Viz Media

How did they come to convincing crush DCin comic book and graphic novel market share (23% vs 14%) and nearly beat both Marvel and DC combined (23% vs 24%)?

What are they doing right?

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Manga sells better than Western comics IIRC

Fun story. I decided to buy manga from this store once cause there was a sale, and the guy started to take theft cards out of the book so that the alarms don't go off when I leave. I mentioned that the graphic novels don't have those. He responded "Nobody tries to steal them"

>shit that didn't happen: the post

Obviously, but why?

My guess is that it has to do with availability in both mass market stores like B&N and presence at book fairs to attract younger fans, but it's a question that nobody seems to want to answer. To me, that's strange because people thought that piracy would kill the western manga industry a decade ago.

>Tiny graphic novels from a variety of genres at a reasonable price point.

It makes sense. Back when I was a kid they were $8 a pop for around 200 pages. Black and white and tiny or not, that's a goddamn steal. A lot of indie OGNs follow suit because it's such an effective way to go about selling your book.

No, it happened. The store was Newbury Comics.

>why?
I think manga is less underwhelming for kids. The can pick up One Piece and know exactly what's going on, but too many variations of super heroes, crossovers, etc. Also like mentioned price wise manga is better.

>Mass availability
>Low price point
>Stories are only continuous unto themselves or, at worst, other works by the author, so you can always start at #1
>Wider range of genres to pull from (this is also just Viz and the like having good business sense and not going all in on Dragon Ball clones and nothing else)
>Small, easily portable format, far less unwieldly than paperbacks
>"foreign" exotic flair
>Comics in question come from a much stronger industry
>sex appeal (jerk-bait is woven in more seamlessly in the titles that go for that)
>more stylistic variety (WAY more titles by/for women, more cute works whereas Western comics are huge on realism)
>Actually has comics that women might want to read

The bigger question is why these companies are so fucking stupid that they don't emulate this shit beyond superficial Ameri-Anime garbage every few years.

Manga is a lot more accessible than big two comics. That's really all there is to it.

Why didn't/haven't they adapted?

>people thought that piracy would kill the western manga industry a decade ago.
The manga distributors on both sides of the ocean have been cracking down. It's harder to pirate manga than it was when we were kids.

Granted, it's still not HARD, but it's harder. We're living in a world now where Western comic readers are easier to access and have more stuff in one place than manga readers.

Their built in audience have certain expectations and they already have social perceptions that would be hard to overcome. Also, they're probably just kinda ignorant on what exactly the appeal to manga is.

Ducks do that in Germany. Up untill 20-30 years ago, the main focus was the magazine. Currently, it gets more or less ignored but you have 5 different ongoing LTB which is basically manga format. ~300 pages for 5-6€

Variety and value. Capeshit dominates the Western comics scene, especially in bookstores, but manga has much more genre variety. And assuming you find a comic and a manga with similar content that you want to read, would you rather pay four bux for a full-color, ad-riddled, 30-page issue of a comic, or ten bux for an ad-free, black-and-white, at-least-a-hundred-page volume of a manga?

It's funny because of
and the fact that Archie's been profiting off the digest formula for decades. Nobody's willing to pull a Warren and oppose Diamond to get back into supermarkets.

>The bigger question is why these companies are so fucking stupid that they don't emulate this shit

Because change is the hardest thing about living.

>Nobody's willing to pull a Warren and oppose Diamond to get back into supermarkets.

The funny thing is, the thing that actually drove the major publishers away from supermarkets isn't even around any more, so it's not like anything is even stopping them from trying.

The real question is: The manga will kill the capeshit in 20 years?

youtube.com/watch?v=-vohNUTTx3A

Oh look, it's Vince McMahon.

Why can't western comic writers decent female characters but Japan has thousands of them in manga and anime?

Because women get to write manga all on their own, whereas women in the comics industry have (mostly male) editors peeking over their shoulders and worrying about whether a female character is "too strong" or "not sexy enough" for the entrenched audience.

no

Because there are actually women mangaka who break into the industry because the readership is between 60/40 and 50/50 male/female.

Sweet anime tiddies > Progressive values

No, but it will put a dent in the business of the Big Two. Then again, Marvel has the billion-dollar movie studio to make money from and Disney to eat the losses from unsold comics, while DC has...whatever DC has in terms of movies and WB to eat the losses from unsold comics. Manga could become the dominant force in comics/graphic novels and capeshit would still exist because the Big Two's brands are too recognizable to just up and vanish like Mira Sorvino's acting career.

