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Denver, 1:45 AM
Mon Nov 9
19 posts in the last 24 hours
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10/12/09
10/12/09
-People who like anime are typically grouped collectively as weeaboos. I heard people that have merely mention an anime and get called a weeaboo.
-Manga is a metric ton more expensive. Manga back in Asia is about 5 dollars. It costs much less to license a manga in an asian language than to license it in English for some reason.
-Scanlations provide a much more advanced story plot. Anyone that is greatly invested in a manga's storyline is probably going to go search out the newest chapter, which incidentally is free online.
Only manga I have ever bought in English is 1-25 of the GTO series, simply because it was so marvelously translated (captured even the subtle idioms and references in Japanese and made it work flawlessly in English). Most aren't close to being worth the price (fan scans usually are much better).
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You could say the same about anything.
If you look at American TV a lot is repetitive. Movies too. That doesn't mean that those suck or that there aren't good series coming out each season.
10/12/09
And what does it have to do with American TV? He doesn't bring that up, only you do, and it sounds like he's enjoying Japanese TV.
You have a pretty heavy "Japanese defense force" thing going on, don't you? Well, don't worry. He's still enjoying Japanese movies & video games. Just give him a break on the manga.
People. Damn.
10/12/09
1) The price, this has been mentioned enough so I'll leave it there.
2) Retailers. This is from my experience in the UK but physical retail outlets that stock manga do so incredibly poorly. Any big chain has a smattering of books, normally they'll have some of the popular stuff but most of what you'll find is random volumes of whatever that once they go generally don't get restocked. The more specialised stores that sell comics and general geeky stuff generally do it a bit better, with special offers on their manga and a bigger variety. They still mostly suffer from the problem of missing books in the line-up though.
The biggest problem both of them have though is they never stock enough volume 1's. This is damn important, if someone fancies picking up a series they are not going to start at book 2, or book 6 or whatever. They're gonna want to start at the beginning. Not having that crucial book 1 in stock probably costs any retailer that sells manga a ton of sales.
10/12/09
As a former squatter, you need to get rid of people who sit by the manga shelf and read for HOURS and buy nothing. These people will NEVER buy anything anyways.
10/12/09
So are you suggesting that we shrink wrap ALL BOOKS EVER because SHOCK HORROR people can just read them in the store? It's hardly a problem unique to manga, though I imagine it's more prevalent due to its shorter nature. Still there are people that do this with American comics and hell some people even read whole books in stores.
Shrink wrapping can damage softback manga volumes, it's why a lot of companies avoid it now (even though it used to be more common). Your second suggestion about taping part of the book shut is just ick, I don't want to think about how much damage untaping that might do to the pages. Those damn security stickers are bad enough.
10/12/09
Also, this is somewhat unique to manga and not similar to regular books. It is highly less likely that someone will crack open a 500 page novel and read it in one sitting in a book store. However, some people can skim through a volume of manga in less than 10 minutes. Leaving all the books open encourages people to treat the bookstore like their local library.
P.S. The covers the US versions use are horrible. They should have just kept the flap design they use in Asia. It's much more durable and less prone to corner damage.
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Where I live, I can go down the main street here and buy it from Barnes and Noble or Half-Price Books. Or I can go 10 minutes down the highway to my comic book store and buy it there (which is what I do, because I can pre-order everything from Previews). In fact, just next month, I have 8 separate titles to pick up. I had 4 this month.
Manga readers don't even have to GO to stores. Websites like Right Stuf have a HUGE selection of manga, and it's always below MSRP, and frequently on sale.
It's not all distribution and pricing. Just like anime, manga still has a huge stigma. Even American comic books still have a bit of a "comics are for kids" stigma. And many of those story lines are about ADULT characters. If they can't even think that comic books about adult characters can be for adults, how can they think that comic books about kids (most manga I've seen is about high school age kids) are meant for adults?
Also, it's something foreign. I read recently that (I believe) a Dragon Ball manga was released in both a right to left (original) and left to right (American) format. The L-R sold twice as many copies because it was published like an American book. (Don't get the wrong idea from me here, though; I like my manga printed in its original format.)
The #2 selling manga (according to the New York Times) is currently an English manga (OEL) called Vampire Kisses. Beating out Naruto, Bleach, and Full Metal Alchemist.
10/12/09
Here you would pay $8.99 for a volume of Naruto. There you might pay the equivalent of about 5.99 or 6.99. The lower the price goes, the more accessible it seems to become to the general public.
It's funny to think that most of the modern manga are sold in stores alongside and even with more promotion than American comics, at least in the stores that I frequent. It's not so foreign as one might think to see how many of the shrieking demographic embrace stories of yaoi and vampires.
