I’m terribly sorry to morally or ethically inconvenience anyone about this. But.Â
There are probably 20,000 service industry workers in San Diego that all appreciate your tip-dollars more-or-less equally.
There are two or three properties in San Diego where your drinking money goes into the pockets of a homophobe who is working against human rights, and using the money he is given from those properties to do so.
It’s a simple decision to make, but it is a decision. Anything else is honestly just rationalizing. I’m not going to be holding a placard outside your hotel room or anything, but there are probably 200 establishments for drinking and congregating within 15 minutes walk of the convention centre. Drinking at any of those probably won’t fund jackholes, and drinking or eating (or, unfortunately, staying) at The Hyatt will.
And you know, when the money goes into his account, I’d wager that the bank doesn’t keep a column next to it for whether it was spent by folks in favour of his actions, or critical of them. It’s all money.
So, your decision. This is the last I have to say on the matter.
– Chris
I haven’t linked to Adam Stephanides site Completely Futile for a while, but 
So just what do we want the manga industry to look like, anyway? I mentioned at the end of that last post that I let my own hopes and fears inform any predictions I might make… Prescribing the future of the industry, any industry is something of a sucker bet, something could happen tomorrow to send that industry wildly off course. Besides, predicting the future is best left to the people managing your retirement portfolio, I’d much rather describe what I would like to see, rather than what I think will happen.
So what do I want the manga industry to look like then? I think that Drawn + Quarterly has a good idea, with one prestige-format (meaning a format with actual prestige, like a hardcover book with lovely thick paper and a beautiful design, and not those flimsy little 48 page superhero comics with a spine) release of “mature manga” per year. If there were 3 or 4 publishers doing that, each with a nicely designed manga release per season (spring/fall), that’d be maybe 8-10 wonderful books per year, which I think that the market could bear, and that’d be lovely. Currently the number of high-end manga releases in a given year is about half of that, which accounts for the loud noises I make when they manage to drop. Add in the serialization of older seinen and adult books from publishers like Vertical, Viz, and Tokyopop? I think I’d be okay with that.
No one knows how the manga market is going to shake out in the next few years, I think that much can be taken as fact. Everyone’s got ideas, informed by both their desires and their fears, but I’ve talked to a lot of people and no one has the magic bullet. There’s a lot going on in North America–war, recession, the cost of gasoline–all of them are big question marks for every retail business. I’m not an economist, I can’t even begin to address how decentralized suburban environments and a lack of public transit infrastructure are going to affect the sales of the serialized adventures of manga heroes and heroines at the local box store. But luckily there’s enough weird shit happening inside the industry itself that I can talk about that instead.
I can’t help but look at this situation from the perspective of a lifelong comics fan who never had his parents throw out his comic collection–who worked in the drinking and the fucking around alongside the adventures of The Transformers, The Uncanny X-Men, The Invisibles, and eventually The Socially Awkward Characters of Adrian Tomine. Superhero comics offer an escape, are modern mythology, and are no more or less immature than professional sports fandom, say the converts. Mike Manley calls them all “babymen” though, fully grown though emotionally immature men who simultaneously crave change and tradition, the illusion of life-altering adventures set against the steady hum of conformity. In short, the Simpsons episodes before and after Barney gave up drinking, because those ones where he’s just got a coffee look fucking weird in syndication. Whatever side of the debate you come down on in the emotional maturity of superhero fans argument, one need only look at the books themselves to see the overwhelming conservatism, tradition, and homogeneity in the monthly superhero fantasy land. It’s a genre where most everyone draws and writes very similar stories, and that’s what makes it surprising when those same fans make the same accusations about manga.
Unfortunately, and despite the best wishes of myself and many of my friends, the answers are not as simple as “more josei manga! more seinen manga! more adult manga!” for a number of reasons. The big one is the differing cultural mores; that the west has all kinds of completely insane hangups about nudity and sexuality, let alone the combination of those things with violence, and while not every manga intended for the 18-and-over set is full of those things, the popular ones are.
If you look at all of the manga pubs and their output, it becomes clear that each has their own strategy when it comes to attracting the mature reader and keeping them there. DMP offers a bevvy of Yaoi material in vanilla and kinky flavours, releasing just enough 16+ material into the market to keep the girls (and occasional guy) salivating for their 18th birthdays, when they can get to the mature stuff. In fact, the yaoi market might just be the most diverse in terms of age and reach, and its growth from being an ultra-niche fandom into a sizable demographic worth paying monetary attention to has been rapid, and worth noting. While no one in the niche is getting rich, most pubs are keeping their heads above water and behaving ethically. Of particular note is Yaoi Press, a publisher that’s managed to keep the lights on and a steady stream of product released, and they’ve done it without licensing even one book from overseas. It’s a company for fans by fans (a fan who happens to be a pretty savvy businesswoman) that has largely managed to bypass the biases of fandom against “fake manga” and put out quality product that sells to girls and women. That’s pretty impressive, and perhaps a business plan to follow. Over the past few years Tokyopop seems to have recognized the value of broadening their demographic reach, perhaps fearing that they were about to lose the shonen and shoujo markets to their competitors. Their Original English Language Manga efforts (OEL/World Manga) showed a broad, broad reach across age, gender, and race, but the problem with trying to be all things to all people is how often you end up bein’ nuthin’ for no one. Even the most ardent Tokyopop supporter would define their output over the last three or four years as “unfocused.” One wonders what their publishing program would have looked like with stronger lines, with stand-alone graphic novels, with an experienced editorial staff better known for commissioning and developing original work? Maybe we’ll get an opportunity, Tokyopop seems to be refining their line now… but I’ll probably talk about that next time out.
