The Trickle-Down Manga Theory
Dave
Intermittent wonders why the news about
Shonen Jump's
growing sales should matter much to non-manga comic book fans.
Dirk
Deppey has already replied with two reasons (steady bookstore sales
keep the Graphic Novel section alive; competition from the manga
publishers might encourage The Big Two to produce material in varied
genres and formats appealing to younger readers), but I'd like to add a
third: It promotes the art form of sequential art. Even if
the sales of superhero and small press comics never equal that of
Shonen
Jump, at least the people buying manga are buying comics. As
Ralph
Phillips pointed out, even if one portion of comics struggles or
withers away, that doesn't mean comics full-stop cease to exist.
And as I believe
Shawn Fumo
has argued from time to time, today's
Chobits fan may grow up
to read
Cheat or other indie romance GNs in the future.
I would imagine very few of us started out reading black-and-white
autobiographical comics when we were in grade school. We were
probably introduced to comics through colorful characters pounding the
crap out of each other. Later (assuming we didn't give up on
comics completely) we sought out other, more mature works of sequential
art (assuming our tastes evolved or expanded).
A fourth reason might be that readers growing up on manga might become
creators of sequential art themselves, and because they weren't
immersed almost exclusively in superheroes, they might set out to
create more diverse comics. In fact, this might already be
happening: As
Shawn
Fumo notes, American creators who grew up on manga and anime are
now getting published as part of Tokyopop's ongoing "Rising Stars of
Manga" contest, and their topics aren't all about giant robots or teen
romance. Getting newer generations of sequential art enthusiasts
to think of comics in terms broader than just "superheroes,
superheroes, and more superheroes" could be a very good thing for
American comics.
So much for the broad, abstract point. Now to consider a specific
question Dave raised: How is the "Amerimanga" book
Death: At
Death's Door doing? I don't know if there have been any
reports on bookstore sales (ICv2 noted that
sales were "strong"
and that it made the
bookstore list of
Top 50 Graphic Novel Titles;
Publishers
Weekly referred to it as "one of the most successful American
manga-style books" and listed it as
number
eleven on its list of "Top-selling Graphic Novels of 2003"), but in
the Direct Market sales have been good: It was the number one
graphic novel in
July
2003 with estimated sales of 15,364 copies, and it showed up on the
Top 50 GNs list again in
August and
October, with
sales of 1,780 and 2,483, respectively. (Of course, this book
undoubtedly owes much of its success to the extremely loyal
Sandman
fan-base, but Dave wanted to know.)
