic book mafia” has basically prevented online sales of comic books.
These factors also create a cyclic effect. Less sales means economies of scale help manga more than comics (the fact that manga is sold in a format near-identical to paperback novels probably makes it even cheaper as well), further harming comic books pricing.
Manga also casts a much wider net. The major comic books make basically one thing; superhero comics. Manga does something for everybody. It’s got romance, drama, romantic comedy, slice of life, pure comedy, etc. and action to taste, with any mixture of setting and “adultness level” you could ask for, or mixed with any non-action style. Anyone who isn’t turned off by the format or Japanese style/culture can probably find something to enjoy. But superheroes as a genre are targeted mostly at boys and young men, and lately aren’t even doing a good job of that.
Which brings us to the last set of problems. The comic book industry has become an impenetrable mess, and has lost its target demographic and is chasing ghosts instead of trying to bring them back. I’m a dude approaching 30. I’ve been in the sweet spot for what should be the comic book demographic for the majority of my life… and I’ve never bought a comic book, and have only read a couple graphic novels. And even then, one was because it was by the same author as the comic a movie I’d liked was based one, and the other because I was bored at a summer camp.
As an aside, I think that’s also part of the problem; there’s a gulf between superhero comics and other western comics that doesn’t seem to exist in manga.
Most of the popular comic IPs have existed for around half a century, which creates a set of major problems. There’s no good starting place, a lot of trash, and a daunting backlog. I think that, in general, there gets to be a point in any medium where a series is so large that it’s imposing to join the fandom, and most superhero lines are long past that point; there’s a feeling you aren’t a True Fan unless you’ve read/watched/played everything (whether personal or enforced by elitists within the fandom). For a small series, that’s doable, but the larger it gets, the harder. The fact that a lot of it is old or crap doesn’t help; do I need to read the crappy comics, or the old and dated one to be a True Fan? Manga doesn’t suffer from this. Only a handful of series have run for decades, and even then it’s all under a single line for the most part. Something like One Piece remains a lot more approachable than Spider-man because there’s only one continuity, and it’s all just one long story; there’s not half a dozen alternate universes, reboots, and the starting point isn’t 50 years old.
Manga retires old properties. They might redo something really old, like Dororo, but that’s small potatoes compared to the constant churn of relaunches in comic books. If you do want to get into a decade old property, it’s all right there. Relatively shorter runs, and the fact that they’ll be by a single author for the entire run, helps ensure some level of consistency.
This finally gets into the final issue with Marvel and DC; they give old characters to new authors, who aren’t writing for the characters, but for themselves. In manga, old characters get to retire. A series finishes, and they finally reach their goal or whatever. A new series starts and must prove itself on it’s own. An established author might get a little more notice than a new one, but the story itself has to draw in new fans. But comic have turned into IP holding companies, selling Superman to Superman fans, and so on. The character is what gets people to pick up the comic, and that leads to authors abusing the series they’ve been given to write ideological tracts with superhero branding to help them sell, rather than write compelling new stories to get people interested. This is also why we see “race lifts” of old characters (gender and sexuality swaps as well); the quality and quantity for price means that new IPs don’t sell worth a damn, so the only way for them to add a more diverse character is to slap an existing IP on top of them like an ill-fitting glove… at the cost of further pissing off the existing fans.
This problem ties into a bunch of the other ones. Many of the new writers and artists suck at writing and drawing. Their messaging means they aren’t drawing back the prime boys and young men demographic, but instead chasing a demographic that isn’t interested in superheroes, resulting in a product neither group wants to read. Roll all that together and you’ve got a dumpster fire where they can’t sell comic books to people who are stuck at home with nothing else to do, in an era where superhero movies are breaking box office records.
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