in the shell

[GhostLine]

It's been exactly a year since anyone has posted on the manga forum. I read a couple years ago that manga sales having actually been slipping in Japan and giving way more towards portable technology.

But, now same with US Manga sales...perhaps with all of the reports of a recession.

What does everybody else feel about the future of manga?

Do you buy all you can get your hands on? Do you just choose carefully some precious pieces (this is what I do...I will never part with my Nausicaa collection!)...or do you plan on waiting for the anime?
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[GhostLine]

okay, now it's been yet another year...and by now, a few manga distribution houses in the US has shutdown. DC Comics' Manga distribution imprint CMX (something like that) is folding and will shutdown this summer. other anime-based fanzines are ending. but really, with all of the massive amounts of monthly releases, all $9.95 and up...who really has the budget to go exploring with different titles other than pre-existing? 'prolly just gonna be surefire sellers like Bleach or whatever will be the mainstays. original english manga releases i think are being shutdown...except for cross-media franchises such the push of the Twilight graphic novel.

you can probably look to seeing manga-kas going to digital (since works can mainly be created on computer anyway...Manga Studio and a decent Wacom tablet will suffice....) as the American comic industry is looking to the likes of the color screen iPad to save the superhero...but an online issue is like $1.99 US. Yikes!

what is the future of manga in the US?

Anime is another story.... Many feel that that most of the new films that will come out, will be in fact US funded...as we have seen in Gotham Nights, Dante's Inferno, Halo:Legends. Of course they are all vignette based shows, utilizing separate anime studios for each small tale...thanks to Animatrix for starting that weird genre.... FullMetal Alchemist: Brotherhood was just released the other day...$40 US for the first volume!!! BUT...it contains 13 episodes...as opposed to $20 for like 4 (sometimes 3) episodes. This, I wonder if will be have to be the new trend...more bang for the buck. At the same time DC and Marvel animation projects (with much lower quality art IMHO) are selling like hotcakes. Planet Hulk anyone? HUGE seller...which i think goes to say that there is still a market for anime...it just has to be better marketed, better priced...you can get away with charging more for a complete work, because it's complete...but i seriously doubt people are going to shell out their recession dollars for only a smattering of episodes. one of the reason why US comic individual issues are flailing, but trade paperback (TPB) sales are still strong.

i guess we'll have to go back to the days of telling stories around the campfire....
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[Freitag]

It' been in the last few (2 or maybe 5?) that I have started seeing large sections of Barnes and Noble (or whatever passes for B&N in the area) of Manga.

I had the same observation as you - $10 per book and series like Bleach where there are 100+ books. $1,000+ Not me man.

Heck I don't even have the budget to buy Start Trek: The Original Series on DVD. I just record mine from over the air.

And then there are online comics like this: http://zudacomics.com/azure that are pretty good. And they are original and serialized (sort of like in original magazine format) and free. Did I mention that they are free? (That site has other comics too. Some of them suck)

I think there is a balance in the somewhere between several variables.

* The price any one person will pay. (lately this number has been decreasing - or at least the available budget for this item has)

* The number of people in the audience.

* The cost of living/producing your art. (this number is constantly increasing thee days)

I mean image if you made something that everyone in the world wanted ($7 billion per episode!). You could charge $1 per episode and every one would buy it. I'd pay that much even for series that I wasn't that happy with, just in case it got good later on.

But I think that Manga is enough of a niche that the audience size is in the low thousands (or even high hundreds) at least in the US

I agree that online publishing is probably the direction it is all headed -that at least minimizes the publishing costs. and increases the revenue option (advertising)
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People tend to look at you a little strangely when they know you stuff voodoo dolls full of Ex-Lax.

[Jeff Georgeson]

I've watched the manga sections of some local bookstores nearly disappear; it's back to the way it was 10 years ago, when you were lucky to see any of those "strange Japanese comics" outside specialty stores. You can certainly find the most popular things (Bleach, Naruto), but the rest is often pretty random. US publishers seem to be printing the first few volumes of a series and then quitting, making it even worse for anyone trying to follow a story.

I know from experience that publishing on the Web is much, much cheaper than print, and especially with iPads and other tablets appearing, that may be the way things go. (Although I'd point out that Apple, at least, are very prudish and unpredictable when it comes to what they'll allow to touch their proprietary tech; they've been known to ban formerly approved apps from their iPhone with no reason given, and recently even banned an app from a big publisher [Kodansha]. So anybody publishing for the iPad, etc. is taking a certain amount of risk doing so. Sort of like asking Disney to release Studio Ghibli products ...)

Advertising (on the Web, anyway) is still an iffy proposition--typically, only high-traffic sites make much ad revenue. I don't know how it works on tablets; maybe that would be much more like print adverts in magazines, only with loads of interesting extra features like animation, targeting to specific audiences, etc.

--Jeff
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Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
--Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"