My manga posts seem to be generating a lot of attention, to the point where I feel I need to expand on my theory a bit.
Yes, I do feel that manga is the future of comics. Why? For starters, it’s what real people are actually buying. The industry (and by that I mean the five big superhero publishers, the indie companies that ape them, and the retailers that sell their wares) try very, very hard (or at least talk a great deal about trying very, very hard) to get young kids, girls, and other atypical comics readers to read comics–but the thing is, they’re already reading ’em! They just happen to be reading comics from Japan. So in a very simple sense, comics stores need to be selling the comics that people want to buy. Like Dirk always says, the longer it takes the Direct Market to realize this, the worse off the DM (and by extension the American comics industry) will end up. I do see some inroads being made–both of the big comic book stores in New York City, Midtown Comics and Jim Hanley’s Universe, now have manga featured prominently either on their very popular website (in the former case) or in their heavily trafficked store window (in the latter). However, it’s safe to say that Midtown and Hanley’s are on the leading edge of smart-retailership in general, so this doesn’t necessarily indicate industry-wide foresight.
At this juncture in the argument, many people say that, in fact, manga will not save comics–the only thing that manga will help the American companies sell is more manga. By manga, such pundits are referring to Japanese comics written and illustrated by Japanese people in Japan, then at some point translated into English and sold in America. (At this point, the big manga companies aren’t even “flipping” the stories to be read from left to right in Western style–that’s how into the Japan-ness of the material the audience is!) This is to say that to them, manga really is a “genre”–when, as many have pointed out, to say that is akin to saying that Hollywood is a “genre.” (Technically they’re both modes of production capable of producing work in a wide range of genres, but, I suppose, with a proscribed range of affect. At a certain point, though, that proscribed range doesn’t really matter–Hollywood has produced both Taxi Driver and Spy Kids, and manga has produced both Screw Style and Yu-Gi-Oh!) Right now there’s little evidence to contradict this assertion about the provincial nature of manga readers, since the attempts at cross-pollinization have been fairly sporadic, and since the places where, in the main, manga is bought and sold are NOT direct-market comics retailers where buying patterns could be anecdotally, if not statistically, monitored. My own extremely limited experience with manga-reading kids does indicate a certain degree of over-the-top cultishness that brooks little deviation from the norm of big-eyed Japanese-style drawings done by people with Japanese names. Moreover, much of the manga phenomenon in America is tied to anime cartoons and gaming of both the card and video varieties, which would appear to provide even more ways for the manga consumer to spend his every entertainment dollar on stuff from the land of the rising sun.
But I’ve never intended to come across like I think that manga readers would jump to The Incredible Hulk or Black Hole the second those books are published in little squarebound softcovers. My proselytizing for manga-formatted comics is more a question of removing unnecessary obstacles to readership than it is of creating some sort of tesseract that’ll transport fans of Love Hina or Dragonball Z to Hellboy in the blink of an eye.
What do I mean by “removing obstacles”? Let’s look at New Marvel for some for-instances. When Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada took over, they slowly instituted aesthetic and business changes that are now largely line-wide. Here are a few:
1) Stop writing continuity-heavy or continuity-dependent stories that require a familiarity with the characters unattainable to the casual reader
2) Stop doing multi-title crossovers that require readers to purchase and be up to speed on several titles
3) Start writing in 3-8 issue story arcs that will make for smoother reading when collected
4) Start publishing those collections as often as possible
5) Stop doing text-heavy, visually “busy” covers featuring tons of characters and replace these with simple, iconic images of the main characters
6) Start printing the books on high-quality paper line-wide
7) Stop using ALL CAPS lettering and switch to the same kind of mixed-case fonts that most publications use
Now, we’ve all got our opinions as to the overall character of the New Marvel regime, and as to the success of their initiatives. Certainly, no one (not even Quesada and Jemas themselves) thinks that every single book Marvel has put out since 2000 with these guidelines in mind is a rip-roaring success. Indeed, none of the above are guarantees of quality in any way. But that’s not the point at all–they’re not intended to be construed as guarantees. Rather, what these measures (and some others) actually did was remove several long-standing and frustrating obstacles to acquiring a larger readership for Marvel’s books. They made the books easier to read, easier to understand, easier to find, easier to afford, easier to follow, easier to hold, and easier to look at. Even if you believe that 99% of what Marvel does is total dreck (and I don’t, at this point not by a long shot), at least that 1% has a much better shot of attracting an audience.