It still does have the same stigma as video games did and still do; however, it's not so much a matter of it not being accepted as it is that manga in Japan appeal to a much larger demographic. Here, most of them are brought over for the teen group, leaving little to the adult demo. In Japan, it's not so strange to see both high school students and businessmen reading manga on a train side by side.
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Though strangely enough, anime DVDs tend to be cheaper in the US than in Japan. A series that comes on 6 DVDs that cost $25-30 each will be on 8-10 DVDs that cost $50-60 each in Japan.
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Yeah I was thinking this exactly. Our anime is way cheaper than their anime. So I didn't realize our manga was so much more expensive.
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See, I didn't know this. Because American comics run $3-4, and a manga is essentially SIX of those in one volume, just in black and white (and with no stupid ads inserted every other page).... The pricing didn't seem too bad to me. Now I'm a little annoyed, especially since manga has been going up in price over this last year.
And what I mean is that an English language book is placed so high; that fact that it's about vampires probably put it there, but it's still surprising by its very nature. I know that vampires are the "thing" now. I should mention that the only book that beat Vampire Kisses out, is a Japanese manga called Chibi Vampire (which I think is garbage personally).
The last part of your reply suggests incorrect (or just poor) marketing. There are plenty of books brought over here that are written for, or appeal to, more than just teenagers. Books like Nana, Saikano, Monster, most Osamu Tezuka books, and Trigun. That they're targeted only at teens suggests a misconception, an unwillingness for American audiences to see something as more than "just for kids" (as I already mentioned), or just bad marketing.
It appeals to a larger demographic in Japan because it's more acceptable (the fact that it's been around a lot longer, and can be found virtually anywhere, helps a lot). We're getting the same books here, for the same demographics (though some are likely targeted incorrectly), but the American equivalent of a "salary man" isn't likely to give manga a single thought. It works both ways; you have to be willing to accept something as a viable medium before you can consume it.
There's a gender divide here, too. Boys are hesitant to pick up shojo books, but girls will read both shonen and shojo. Viz Media's Shonen Jump magazine was selling 2-3 times more copies than their Shojo Beat magazine; many girls who were reading Shojo Beat were also reading Shonen Jump, but boys reading Shonen Jump weren't reading Shojo Beat. Then there's the problem that many girls won't go into stores and buy that sort of thing; a potential target is too embarrassed to either enter a specific store (like a comic book store), or buy it from a regular store (like B&N).
And blah blah blah.
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Of course Harry Potter is a much better story than Naruto, but that's neither here nor there.
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But I can see that one collected manga book is 10 bucks, most are going to be 11 nowadays. That's quite a lot on most kid's limited budget.
10/12/09
Manga doesnt sell in the US for mainly 2 reasons.
People who read would rather read everything else but manga.(take that how you want)
And manga is too expensive so people just read it in the store. Yes thats right, theyll stay there for hours on end reading anime.
Its also funny that people always are against stereotypes, but the only people who read manga at my store were asian kids and overweight 30 year old white guys. I thought it was funny how accurate that was.
I myself dont like manga at all. ive read some of the original Dragon Ball and some Death Note, and that was ok, but i truly dont take manga seriously. theres better stuff to read when you go to a bookstore.
Then again, ive become disillusioned with japan in general. I dont know if i just grew out of it or if they changed, but i dont like modern anime and i think over 70 percent of my PS3 games are nonjapanese. Compared to my PS2 collection, which i would say 90 percent of my games are japanese.
And yes, ill get shit for it, but manga is not a real art form yet.
I would say the same thing about anime, but my favorite anime begs to differ(Grave Of The Fireflies)
If there is a Watchmen or a Grave Of The Fireflies for manga, please let me know so i can try it.
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Making a claim like this without any sort of reasons is begging for a shitstorm of responses. Do you want to be proven wrong, or are you just flamebaiting?
If neither is the case, and that's really your informed opinion (though one could hardly call dragonball and death note together enough to make an opinion "informed"), then I truly feel saddened that you have such a narrow definition of art. Do you think the same about movies/music/live theater? Or are works of fine art (and "finer" literature) the only things that fit your definition?
10/12/09
From my experience though, most of the anime that have really good storylines and aren't 4000 episodes are either original to anime, or from light novels or normal books.
I know there's some good manga out there, so I'll think on it. Ever notice when someone ask you to think of something your mind just goes blank? Yeah, that happened to me right now.
