Earth to the Direct Market: MANGA IS THE FUTURE. So sayeth me, and so sayeth Dirk Deppey, who today has a lengthy analysis of the meteoric rise of manga in the bookstore market, and the towering dominance of manga in the graphic novel market specifically. He also points out the demonstrable qualitative difference between manga’s depiction of teen sexuality and the American mainstream’s opening shot at same.
Yesterday Dirk also took another swing at superhero comics, this time arguing that the inherently escapist qualities of the genre preclude it from yielding sophisticated work except perhaps with the most herculean effort and Shakesperean talent behind it. For various reasons I lack the emotional attention span to rebut at length, but I’ll just say this is pretty much the same way the big Hollywood studios felt about gangster pictures before Bonnie & Clyde and The Godfather and about science fiction before 2001 and Star Wars. While there’s something to be said against the countless lame attempts to make superhero comics Relevant (I find the Green Lantern/Green Arrow “my sidekick is a junkie” idea particularly annoying), to say that “the real world should be left to comics about the real world” is to deny the effective communicative properties of genre, which would lead to a pretty boring “real world” indeed.
(Meanwhile, Dirk, if the “superhero comics suck because they’re for kids” diss is such a canard, then what do you mean by calling DC, Marvel et al “children’s publishers”?)