I believe they were also the victim of the comics code, though, as the industry sought to streamline and focus on what they considered they’re core audience, which was teen boys (ignoring that teen girls also read comics, and not just the romance comics). It was not just due to the rise of soap operas which had really been around since the age of radio, so… Women did not stop reading, after all. The industry decided that it was who they wanted to cater to.
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And even where money isn’t an issue, just logistically they’re pushing things to a breaking point - if a story crosses over into another comic line, you now have to deal with that other comic line where the crossover story also involves unfamiliar characters and its own ongoing story, so you have to retroactively become familiar with the other comic line(s) to know what’s going on. The publisher’s hope is that you’ll just read all the comic lines all the time, but that’s not what happens.
As a kid, the endless nature of comics was enough to turn me off - I always was coming in on the middle of a story, so I never knew what was going on, nor was there a satisfying place to stop reading. Crossovers just make everything infinitely worse.
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Yes, though it’s still “comics.”
Regarding long form, she did of course do her “Dykes to Watch out for” for a long time, from which arose the Bechdel Test.
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Agreed! I do think that the audience for graphic novels might be slightly different than for monthly comic books - a more adult audience that grew up on comics and loves the format, but wants some deeper story telling?
As for Dykes to Watch Out For, it seems to me that that is another angle to all this - comic strips, vs. comic books and manga. I read several comic strips now (XKCD, Cat and Girl, Something Positive, for example), which are much more in the mode of DTWOF than of a monthly superhero comic or a manga.
Come to think of it, I wonder just how many of today’s comic strips put out independently today were influenced by DTWOF? Something Positive has a long running story line, and a variety of characters of different orientations and gender identities, though the main character is a cishet white dude… But I can still see Bechdel’s work being an influence on Milholland.
Seems to me that there is a larger category of literature, known as comics, and many different iterations of comics (comic strips, graphic novels, comic books, manga). It’s proven to be a powerful medium for telling a variety of kinds of stories that appeals across many demographics.
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But I don’t think girls and women stopped reading or being interested in comics, I think they were pushed out for a more singular focus on what was considered a medium for boys.
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While anime and manga were struggling to gain a foothold in the US, comics were doing everything they could to make themselves less accessible. It wasn’t meant to impede accessibility, though. It was all about appealing to their primary consumers – collectors. There was a focus on art that led to an improved and more expensive paper stock as well as more colors in the printing. Then there were the variant covers and storylines meant to drive sales rather than to drive story. (How many of our dead or broken heroes we actually care about have remained dead or broken?) The monthlies grew more expensive over time, and there was a fight to get them. Especially since the average bookstore was not going to carry everything. Specialty shops, if you were lucky enough to have one nearby, weren’t all inclusive or welcoming. The trade collections rarely feel like an appropriate compromise due to not being that much cheaper in the end. Then there’s the fact that the model is built around the monthlies, meaning something you actually enjoy is not supported if you buy collected volumes months later.
Meanwhile, manga production is cheaper, manga volumes can be sold for cheaper, and they show up in bookstores. These series have likely already proven successful in Japan, so not only are we supposedly already receiving the cream of the crop, we’re also unlikely to see the rug pulled out from us from a cancellation. (It still happens for various reasons, like for smaller titles or loss of mangaka.) And like others have already mentioned here, there are more titles that appeal to women and there’s to thrill of knowing a story will actually end.
There’s also the interplay of anime. Anime just feels more inclusive than superhero shows, even if many of the protagonists may still look white. There’s still a whole discussion out there about why Dragon Ball Z picked up so many Black fans. Once you have that “in,” though, to whole world of the books opens up.
One last thing I just thought of…shelf appeal. The spine of the average manga volume is thicker than a comics volume’s, providing a larger canvas. Not that they often do anything with them, but they usually brighter colors and more interesting logo designs that pop. Comics collection spines are stuck in the mindset of late 80’s graphic novels, using darker colors and plainer designs to look acceptable for “serious readers” and “adults.” So the first impression of a spine-out volume on the shelf is one of banality.
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Webcomics offer something important to this conversation… Just like manga they cover a huge variety of genres (probably not overstating it to say all genres), and some of them are successful enough to develop from hobby projects to side jobs to careers, supported by advertising or patronage or merchandise sales.
What manga seems to have is the support of publishers who will actually print it and put it in US book store chains… Granted, after they’ve already demonstrated some success in their home market. And of course those publishers aren’t Marvel and DC - they’re divisions of book publishers, or overseas divisions of Japanese publishers, or independent publishers.
Basically to me it seems like a repeat of the newspaper comic strip fiasco - entrenched players dominated the medium with a handful of safe and proven stories, sending creators looking for new outlets and readers looking for new venues… Thus webcomics and manga.
And that webcomics demonstrate an interest in more variety in genre - but manga is what actually delivers it in stores.
ETA: Also, it occurs to me that manga publishers in the US simply don’t have the infrastructure to expand into OEL - that’s a whole culture that Japan, Korea, China, etc. have - to the point that you have comics about making comics like Bakuman - of cultivating artist-writers and editors, publishing weekly and monthly chapters in magazines, that go into developing a successful series that a US publisher would be starting at square one with; even an overseas division would have little advantage. And Marvel and DC have a completely different culture in that respect as well since they’re focused on the company-owned franchises that artists and writers contribute to instead of the creator-owned series like what a manga-ka or webcomic author does… (Though thinking about it I suppose comicilizations might be company-owned as well…)
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Last year I started to get into (digital) comics a bit. For me that meant primarily Franco-Belgian comics because that’s more in line with what I grew up with. However I would really like to read some American comics. I haven’t read a page of Marvel in my life and only very little DC. As it happens the most recent comic I read was Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s and Lisa Sterle’s Squad, but I found that one because I knew the writer from various other things. But all in all America is a pretty huge blind spot in my comic reading.