This is what I’m getting at when I talk about the strength of the manga format. Manga collections look like–and read like–books. They’re the size and shape of a regular old paperback novel, and since you’re getting a couple hundred pages of story at a shot, they’re pretty much the length of a regular old papeback novel as well. Even if what’s inside is utter crap, at least someone who comes across it in a bookstore can say to herself, “Yep, that’s a book, alright.” (The price point is far more in line with regular paperback books than most trade-paperback American comic collections’ are, too.) Moreover, manga companies go to great lengths to ensure uniform, attractive trade dress throughout a series’ duration, meaning that they actually look nice when put next to each other on a bookshelf. In a bookstore, where you need to do whatever you can to catch the eye of the buyer, this simple step is a godsend. And you’re never gonna see a manga collection that needed to be reissued after Volume Two came out because the publisher never bothered putting Volume One on its spine. (Folks, this isn’t some act of hubris like Eddie Van Halen prematurely assuming he’d eventually be able to release a VH Greatest Hits Volume Two without people pointing and laughing at him–go ahead, put Volume One on the the first collection you publish! We won’t mind!)
Compare and contrast with the standard American comics format, the pamphlet. (For the record, blogosphere, I prefer the term “floppy,” but pamphlet seems to have stuck.) It’s much bigger than a book, but also much thinner and, well, floppier. In that sense it’s closer to a magazine, but it’s thinner than most magazines as well. Outside of Marvel, chances are good that its paper quality is closest to a tabloid or newspaper. Of course, it’s work of literature (broadly defined, for the most part), though, so it’s alienated once again from its magazine and newspaper similarities. And of course, there’s no spine to speak of, so you’re stuck with sticking them in longboxes if you want to keep them around and in reach. The pamphlet comic book is this weird non-thing, in a twilight zone of bad design, bad size, bad durability, bad quality. Plus, now that most mainstream publishers have switched to telling genuinely serialized stories (as opposed to more-or-less complete tales with a “to be continued” thrown in during the last half page, or installments in ongoing soap operas with no beginning, middle, and end), the pamphlet is being used as a containment device for one-fifth of a story, and it’s one hell of an awkward container. I happen to think that mainstream comics have, in the main, improved in quality since this new mode of storytelling took effect, and to me the pamphlet is now an obsolete mode of delivery for the kind of stories even the big superhero characters are being used to tell–not to mention an expensive one: prices for most pamphlet comic books hover around $3.00, which means you’re paying quite a bit for not a whole lot of story.
Now, I know that fanboys (and we’re not just talking about superhero people here–I’ve seen altcomix titans talk about the dusty books in their longboxes with a level of nostalgic sentimentality that’d make a Norman Rockwell retrospective look like a 24-hour live reenactment of the making of “Piss Christ”) talk about the charm that these objects (the pamphlet comic books) have. In addition to the “that’s how I read ’em as a kid” factor, there’s the “monthly fix” element in terms of storytelling method. But in business, charm is for cereal-hawking leprechauns. And comics is a business, protestations of the “it’s art!” crowd be damned. It has to be, or everyone from Brian Michael Bendis to Chris Ware would be reduced to xeroxing minicomic copies of the new Powers or Acme Novelty Library and swapping them over the internet. The pamphlet is an obstacle to selling comics to non-traditional comics fans.
(And yes, I think a lot of these complaints still apply to trade paperbacks, and in some cases even hardcovers. Though the range in size of literary fiction and prose nonfiction hardcovers means that comics hardcovers don’t stand as far out from the crowd, in many cases they’re even more expensive than a fat first-run hardcover novel. And the trade paperbacks suffer from that same “what the hell size am I trying to be?” problem that besets the pamphlets which comprise them. Of course, don’t even get me started on how haphazard and slapdash trade dress is for these things. Christ, my shelves look like they were stocked with books from a printing press run by the zombies from 28 Days Later. Production values at art-house publishers like Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, Top Shelf, and (real bookstore publisher) Pantheon tend to offset these drawbacks, both because the books are thoughtfully designed and formatted and because the content within them tends to be so self-evidently good that idiosyncratic packaging is less of a distraction or impediment.)
