Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by retailer Steve Bennett of Mary Alice Wilson's Dark Star Books in
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, '
The phrase 'superhero exhaustion' has been tossed around recently but apparently manga publishing in
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
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
I don't consider myself an expert on
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.
Column by Steve Bennett
Posted by ICv2 on October 28, 2007 @ 11:00 pm CT