Getting back to publisher strategies for the aging manga market, I feel like Dark Horse was in there first, and has been in their longest, when it comes to manga material for older readers. Unfortunately I feel like that was as a result of their focus on publishing manga that would appeal to the existing North American superhero readership base, a backlist comprised mainly of fantasy and science fiction manga, with a bunch of samurai thrown in for good measure. The current boom in popularity of serialized sci-fi and fantasy on television would seemingly make titles like Eden, Blood+, and Gantz sure-fire hits, but unfortunately the sales on Dark Horse’s seinen (young men) manga seem to have flagged. Eden seems to be under a constant death-watch, and Dark Horse’s horror manga initiative seems to have suffered an untimely end. Even the series that I personally thought had the most potential, Hiroki Endo’s Tanpenshu short story collections, were largely ignored in the market. I kind of have to wonder how many series you can cancel mid-stream before buyers simply stop buying everything, and wait for the serialization to be completed before they pick up a book? That can’t be a healthy strategy for anyone involved, and I hope that whatever steps Dark Horse decides to take with their manga line, they see them through to completion for their own sake…
I have to say that, going forward, it seems like manga for an adult general audience is going to come from Viz. The Viz Signature line seems to be comprised entirely of things I want to read, and on a fairly regular basis. Unfortunately with the end of Drifting Classroom and Golgo 13 and nothing immediately launched to replace them, the regular output in the line is going to be comprised of just Naoki Urasawa’s Monster and Takehiko Inoue’s REAL through this Christmas (and the re-launch of the Vagabond series which will hopefully catch on in a big way)… But the idea behind it is a solid one, the radical notion of presenting works not just using classifications of age or audience but quality is pretty radical in mainstream publishing. That a company is willing to step up and say “This is really good stuff that we’re publishing here, take a look at it,” whilst also trying not to say that anything else they’re publishing is necessarily… bad… heh. It’s kind of neat. That and I was lucky enough to receive an early copy of the first volume of Viz’s edition of REAL and it’s fucking gorgeous, and feels great in the hand. French flaps! Larger size! It looks and feels different than manga for kids, which (alongside the recent releases Tekkon Kinkreet and Cat-Eyed Boy) is a very important step for the publisher. I also think it’s interesting that in talking to Marc Weidenbaum about Viz’s Original English Language publishing initiative, a big part of that conversation was that OEL could very well be what readers go to “next”. With Tokyopop titles like Dramacon, Bizenghast, and Princess Ai all doing well in the market, and being books with a Japanese ‘look’ but with North American cultural mores in mind, this really could be the future. Whatever they end up with will be worth watching.
That said, as the market stands right now my heart belongs to the Alternative and Art Comix publishers who are publishing challenging, entertaining, and unique manga. Drawn + Quarterly’s productions of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s work really are top-of-the-line thanks to copious extras and a beautiful hardcover production, as is their most recent release, the 70s manga that’s equal parts revolutionary student movement and French art film, Red Colored Elegy. Their recently announced 800+ page autobiography of Tatsumi is shaping up to be the book of 2009, and may even succeed to really grab a mainstream audience where his fiction works have not, as North American book buyers tend to embrace autobiography and memoir in comics format quite easily. Of course, Last Gasp’s own manga titles, including the ground-breaking Barefoot Gen and the soon-to-be-released underground manga title TOKYO ZOMBIE are must-buys. I think Last Gasp will be announcing a new Junko Mizuno manga soon too (San Diego!) and given her standing in the fine art and vinyl toy world, that will have a real possibility of breaking through. And PictureBox Inc. seems entirely committed to publishing works that are capital-I Important and then trying to create a market for them, so their upcoming release of Monstermen Bureiko Lullaby should be, if nothing else, very interesting. Oh, and everything Fanfare/Ponent-Mon publishes is worth buying too, every single one. I wish they could get their scheduling and distribution under control, and I think those factors will keep them an ultra-niche publisher until they get sorted out, but Disappearance Diary alone should win them an award entitled “Best gift to a North American manga fan”. Their upcoming release of Jiro Taniguchi’s “Faraway Neighborhood,” should it get the distribution and attention it deserves, could very-well be their breakout book. Keep an eye out for it.
If I were a publisher, I’d be looking at my options. I’ve thought for a while that the graphic novel market in general, and manga in particular, has outgrown the “graphic novel section” of the bookstore. While about 80% of the manga being published could go to the same audience of 13-18 year olds (and those who read books for 13-18 year olds) there are a good number of books–and customers–who are likely tired of stepping over teenagers sprawled on the floor in the manga section. I think publishers working to develop newer and more diverse sections in bookstores is more important than ever, and there’s already been some headway made in developing separately stocked–and separately purchased–graphic novel sections in the children’s areas. Walk into most chain bookstores and you’re much more likely to find Pokemon: Diamond and Pearl Adventures Volume 1 across the aisle from the picture books rather than next to Naruto (although in an ideal world it might be cross-racked). Now, and here’s the trick, we need a grown-up graphic novel section, not only for the excellent (and future) D+Q, Picturebox, and Last Gasp offerings but so that the only difference between Battle Royale and Boys over Flowers isn’t some easily removed shrink-wrap. The industry is getting younger–the buzz words at the New York Comic Con were COMICS and FOR and KIDS–but it’s also getting older too, and older customers would like a different shopping experience than trying to find the latest Tatsumi or Inoue manga jammed in-between Ultimate Spider-Man and Naruto whilst simultaneously trying to avoid the outstretched gangly limbs of sullen teens thoroughly immersed in the Universe of the Four Gods.