As far as printed comics go

Could the Shōnen Jump format, adapted to Western comics, work in the United States - more specifically, for the Big Two?

It kinda did before. I remember Marvel putting out Marvel Comics Presents for a good while. Not exactly the same, with only 4 stories, but close.

To answer your question: Why not.

American comic writers/artists today don't have the worth ethic for it

In theory, but even the Japanese struggle to to churn out a chapter every week.

>Why not
It'd be too expensive.
Shounen Jump is cheap because it's all black and white on thin, low quality paper.

And then there's the matter of how you set it up.
All that week in one go? Maybe.
Superfamily book and Batfamily book? Then where would titles like Super Sons and Trinity fall?
And god forbid you try to get anything decent out of the western comic scene if you tried to get them to work like a mangaka. They get like, 4 hours of sleep every 35 hours.

Japanese ones really don't either, that's why so many of them are wrecks or burnouts mid-career, unless they find some kind of out or a cheat.

poor work ethic=/=body is wrecked after years of working too hard

Like Miura. Young Animal isn't about to drop Berserk, so as long as he comes out with a chapter of amazing art every year or so, he can fill the rest of the time with therapy sessions and Idolmaster.

Eh You could easily do some group breakdowns. It also makes arranging editorial easily.

That would be great but I think it would be better off bi-weekly or something like that.

It's a great format to get people into new series as well because people usually only buy it for one or two franchises but often also read the other things simply because it's in there.

I could see it working monthly instead of weekly.

Still have to be black and white and printed on newsprint though, otherwise the cost would be way too much to work.

A Jump Style anthology would be very welcome, but I don't know if physical anthologies would work in this digital age. People hardly even buy newspapers anymore, getting people to buy cheaply printed comics would be a struggle. I could see this happening with an online version though, some companies like Webtoons are already pushing something similar to this. If we could get a comics industry of regularly released comic anthologies with diverse genres/themes I would be all for it.

I know a company that's giving it a try, but they publish manga styled stuff.

>manga styled

Like what, western comics with manga style or actual manga?
Because if it's the former it's gonna flop.

Man I'd love to find scans of old Shonen Jump volumes. I love anthologies and it'd be some good nostalgia.

Western comics with manga style. They've managed to stay afloat much longer than I expected them to.

They used to do that.

What's the company? I'm curious

They did it's called Invincible

They're called Saturday AM.

They would be better off doing it 2000AD style. Rotating stories for D listers carried by an A lister like Dredd.

I used to buy some comic magazine called Comic Heroes when I was 14-15, used to come with this little mini comic full of mainly indie shit and sometimes Judge Dredd, it was about fucking $12-$14 though for this lame magazine and this shitty little comic compilation book and the occasional poster so I dropped that shit pretty quickly.

no, but it'd be great for indy stuff and webcomics

I think you've missed the point OP was making, but that's understandable; Shonen Jump is a very peculiar creature because of its publication format.

The quick and dirty version is that every week a book comes out which contains a collection of different series; typically only 12 or so pages of each. The really interesting part is that every week, the readers of the book are given the ability to vote on their favourite stories. The ones which score high continue to get included in each weekly book. The ones which score poorly are eventually dropped. This sort of immediate meritocracy is something with no direct analogue in the western market. It also allows up and coming creators to come up with entirely new characters, stories, settings and such and just go nuts with them. If it works, then the'll get those votes and keep getting published. If they don't, they get dropped. But either way, Shonen Jump continues to get published and having one or two bad stories in a given week isn't going to kill them. It allows them to take certain risks, and moreover to allow those risks to be shared with the public who are picking up the book to read the tried and true stuff like Dragonball and One Piece.

I think something like this would be great for Marvel in terms of establishing new characters who aren't just the fifteenth rehash of a concept from the 1960s. You could have your brand new hero in their own story published in the same book as, say, the latest installment of Mark Millar's Wolverine, for instance, so the big-name, known property carries the lesser-known one and gives them the opportunity to get the attention they might not get in their own solo book.

>Idolmaster

lucky, I just want one of the main games to come overseas

Weekly Jump stories are 20-22 pages each

I stand corrected. Even so, my point stands otherwise, I think.

They are? I thought they were 14. That's how long I remember Dragon Ball chapters being anyway

Dragon Ball chapters tended to run short.
yeah your point still stands yes.
But american comic books are about the same length as a weekly manga, the primary difference isn't length, but the number of people/tasks involved,

Manga is generally the manga-ka and a few assistants doing everything, american comics are

>writer
>pencil artist
>inker
>colorist
>letterer
if the process were more streamlined, I think things would be easier.

No because slave labor is illegal in America.

You mean like Golden Age Action Comics, Detective Comics, etc.? That's how it used to be but then comics companies started getting more Jewish.

Frendly reminder that anthology magazines (the "format") has their sales declined because people learnt to wait for the collected edition of what they wanted, skipping the dreck.
Exception that I´m aware, Italy.


So pretty please stop feeding the pinhead OP and his billonth repost of this barely covert Sup Forums thread .

It's actually the opposite. They turn into wrecks precisely BECAUSE their work ethics and effort is so high.

