Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by retailer Steve Bennett of Mary Alice Wilson's Dark Star Books in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This week, Bennett talks about some similarities between comic sales in the U.S. and Japan.

I actually saw the latest issue of Wired, the one with the articles on manga, a couple days before the news broke on the usual suspect comics news websites (this one included).  It was hard missing the pink haired maiden on the cover on the magazine rack of my small town grocery store.  The story inside, 'Japan, Ink' by Daniel Pink makes for interesting reading considering its implications for the American comic book market.

The phrase 'superhero exhaustion' has been tossed around recently but apparently manga publishing in Japan isn't doing much better; the article establishes that for the big manga weeklies which used to sell millions of copies a week 'circulation is on a steep and steady downward slope' with sales of the collections not doing much better.

Though he never gets around to specifying how exactly, Pink suggests the salvation of manga will come from doujinshi, amateur manga done by amateur creators using copyrighted characters taken from popular manga and anime series that create their own versions, often with a homoerotic spin.  It's the Japanese equivalent of American fan-fiction and like American movie studios Japanese publishers generally turn a blind eye to these endeavors -- seeing the benefits from letting fans have something that's altogether their own.

Further Pink suggests that the doujinshi model could be used in America.  It's a tempting notion to be sure; they could be done online like fan-fiction so no money changed hands.

There's certainly no shortage of professional level artists who want to draw super-heroes desperately enough they'd do it for free (especially if they saw doing the doujinshi as a way of getting a shot at the actual article) and  as Homer Simpson recently did on The Simpsons, I know I'd like to try my hand at writing a Superman novel.  And I imagine after me moaning about how bad contemporary superhero comic are for over a year at least some of you have wondered if I could do better*.

But it's just not going to happen.  Copyright lawyers from Marvel and DC could quite rightly argue amateur comics featuring their copyrighted characters are almost indistinguishable from the official comics and would create confusion and weaken their hold on the trademarks.

But as to why sales of manga are down in Japan; I don't know, but have the sneaking suspicion it's because publishers relentlessly give their readers a steady diet of what they've already read under the assumption they want more of the same.

I don't consider myself an expert on Japan, let alone Japanese publishing, but from everything I've read it's pretty clear Japanese publishers aren't that different from American ones.  Both chase after the latest fads and trends and if the Japanese somehow do publish a series (take for example Death Note) that's genuinely different from everything else being published and sells incredibly well they'll publish more comics just like it.

Likewise I don't consider myself an expert on manga but back when I was regularly writing comic book reviews for the Comics Buyer's Guide I must have reviewed at least two hundred volumes of manga. And while I certainly found some absolutely original manga (both Translucent and Yotsuba immediately come to mind.), most shared a terrible crushing sameness, a lockstep adherence to hidebound convention at least the equal of anything found in superhero comics.

Dragon Ball Z didn't create the boys fighting genre but it definitely perfected it -- which becomes clear when you read manga for that audience segment that came after it like Zatch Bell.  Though undoubtedly 'inspired' by Harry Potter, the core concept (loner boy meets magical friend with a spell book who helps him grow as a person as he helps others) is rich in wish fulfillment and the first volumes were often quite sweet and touching with offbeat characters and situations.  And then the overall plot of the series (monsters fight and fight and fight other monsters for the crown of another world) overwhelmed what was good about the series in the first place.

So (at long last here's my point) while manga in America is still selling great  undoubtedly the point will come when its audience will tire of magical girls and supernatural romantic comedies which make up the bulk of the series being published today.  Hopefully that's when publishers like Tokyopop and Viz will take these changes in taste into account instead of following the American hypothesis if sales are down somehow the readers who remain will just buy more of what they've become tired of.

* But then it's hard to imagine anyone producing something worse than the current issue of Superman where Mark Waid (what were you thinking?) establishes what is essentially marijuana from Krypton is growing on earth and can temporarily bestow superpowers on the humans who smoke it.

The opinions expressed in this Talk Back article are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.