The Forager has weighed in on the big manga debate, and as far as he’s concerned the emperor (a particularly appropriate term when discussing comics from Japan, no?) has no clothes. Why? Because the manga that comprise the big American manga-buying boom are just as slavishly devoted to entertaining teenagers as are their American supercomic counterparts. To be perfectly frank, I’ve seen little evidence that contradicts this assertion, and this is indeed a problem. While it is true that, at long last, “kids are reading comics,” if Japan’s more sophisticated efforts in the medium aren’t also translated and mass-marketed, their most logical next-step purchases (far more logical, as many people have pointed out, than Love & Rockets or Planetary or whatever) won’t be around when the kids grow up and are ready to make them.

Dirk Deppey responds with a two-point rebuttal: 1) That Japan produces plenty of good comics, thank you very much; 2) That his endorsement of manga isn’t some sort of Team-Comix “and then they’ll start buying Eightball!” bit of proselytizing, but a simple market-force reality check.

I agree, to one extent or another, with both points. When a good friend of mine returned from Japan after spending several months there studying manga on a grant, he dove right into the American undergrounds, reasoning that since what he liked most in Japan’s comics medium were its alternative titles, he’d have similar good luck finding quality titles with the American independent scene. So obviously Japan is perfectly capable of making some damn fine comics.

But the issue, as the Forager then responded, was not whether there are any good Japanese comics; the issue is whether many (or any) of those good (read: suitable for grown-ups) comics are finding their way over here. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like it. Witness the intrepid Bill Sherman’s unaided foray into Tokyopop territory: by his own admission, this book may be perfectly good, but there’s almost no way for an American adult to find magnetic north when reading the damn thing.

As for Dirk’s assertion that store owners should be offering manga titles not in order to convert Yu-Gi-Oh! fans into devout X-Men or Acme readers, but in order to stay in business–well, yeah. I’ve always thought Dirk (and the TCJ team in general) are a little harsh on people who have, oh, I dunno, some hope that this medium we love will be able to thrive, or at least survive, for our children and grandchildren to enjoy–why, exactly, would such sentiments automatically lead to Team Comics boosterism? Why couldn’t they lead instead to the stringent critical standards that the medium needs to survive? But still, he deserves kudos for trying to shake retailers out of their attachment (it’s deeper than “sentimental,” but that doesn’t mean it’s not a dodge from reality at times) to what we’ve traditionally thought of as comics here in the States. My own pro-manga argument, centered as it was on formatting, tried to split the difference: I looked at the strength of manga from a publishing perspective, not a content one, which meant that I thought the American industry needed to wake up and change the way it did things in order to survive, but not necessarily abandon its preferred modes of storytelling wholesale–just its preferred methods of publishing.

NeilAlien, in his own post on manga, seems to agree that this is the way to go. The American comic book, both in its superhero and altcomix iterations, is an artform worth preserving. Does our attachment to this artform mean we must ignore the innovations that could well help us preserve it? Of course not. If anything, it should help us to separate the baby from the bathwater–the baby being format, marketing, publishing, and retailing strategies; the bathwater being putting big-eyed girls in the monthly Avengers floppy and blaming “that anime crap” when, astoundingly, it fails to sell.

Forager, though, argues that manga still can’t save the Direct Market, since DM retailers, even the best ones, lack the natural advantages that the big chain bookstores have–from purchasing leverage to walk-in traffic to family shopping patterns. In essence, he’s pointing to a deeper problem: The comics industry will always need comic shops to survive, but the entire comic-shop industry needs to completely transform in order for it to survive.

Two years ago, during his panel in San Diego, Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada said that the biggest obstacle facing comics is the lack of a national chain of well-organized, well-stocked stores with employees in uniforms able to direct shoppers to exactly what they need (a la Blockbuster, Borders, B&N, etc). As chic as it is to hate the big entertainment retailers, I’m not sure that Quesada is wrong. Manga’s the stitches; an overhaul of comics retailership’s the surgery.

Hooray! The Missus has been blogging again recently: go here and here.

(So have Andrew Sullivan and James Taranto, by the way. But they talk a lot more about, y’know, being awful bloodthirsty warmongering imperialists and a lot less about, y’know, having sex with me than the Missus does.)