To sum up, Direct Market retailers need to get manga books in their stores, prominently display them, do their damndest to sell them and to get the people who already buy them to do their buying there instead of elsewhere. That’s pretty much a bare-minimum industry-wide bankruptcy preventer at this point. But beyond that, the publishers that depend on the Direct Market for an obscenely high percentage of their profits (despite some legitimate inroads being made into bookstores) need to remove obstacles to their readers (and to those bookstore inroads) by experimenting with publishing their books in manga format.
No, they shouldn’t do it all at once–they’re still too dependent financially on the Direct Market’s audience of fanboys, for one thing, a crowd notoriously resistant to change and one that’s unlikely to buy anything that even looks like “that crap from Japan”–but certain books would actually make sense for demographic, aesthetic, or storytelling-style reasons. I’ve suggested Ultimate Spider-Man because it basically is shonen manga, in pacing, characterization, tone, and content, if not in artistic style. I’ve also suggested Sandman, because that book’s anomalous audience–teenage girls and young women–is one that snaps up shoujo manga with gusto, so I imagine that, in the immortal words of Egon Spengler, the door swings both ways. I’ve seen folks suggest not-quite-mainstream, not-quite-altcomix books like A Distant Soil and A Thousand Ships, which make sense because of the clear-line black-and-white art the books employ (theoretically this should reduce in size well without losing much in the way of comprehensibility or attractiveness), the epic/romantic feel of the stories, and (oddly enough) the queer-friendly tone that is (increasingly obviously) appealing to the teen-girl manga-reading audience.
There are some promising signs in this regard. DC has published a Sandman spinoff involving the insanely teen-girl-popular character Death that not only employs manga-style art, but was released in actual manga format. I’m unaware if further volumes are planned, but the addictive serially-released nature of manga volumes means it would behoove DC to get cracking in that department one way or the other. Meanwhile, Marvel is at the very least trying very hard to use manga content, in several ways: On big books like Uncanny X-Men (an actual Japanese person!), in their now-largely-defunct Marvel Mangaverse titles (which usually related to the original Marvel characters only in name) and in their kinda sorta manga line, Tsunami (well, at least that was the idea at the time; for the most part it’s now the pacing that’s manga more than the art or the creators). Rumor has it that, indeed, Ultimate Spider-Man will be collected the manga way; I’d speculate that when the first Tsunami collections bow, they too might be manga-sized; the Epic books may get that treatment as well. Dark Horse already has manga books, so they’re in okay shape, but it seems criminal to sit on books like Hellboy and Sin City (not to mention their teen-girl friendly Buffy tie-ins) without putting them into what’s become the popular format. Image has the benefit of a high profile name with virtually no central administration, so individual Image creators appear to be exploring the possibilities–Devil’s Due’s Semantic Lace was published directly into manga format. CrossGen may do a lot of things wrong, but I think they’ve been right on the money with their incessant experimentation with format; aside from manga-sized collections of individual titles (called “travellers,” I believe), they’ve also gone a route that few American publishers have dared, and published big omnibus collections featuring issues of several different series for relatively little money. This, of course, is the publishing model available at newstands all over Japan, where a guy on his way home from work can spend a few bucks on a big collection, and even if 80% of the (often 40 pages or longer) stories in there don’t tickle his fancy, he’s still gotten his money’s worth with the other 20%. Unfortunately, CrossGen’s publishing savvy can’t change the fact that these well-packaged, well-formatted volumes contain CrossGen comics. (I appreciate that they’re trying to cover all the genre bases, but it’s amazing how so many books that are supposed to be so different all look and feel exactly the same: “You know what this line needs? Another book featuring female characters with heads of really full wavy hair!”)
The case for manga is often obscured by what amount, I think, to fears that the Japanese Invasion will crowd out all other forms of storytelling and art. Which, of course, it will–if the American publishers that produce those forms don’t get their act together and adopt the aspects of manga publishing that they can–that is, remove the obstacles to readership that the more successful manga books have proven to exist–while still retaining the qualities that make their own books different and, in those wonderful rare cases, special. If the American comics industry doesn’t want manga to close the book on American comics, they would be well advised not to close the book on manga.
(Update: I just want to say this within this actual post–I should note that for all my pontificating the only manga I read is Battle Royale, the grand guignol dystopian kids-killing-kids tale. I’d hope that any gross inaccuracies found above are due to my unfamiliarity with much of the material, and not simple stupidity on my part (not that I’m saying we can rule that out).)