The longest running anime of all time is about a housewife.

What anime?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sazae-san

Housewife Soldier Mighty Wife.

>Marvel has the billion-dollar movie studio to make money from
>implying most filmgoers buy comics

The women part is crucial. They want their emotional pretty boy melodrama or the story of an everyday everywoman trapped in a convoluted love polygon. In Japan as I understand it, women outread and outbuy men.
Then you look at America, and it's all superheroes or needlessly edgy indie comics, or needlessly edgy indie superhero comics. None of which are ribbed for her pleasure.
Viz simply shoves their mangoes down a black hole that mainstream american publishers tiptoe around for some outlandish reason.

You're kinda not far off, actually. Regardless of how you feel about it, fanservice is a thing that exists in manga, and it does draw people in. But manga also approaches sex, romance, and relationships in better ways than capeshit ever could. And then there's yaoi and yuri, which gives LGBT readers something that neither of the Big Two could ever do because of Editor Meddling and fear of pissing off the existing audience.

That's exactly my point. Marvel could stop producing comics right this moment and the billion-dollar movie studio would still rake in profits. More people in the US - hell, the world - give a shit about Marvel movies than about Marvel comics.

>More people in the US - hell, the world - give a shit about Marvel movies than about Marvel comics.
That will never not be sad.

The truth makes me sad if it becomes the dominant force. that, I hate the Japanese market of comics, There are good things, but I detest the cliches of the shonen-shit much more than those of the capeshit, not to mention that 40% is soft porn.

Also telling how the most successful webcomics have been those with a large female following, like Homestuck or Check Please.

The movie studio's success seems independent of the comic publisher's success

It shouldn't be, though. Marvel has been living off the ghosts of the past for far too long. DC, too. Not that I blame them for doing what they can to keep those characters and stories in the spotlight, but they are so stuck in the Capeshit Lane that they forgot other genres and standalone stories can exist alongside the ongoing capeshit stuff like "Spider-Man's Worst Day Ever This Week" or "Squirrel Girl Confronts a Mirror".

There is more to manga than shōnen and tiddy comics, user.

>yaoi and yuri, which gives LGBT readers
Most yaoi is read by women who like guys while yuri is about an even split of male/female readers.

> the cliches of the shonen-shit much more than those of the capeshit, not to mention that 40% is soft porn.
Let this never be forgotten. Just because the manga industry is bigger the American comic industry doesn't mean 90% of it isn't crap.

>The movie studio's success seems independent of the comic publisher's success

It both is and isn't. The movies wouldn't exist without the comics (obviously), but if the comics ended today, they wouldn't be nearly as missed as if the movies ended.

My point remains erect.

Have you tried titles like Otoyomegatari, Dorohedoro, or that mountain climbing manga?

>But manga also approaches sex, romance, and relationships in better ways than capeshit ever could.
>70% of shojo manga are almost always on a group of anorexics looking for sex
>the other 30% that represents gays are jokes with legs

Fuck soft porn, go for hardcore.

They licence a lot of the big long running shitty battle shonen that people will keep buying for dozens of volumes.

Still better than what the Big Two could do.

Even as a cape fan myself I feel Euro comics are true kings.

Why are the big 2 so bad at attracting female readers?

The top editors at both companies are men. The Big Two are also afraid of changing literally anything about their business model, so they don't do comics that could draw in new female readers for the long term.

>I think manga is less underwhelming for kids
I still remember why I picked up Anime/Manga over capeshit when I was a kid. Its more gray and the good guys can lose. And at the time I saw Hellsing, which was about bad guy. Unless things have changed in 20 years, for a kid Anime is smarter. For a kid.

And kids watch cartoons, not buy comics.

No, thank Disney and WB for that. But they may very well be eclipsed so much in sales that it forces real restructuring.

Euro comics are pretty lame though. They mostly have that same-y realistic looking stiff art with a lot of panels on a page.

>detest the cliches of the shonen-shit much more than those of the capeshit, not to mention that 40% is soft porn.
There's a whole world of manga beyond this out there.

Because 90% of the staff of the Big Two are men 35+. Upper class yuppie liberal men who love paying lip service to those hip young #wole millenials, but businessmen first and foremost who still inexplicably see the white older nerds who they hold in such high contempt as their main audience.

Because they don’t buy comics or maybe I’m just getting confused with feminists

Yeah but it doesn't sell.
Not the user you responded to, I honestly don't even know what's worse the high selling capeshit or the high selling shonenshit.