2000AD is still going

2000AD manages 4 to 5 8 page stories a week following the western style of artists through

Comics used to be published like that, but they dumped the format in favor of higher quality paper and colors. So, it's very unlikely they could just go back, since the market has already shown they put a lot of value in the presentation.

>It's a "nip comics are SOOOO much better than western ones gaiz" episode

Sage
Fuck off
Containment board

It used to be that way, though.

Superman was only a regular in Action Comics, but one Action Comics magazine besides commercials also had 1 or 2 or 3 additional stories.

Why the fuck do you think they were originally called Action Comics and Detective Comics and later when characters became more popular they got their own series.

We complain about decompression in modern comics, but they don't even touch manga.

An arc in manga can be like 100 or more chapters.

We actually get something like it in England. We get tradebacks too, but major shops like WHSmith stock a collection of that months Spiderfamily books, Xmen related collection, batfamoly collection

The pro is youre getting 4 or 5 issues for half the price, the con is your spending way too much if youre only interested in one or two of the issues

Sup Forums

An arc is usually more busy than a western one, you go through the chapters weekly and at a fater pace and youre looking at more 30-50 than your hyperbolic 100

OP here; that was not my intent. (I have no specific affinity or disgust for one over the other.) My point in making this thread was to think about how comic companies could try something new as a way of adapting to modern media consumption. Or something like that.

Read . These threads go back a while.

The US is not Japan, there aren't enough readers to make it worth the risk, since they already pay their artists and writers quote a decent amount they'd either have to pay them less or charge a lot more for the book.

>only 100 chapters arc

Decompression in manga is the exact opposite of Bendis dialogue. Most manga have no more than three speech bubbles per panel and no more than five panels per page, that's why they run so long.

Thats even better.

You do a weekly anthology in black and white on cheap paper, then sell the individuals online in black and white next weak, with colour versions a couple of months later and individual storylines as tpbs later in the year.

Le Journal de Spirou has been published weekly in color for 80 years. It's not because Asians don't do it that you can't.

I facepalmed.

manga chapters are rather short, if you count in panels.
And there's no need to wait for X or Y issue line to reach a point to start something. Self contained story just flows better

Yeah because the regular monthly floppy business has been going so well.

There was one specifically for Spider-Man short stories for a while I don't know if any other characters had it.

tell me more about your monthly floppy

But they're not really self-contained, you're expected to have read the entire series.

No. Anthologies do not sell over here, period. Even when they were being made regularly they weren't great sellers.

We have successful examples of it working.
2000AD for example.
We also had things like DC showcase and flash comics which presents many different stories.

No.

I'm belgian and it's actually how the comics are published in the first place before the collected editions. It's been like this for 30 years, probably more.

We have monthly books like "Avengers" where you can read the issues of Avengers, Iron Man, Captain America, things like that. We have a "Guardians of the galaxy" where you can find every series about the team. We even had a Inhumans one recently but it got cancelled pretty quickly kek.

It's a bit of a clusterfuck but If you are really into it, It's cheaper than buying the hardcovers a few months later. Probably around half the price. This one costs around 5 bucks and you have around 4-5 issues in it.

I remember when I was a kid both DC and Marvel anthologies had the same French editor and the same title for some strange reason.

...

Archie comics *kinda* does this (or in the case of Sonic , *was* doing this) but it was done by reprinting a few dozen stories amid their humongous back log in digest format.

The SJ format wouldn't work for either of the big two because primarily each SJ series is done by one guy and their team of assistants and they typically have basic carte blanche to do what they want; it's THEIR story apart from the editors making suggestions or pressuring them to have the most popular characters of a given manga be more prominent. Also, none of the manga share the same setting. Naruto's story wasn't going on in Ninja Land while the One Piece series concurrently took place in a different part of the same planet.

This makes the difficult task of having a new 20-something page 'issue' each week somewhat easier, but that really is the biggest problem: without working the studio talent to death, western comics can't accomplish this workload. it's not even the matter of also coloring their content; Marvel and DC DON'T give the kind of writing autonomy mentioned above single artist/writer and their merry band of colorists and inkers and letterers. Nearly all of their comics take place in the same shared universe and editors/execs are supposed to keep it all coherent and coordinate event storylines between the myriad of books. It's incredibly difficult if not outright impossible for them to maintain that kind of shared universe on a *weekly* basis, communicating between teams, artists and writers, let alone the matter of demand.

And then there's the matter of price. How much would Marvel Jump or Shonen DC cost each week and still have even a modicum of the same paper/coloring quality that monthlies do, and how many kids could be expected to put down 5-10 bucks a week along with older fans? The system just wouldn't be viable for long.

That applies to floppies in general as well, though.

That's mostly to cut down on turnaround. Tezuka would have between 6 and 10 panels per page.

Yeah exactly, I forgot to name Strange. I had a few too when I was a kid.

That's because there's only one writer for a manga, so continuous story driven plot is possible. I think Hellboy only has one writer, so it'd be possible for it too.

I don't see why a monthly magazine wouldn't work instead of a weekly one