More responses to the manga essay are filtering in.
Johnny Bacardi notes several ancillary benefits and drawbacks stemming from manga’s ever-growing influence. He points out that if the book-sized manga format were the industry standard, mainstream creators would have a practical incentive for sticking with a book until a book-sized story arc was completed. But he’s a lot less enthusiastic about the influence of manga storytelling, which he feels resembles an Irishman’s diet and genitalia insofar as it’s all potatoes, no meat; he worries that much of manga’s success in the States is attributable to the insanely popular anime-slash-card-games the kids are into these days; and he’s concerned about the price point of bigger collections as well. I don’t think he’s got to worry about that last problem, though: Manga collections appear to retail for about ten bucks a pop, which is more in line with the price of a softcover novel rather than the expensive traditional trade paperback collections the American industry produces. (Kudos should be given to Marvel for keeping the price of their trades affordable, by the way.) Finally, he seems to grok the fact that adopting clean, uniform, well-designed trade dress is just another tool in the arsenal to effectively communicate your ideas–i.e. by getting people to buy the book that contains them.
Bill Sherman, meanwhile, offers follow-ups to his follow-up, sparked by comments from Shawn Fumo (who also chimed in at Johnny B’s comment section) and Darren Madigan, who analyze the long strange trip of American manga editions to the format in which they’re currently enjoying so much success and the possible long strange trip that American comics will take as they struggle to break free of the dead-end floppy format, respectively. Intriguing stuff, though I think Madigan’s proposed multi-title magazine editions would likely fail to catch on. Indeed, Marvel did try to publish magazine compendia that included a month’s worth of a particular group of titles (I think they tried this with mags that reprinted the X-books, the Spider-Man books, the Ultimate books, and the Marvel Knights books, though this may be a couple of magazines too many), and newsstands adamantly refused to shelve them anywhere but with the regular old comic books, which no one’s buying.
Via email, former Comics Journal editor Tom Spurgeon writes to say that chasing the bookstore dollar is a fool’s errand for comics, and that success stories like Ghost World and the most popular manga books are the exceptions, not the potential future rule. While I think comics could and should do a lot better in bookstores, I do agree that it would be suicide to completely abandon the Direct Market, or to let it go under–which is why I’m humping manga so much, since it seems like the DM’s ticket to ride.
Finally, I received a translation of that Spanish-language blog post on the manga essay (courtesy of the illustrious Michael Suileabhain-Wilson). This fellow’s argument is that the success of manga in countries where superhero comics traditionally dominate is not much more or less than the fact that they’ve got virtually all the genre bases cover. This obvious point is nevertheless one I failed to make: American comics, focused as myopically as they are on superhero comics (and, in the altcomix realm, on bleak tales of man’s inability to successfully connect with man) are very clearly limiting their audience to people who want to read those kinds of stories. And while there happen to be a lot (of both), I think comics’ tent needs to be a little bigger, don’t you?