Capeshit. At least shōnenshit can end.

Even in the US, at least 40% of manga readers are women evidently. They are doing something right.

Tell that to naruto, after boruto they'll make trashruto about naruto's grandkids.

I said it can end. I never said the end would be in sight any time soon.

I mean, most shonenshit just gets shitcanned when it ends. Fact is, if you're in WSJ you gotta milk your shit for as long as you can because there's no guarantee your next work's gonna be well received and outside of WSJ they pay's not great.

american adults think comics are for kids and do not buy them
kids don't buy comics because they prefer video games

americans tried to market anime and manga to kids and an unintended side effect was that teenage and young adult demographics ended up being bigger.

Since nobody buys western comics it's not a surprise the manga market catched up to them.

Surrealism is no problem.

>#wole
I like to imagine that these yuppies are so out of touch that they'd legitimately use "wole" instead of "woke."

Nah, it would be more of a bodybuilder thing. #WoleAndSwole

They have the weird intersection of plenty of well written female characters and their magazines pushing constant molestation and trophy-wifing of female characters. Like Jump just can't go a year without a major female character in at least three of their comics being sexually abused. It's crazy.

These, manga and webcomics have filled the female readership void.

>and trophy-wifing of female characters
This happens to all female characters in capeshit. All.

Monthly comics should all be cancelled and only exist as trades. Much easier for casuals to keep up that way.

Honestly, more standalone self-contained stories would be better.

So how do we make comics popular or at least more mainstream so people actually buy them again

You're not wrong, but I was just pointing out how, while American comics pretty much boil down to trophy wife shit, a few comics every once in a while about actual female characters, and a horde of poorly conceived STRONG INDEPENDENT WOMEN, Japan's got this strange ass intersection where a comic can simultaneously have a well realized female characters but also have a completely absurd level of sexual exploitation revolving around them. Like one minute you've got this cool chick dealing with tax fraud and the next she's getting her nipples rubbed by an ancient genie or something against her will. It's weird as fuck.

Get them into big-box stores like Wal-Mart. Broader variety in genres. Lower prices. More standalone stories that don't require knowing three decades worth of lore to enjoy.

I'm surprised they don't do this approach but will sell merchandise of food with pictures of characters on them.

You know what's even more efficient than throwing out the old continuity?

Actually using legacy characters.
Not letting a character exist for 75 fucking years.
Not constantly pushing crossovers.

>It's weird as fuck.
It's life, mate.

Source?

>Not letting a character exist for 75 fucking years.

Ahaha, you poor fool. If it makes money, it ain't ending.

This.

Additionally, I think experimenting more with online distribution, like putting out pro quality comics for free (like webcomic distribution) to hook casuals might be a possibility.

It's one thing to have these things happen to characters. It's another to do it frequently.

If Superman getting borderline raped became the annual JLA event instead of the JSA crossover, people would have been weirded out. I rationalized it back when I was a kid, but it's so frequent in magazines like Jump and Shonen Sunday that it's weird as hell.

Which is why the legacy system works. Keep the shit the same, change the name of the guy underneath. Worked for Kamen Rider back in the day, worked for Flash for the longest time, it would still work now.

Bringing Barry back was a mistake.

Because "sexual harassment" isn't a big deal, no matter what the snowflakes in hollywood keep saying. America freaking the fuck out and doing a purge of its media elites is the weird one on the international stage.

Treating women like sex objects is less objectifying than putting them on a pedestal.

>Which is why the legacy system works.

The legacy system is precisely why the Big Two are so assfucked these days. Characters - brands, now, really - existing for 75 years and never really evolving or changing without eventually reverting to some specific status quo is why people stopped giving a shit about capeshit comics.

>The legacy system is why it's fucked
>All of the continuity bullshit comes from the characters who last more than 25 years instead of passing the torch to some new asshole

???

>I rationalized it back when I was a kid, but it's so frequent in magazines like Jump and Shonen Sunday that it's weird as hell
Gimme a few examples of what you mean.

I understand you want to make a political statement or something, but seeing my favorite character get held down and made helpless while various men and women squeeze her titties and threaten to rape her 4+ times is demoralizing.

Like fuck's sake. It feels awful. It's the same in the rare cases it happens to male characters too.

that's the question of the decade mate.

cape comics don't affect the sales of other comics. and comprise a tiny volume of the market.