10/12/09
I have ZERO interest in the Narutos and Yu-Gi-Oh's that clutter store shelves and the anime I'm seeing today sucks compared to what I was watching over a decade ago ("Grave of the Fireflies" was a brilliant film).
All this new crap is so disposable and lacking anything interesting enough for me to pay the bloated fees asked of its customers.
10/12/09
ive seen the anime and ive looked through some of the books, theyre lame.
Theyre bad art direction, bad writing, and so so boring.
american and just english writers in general run circles around these japanese writers with their pseudo mysticism and their tired old jokes.
it is very low level art. if you have to call it art.
Comic books had to go through serious changes to be taken seriously, manga hasnt changed.
Even animation had to go through serious changes to be taken serious, and so has anime, to a lesser extent. We have our Ghost In The Shell, Grave Of The Fireflies, Paprika.
Manga is as lame as it ever was.
and you can call me misinformed all you want but if the only reason you walk into a bookstore it to go to the manga section, you are lame. That section should be changed from "Manga" to "Tired old recycled shit."
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I personally like Mitsuru Adachi's stuff (which is pretty shounen, but is mostly about sports and character development), but there's plenty of content aimed at older audiences who want more than a group of kids fighting off evil monsters/organizations.
Too many people have only seen crap like Pokemon and DBZ and assume all anime is crap, and I think the same goes for manga.
10/12/09
Monster is a good place to look, as well as Bitter Virgin.
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When you go into a book store, do you have something in particular in mind? Usually, you do. I don't just go into a book store to browse around for an hour and not pick anything. I go in with a purpose. If that purpose happens to be manga then I'm not inclined to spend a lot of time looking at anything else when I have no immediate interest in it.
You need to look beyond the typical series that every single person has heard of and delve deeper to find something that has meaning. That's the same with any genre. I could fish through the fiction section and find a million sci-fi books that are all clones of each other, or maybe browse through modern fiction and find a thousand books about court cases and crime.
To specifically criticize manga isn't particularly fair, because every form of entertainment is going to have its gems and its nuggets of excrement. I could just as easily say that movies aren't an art form because of terrible examples like Saw or something more recent like Couples-Retreat.
10/12/09
Also, there are a lot of historical and true story Manga (Grave of the Fireflies was mostly a true story, the biggest exception being the main character didn't die, since he wrote the book) in Japan... they just never make it to the US.
The fact that you mention Shonen Jump as your examples shows me you haven't looked past that... So, start with Monster.
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Im chalking it up to the fact that studio ghibli films are released here in actual theaters and reviewed by real american critics and get good reviews. Anime is legit as far as im concerned in the US. Im just waiting for manga to follow.
10/12/09
you CAN go into a bookstore and pick out a best selling book and have it be good, or go rent a film and pick a hugely popular film that is actually good.
To Kill A Mockingbird and the Godfather still sell really well in the US, theyre classics, theyre well known, and theyre great.
I didnt need to be a detective to find that out.
But the most popular manga is terrible. same goes for anime.
10/12/09
If you take São Paulo - SP - Brazil as example, mangas sell well when compared to other publications. The problem is that the overall market for publications is small.
If you look at prices, average prices for mangas are around R$10,00 (+/- US$5,70). It's not "cheap" in terms of Brazilian market but not expensive too.
Interesting enough is that even very "Japan localized" mangas (like Lone Wolf and Samurai Executioner) sold well and many Brazilian artists are venturing in "manga style". More interesting than that is even traditional Brazilian comics are migrating to "manga style" (like "Turma da Mônica Jovem" by Maurício de Souza").
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THIS. Metro is like...the last place I want to read a manga...I'm prone to getting terribly lost into books so if I read on the train, I'll miss my stop.
I can't imagine what will happen to me if I read a Manga...
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@Rachel Fogg: Just look at this guy's face to find out…
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Is that...Rapist Mc Touchyfingers?! How do you know him!?
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@Rachel Fogg: Exactly! It's a trap!
Quick, matey! Shove 'im into the submarine and press the panic button! ;-)
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You don't have to tell me twice....
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I'm sorry, I'm terrible at jokes, as you should know by now. :P
10/12/09
I think digital distribution is a big deal, in the same way that arcades and ad-hoc parties are popular in Japan, the US needs online gaming in order for people to get together, due to the lack of arcades and the long distances between people.
I know most English-speaking manga fans also get their manga online, especially these days, where a pretty hefty chunk of all manga released in Japan are scanned and translated within a few days of released, then distributed for free online.
Viz and Tokyopop need to get in on that, otherwise people are always going to be reading the latest stuff straight from Japan on onemanga.com, instead of buying the official English trade paperbacks months later.