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Then there’s the apps too. Like I can use tapas or bilibili easily on my phone/tablet/etc and there’s already this huge selection that has been out for a while and so is free. It’s just really easy to access and get into something new which can then also bring more people in to buy print.
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True enough… although some webcomic artists have managed to get their stuff in physical forms, too. Dorthy Gambrell of Cat and Girl has been selling collections on Topactco for years now, and has more recently started a patreon where you can get monthly zines… But then again, this is generally not backed by a large publisher in the way manga is…
It seems to me, that comics, like other forms of popular culture, has a greater level of variety than in the past, and creators have more options for getting their content into reader’s hands. Seems like real subcultures has grown up around online comics that have been self-sustaining without needing to expand into a “mainstream” audience…?
Here is a list of ones to check out… I guess ti depends on what you’re interested in:
The three I listed above are favorites, but that list has a great deal of variety (and has all 3 I mentioned)…
I think that’s funny, because I assume many Americans just assume that Europe does not have it’s own well-defined comic culture, but it does of course…
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A good friend of mine is Dark Horses’ manga editor. When he took the job I didn’t really understand how that could be a job. But I was very very wrong.
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Agreed - print-on-demand and short-run printing have filled up a few of my bookshelves… Though not as much since Patreon took over my webcomic budget.
My assertion was not that online comics need to expand/market/appeal to the mainstream, but more that 1) the comics publishers were not providing an outlet for the creators so they went online, and 2) the mainstream reader latched onto manga out of a desire for more variety in pop-culture works, which book and manga publishers were happy to provide via Japan’s large and ever expanding library of comics.
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Sure. I agree with that. They seem to have a big enough audience to be self-sustaining.
Also true.
Also, true, but I’d argue that the current popularity of manga came out of the anime subculture that emerged in the 1960s and 70s, when the first animes were shown on American TV (Astroboy, Starblazers), that helped to give rise of the first fansubs of animes and the first round of anime conventions (the first of which in the US started in the 80s, I think - the local iteration here started in the mid-90s, but the guys who started it had been running an anime room at Dragon*Con for years before that, I believe). But it was toonami on Cartoon Network that really supercharged anime and gave it a larger, more mainstream audience, making it profitable to translate and import manga to an audience that was ready for it.
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Pages like this show that American artists use the complete form of comics to accentuate their art. Manga is still struggling to grasp this concept.
Manga, while it involves drawing, should be taken as more as literature than piece of art. Their art show restraint for sake of telling a story.
I think this is a misunderstanding about the intent of the majority of manga out there, and I believe you’ll eventually agree with me once you’ve read enough mangas. The common style (e.g., how open and closed frames are used) are used for sake of storytelling. The conventions make it easier for the artist, assistants, and editors to produce the work. Convention also makes it a LOT easier for the reader to actually read, and I personally find a lot of US comics to rely too much on text and tiring to read despite their beautiful artworks.
Unfortunately there are a lot of gems in manga titles not available in English, and majority of the exported titles are from shonen genre, which is extremely formulaic (especially the hugely popular Jump Comics lines, which is notorious for ruthless deadlines). Even there, you’ll see amazing talents that pops up on regular basis (my current faves are Tatsuki Fujimoto, Tomoko Yamashita Hitoshi Iwaaki, and Tohru Izu).
There are so many titles out there in manga, and to criticize the entire media form is like saying American literature has no talent after reading a few Dan Brown novels.
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Oh god, you HAD to choose that scene…
Oh, no doubt. I just think (and sorry that I don’t think I have stated this clearly) that from the publisher’s perspective it doesn’t just need to be popular… it needs to be profitable and “sustainable”, and manga is ideal (along with anime and light novels) from that perspective because of that huge, ever-expanding library that can be licensed, translated, and published with reduced risk and little additional infrastructure - namely translators and lawyers(?) specialized in overseas licensing. Especially for a book publisher, manga and light novels are basically paperbacks with at most a few color pages.
I think that made it so easy for them to see the popularity, try a few titles (…with popular scanlations), and when they succeeded… it snowballed from there.
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Eh… I probably could have found worse…
But in generally, it’s hard to deny to artisty of Ito’s style as an illustrator. I do agree that the images in manga are generally speaking in service to the story, but I also suspect that the visual aspect of American comics have had some influence on manga artists since the 80s or 90s. I think the current focus on image in American comics comes from that era - think of comics like Sandman, which are not only great stories, but used innovative art styles that are embraced today by modern comics. Look at the classic comics (silver age, especially) the logic is the same of modern manga - the images more in service of the story.
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Thanks! I’ll check those.
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I disagree completely.
Comics, irrespective of country, are a visual medium. The paneling IS a part of the storytelling. Using the specific advantages that we have as a medium separates comics from novels- and that’s not a bad thing.
Like, on this page, the panel borders look like Greek pottery because it takes place in ancient times. That ADDS to the story. It helps immerse the reader in the world and provides a clear delineation between timelines without explaining it in caption boxes. That’s just a better choice than regular-ass rectangles.
Manga just focuses on the bare minimum of paneling because of the rigors of the production schedule. It’s not an artistic choice or narrative one; it’s born of practicality.
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Meh… It’s definitely drawn in service of something but drawing me into the narrative isn’t it. Obviously this is a ymmv thing. But what you see and what I see are worlds apart most likely and it’s definitely beautifully drawn.
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