The conventional wisdom about Marvel’s Tsunami line of comics, wisdom promulgated by Marvel itself, was that it was designed to capitalize on the success of manga in capturing a large American audience. Mainly this consisted of bringing in manga-style artists from the Americas to handle the penciling chores, but to an extent it also involved the types of characters the books centered on (mainly teenagers of both sexes or women) and the pacing of the stories (in mainstream-comics parlance they’re “decompressed,” in that they tell a lot of story over the course of several issues instead of packing each individual issue with a lot of plot, let alone with a self-contained story). This kind of storytelling is also known as “pacing for the trade,” referring to the trade-paperback format in which longer runs of single-issue comics are collected. Pacing for the trade made a lot of sense for the manga-inflected Tsunami books, considering that the legions of manga buyers out there don’t know single issues from Adam, instead buying their comics in the far more user-friendly, cost-effective, attractive, and generally look-like-an-actual-book-ish squarebound paperback format, and doing so at regular bookstores where single-issue comics are hard to come by. Indeed, it was sometimes assumed (by me, at least) that when Marvel produced Tsunami trades, they’d be in manga-sized dimensions, rather in the larger size that’s standard for American comics collections. It would only stand to reason, after all.
What to make, then, of Marvel’s decision not to collect any of their Tsunami titles into trade paperbacks at all? It’s tempting to berate the House of Ideas for not having a clue, but it seems safe to say that Marvel editorial, particularly fluent Japanese speaker and Tsunami steward C.B. Cebulski, are fully aware of how comics should be packaged and produced for maximum appeal to the manga market. Instead, I suggest we see this as a cautionary tale for mainstream American comics companies trying to break away from the stranglehold of the comics-only Direct Market and their pamphlet-junkie fanboy audience. We’re at a weird stage in the history of the business where for a variety of reasons (from aesthetic to literary to financial) single-issue comics don’t make sense anymore, but where for a similar variety of reasons it’s next to impossible for companies to react accordingly. Financially, Marvel, DC et al are beholden to the Direct Market, the bread of which is buttered by single-issue superhero comics. Any attempt to deviate from this norm is greeted with deafening silence. Nevermind Marvel’s attempts to manga-fy itself–even real manga, the most popular type of comcis in America, has made barely a dent in the D.M., which as a group is so conservative and retrograde it makes the College of Cardinals look like a bunch of coke-fiend anarchosyndicalist orgy enthusiasts. This means that the big companies simply can’t afford to take the risk of ignoring weak single-issue sales in order to gamble on a potential bonanza in trade-paperback format. This goes double if the comic in question is even slightly different from the superhero standard, and triple if those trade paperback sales are theorized to be strongest in the regular-bookstore market, one that those companies are having a notoriously hard time cracking.
Simply put, when it became clear that the Tsunami books aren’t selling as single issues in the Direct Market, Marvel realized it couldn’t afford to put them into TPB form–but it’s only in TPB form and outside the Direct Market that comics designed like the Tsunami ones could sell.
A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox.
UPDATE: Looks like Marvel’s cutting that Gordian knot after all! Turns out they’re skipping the traditional trade paperback format and going straight for the manga-sized editions. (Link courtesy of Franklin Harris.) Ballsy, and exactly what should be done. Here’s hoping it works.