The character may change in some fashion, but the brand stays the same. When I say legacy, I refer specifically to the brand. Decades of Spider-Man comics and the best twist they ever did with the character was to slap the brand on a black character.

Nami in One Piece is a good example. She got molested in Enies Lobby, when a "soap girl" started feeling her up to kill her. Then the next arc started and...she got molested again, while taking a bath, by an invisible man. And then I started noticing that, like a lot of Jump's retarded editorial decisions, you could see it occurring as a staggered trend across series. You'd have Nami get molested this month in One Piece and that's the only real one like that for a while, various "fanservice" moments in other series, but you won't get another REAL woman-in-sexually-charged-peril moment for another few months.

It's all just sales tactics bullshit.

That's more legacies being handled poorly than legacies overall. If Peter segued into Miguel that'd be pretty great, but Marvel's kinda shit about doing legacies right, as you've noted.

Jay to Barry to Wally was a good way of keeping Flash relatively fresh, although Wally and Barry were a bit too similar in design. The short time we got with Dick being Batman after Final Crisis showed signs that they really could have revitalized the brand that way, but NOPE WE NEED OUR BRUCE EVERYTHING MUST STAY AS WHEN I WAS A CHILD

The paper is honestly dog-shit and must cost less than 10p in the tank/volumes entirety. It pisses me off so god damn much. Print manga on comic book paper! At least a paper made fr images.

Women creators are also a very large part. Rumiko Takahashi (Ranma) Naoko Takeuchi (Sailor Moon) Clamp, Tanemura etc etc the list goes on. There isnt a gender issue with manga creators. And they are not prudes, they write/draw what will sell.

I mean... it's just fanservice.

Nami gets molested by villains, and in the soap girl's case, she then proceeded to kick her ass.

Villains do bad things. If you had to choose between one of these, which would you go for: 1. villain beats you half to death. 2. villain kills your mother right in front of you. 3. villain gives your testicles a very gentle squeeze, asks you to call him daddy.

Sure, three is creepy and uncomfortable, but on the spectrum of "bad stuff people can do", it's incredibly tame.

That you get so offended for Nami's sake is pathetic. The character never once acts like a victim even after all the horrible, traumatic things she goes through and she's consistently portrayed as not just being one of the smartest and most competent characters, but in full control of her sexuality.

And charging Oda with the thought crime of "Oh he's just adding in fanservice to gain popularity!" Stupid. One Piece is the most popular manga of all time, and its level of fanservice is a blip on the radar compared to any other manga that actually goes for that appeal. The reason people like it is because it has interesting characters going on fun adventures. The reason it has any fanservice is because it's something Oda can have fun with. If that makes you uncomfortable, stop reading.

"strong independent woman" is still a woman with all her natural weaknesses, of course in the realm of uncucked manga someone will definitely test that angle of attack or do it just for the laughs

or you want them to be ultimate mary sues from badly written comics where a male will not try to gain power over woman and would rather leave her to be danger to his master plan involving even bigger things just to get kicked in the nuts by her?

I like the parasyte manga.

This.

Can one of you mangafags recommend me a good adult/mature series that is preferably complete? I've heard good things about Monster (don't recommend Pluto, that sucked.)

If it's seriously that innocuous I assume you'd have no problems with Peter Parker being grabbed by the buttocks while he's half naked and moaning as Black Cat threatens his life, right? That wouldn't be incredibly stupid and make it harder to take him seriously, right? People still joke about how he got cucked and Skip molesting him, don't pretend you'd just let it be.

I'm not saying "oh man, bad things can't happen to girls!" I'm saying magazines like Jump constantly use it as a sales angle and it's retarded.

>charging Oda with the thought crime of "Oh he's just adding in fanservice to gain popularity!"
It's almost like I said it was a thing Jump implements at staggered intervals through all its titles and has nothing to do with Oda at all, but rather his publisher, Shueisha.
It's almost like Jump absolutely does unnecessary bullshit to boost magazine sales, like pressuring authors into making shitty tournament arcs, marketable power ups and overbearing fanservice. The general lack of these things in One Piece is more of a testament to just how popular it is and how much say Oda gets in his comic.

I already know how this is gonna go down, "HURRR U JUST WANT PERFECT WOMEN WHO ARE NEVER HARMED," but this shit annoys me because it leads to the characters being used mostly for tiddy value instead of actually being worth a damn. I'd rather see them get fucking stabbed than groped.

>Pluto sucked
Did you read any Astro Boy beforehand?