Forum - View topicOne Piece Manga Has 430 Million Copies in Print Worldwide
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Well, one other thing to consider is the price. These volume manga releases are also, on a page-by-page basis, the cheapest widely available comics by far. They're printed on the lowest-quality paper, are in black-and-white, and have smaller crews than any major publication in the United States or France. Of course it would make sense they'd also be the best-selling comics when you're using number of pages as a guideline. If I recall correctly, manga volume releases in Japan are about 500 to 700 yen. That would buy you 1 to 2 issues of a 2017 release from DC or Marvel.
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Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1796 Location: South America |
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Actually in magazines are cheaper. A magazine like Morning with 430 pages of manga would be 2.5 dollars. The cost per page is lower than 1 cent. Also many people read manga left in the trains by other commuters, paying nothing. Manga is cheap entertainment that you get 400 pages of fun by paying a couple of dollars or sometimes nothing since you can get the ones left lying. The cost per page of manga magazines is 1/30 that of US comics.
Of course if you wanted comics to develop into a true mass medium they should be super cheap, as to be accessible for the population. And today most manga is read for free/almost free on phone apps anyway, the natural substitute of recycled paper used in magazines. In the US comics are only read by a super niche group of nerds who are willing to spend a lot of money on a few pages, some people even collect comics awaiting then to become more valuable. While manga in Japan are like newspapers: entertainment print medium for the general population that is also getting obsolete and is being mostly sold through the internet. Finally, I don't see the problem in comparing sales per page since its ludicrous to compare sales of 22 pages NA comics with magazines and books that are 200 to 1,000 pages long. Or even compare the total sales of 22 pages long comics "Superman" for 80 years with sales of a manga title written by a specific author. Superman is essentially a brand and not the work of an author unlike One Piece or Dragonball. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Of course, those magazines are meant to be read and then disposed and forgotten about. The paper quality is incredibly low and the pages thin, and very few people actually keep them. You compared them to newspapers; that's basically what they're like, and if you were to compare the manga magazines, newspapers would be a fairer comparison because those are meant to be disposed of or used as lining and cushioning later. I guess the best comparison would be the Funny Pages, as, like manga magazines, they're printed on fleeting-grade paper, are mostly in black and white with occasional color (though there's been more color lately), tell very short stories written and illustrated by one person or occasionally a writer and an artist, and are competitive with the lowest-performing ones booted on a frequent basis.
Comics, at least in the United States, WAS a mainstream mass medium, until the industry imploded and almost destroyed itself in 1996 trying to sell to the collectors at the expense of everybody else (including those who just wanted to read them). The main thing preventing comic books from gaining mainstream attention again, in spite of the superhero movies, is that Diamond went out of business during that implosion, which at that point was the only distributor of print media in the United States to specialize in comic books, and there hasn't been a company to replace Diamond since. DC, Marvel, Image, and Valiant were almost completely dependent on Diamond. Archie was the only major publisher that wasn't, which is why Archie escaped the meltdown relatively unscathed (and, of course, comics published by Archie can still be found at the checkout racks in grocery stores, convenience stores, etc.). Archie is facing some financial problems right now, but it's specific to the company itself, namely in rights ownership. (Viz was around back then, but it was not a major publisher yet.) |
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Jose Cruz
Posts: 1796 Location: South America |
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Ok, just one correction:
Not really. Selling 110 million comics per year in the 90's meant 1/3 of a comic per person per year in Northern America. So that's per capita consumption of 7 pages of comics per person per year since each comic had on average 22 pages. That's not remotely "mainstream". In Japan at the same time they sold 2.3 billion manga per year or 18 manga books and magazines per person, averaging 400 pages of comics per unit so in Japan manga sales were of 7,200 pages of comics per person per year. Which was 1,000 times the per capita volume of sales in NA. And in terms of readership the difference in scale was even higher since each manga magazine was estimated to be read by 3 persons while in the US comics are usually only for individual consumption. Hence, per capita comic reading was ca. 21,000 pages of manga per person per year in Japan in the mid 90's while the average American read 7 pages of comics per year. A difference of 3,000 times.. To give an idea of how much manga that is: a one cour anime show is usually adapted from 3-4 books which means that the average Japanese (including elderly and children) consumed the equivalent of 30 cours of anime per year in the form of manga. Otakus obviously consumed far more in the range of hundreds of cours per year. The Japanese people grow up reading manga and so have already trained their brains to read comics much faster than Westerners can. Hence, a typical Japanese reads a 400 page manga in about 30 minutes, spending about 5 seconds per page. Studies have shown that they often don't read the dialogue but infer the meaning from just glancing at the kanji symbols. Hence, by reading the manga one can consume "anime" much faster than by watching it. Manga is in fact the single most time efficient way to consume narrative: reading the adaptation of a novel into a manga is like 10 times faster and reading the manga is several times faster than watching the anime version. Obviously comics cannot have been mainstream in the US if people from other countries were reading 3,000 times more comics on average. It sounds extremely ludicrous to me the claim comics are mainstream in the US, in fact, living here for over 5 years I have yet to meet a single person who actually reads US comics. It's easier, for instance, to find people who listen to melodic power metal instead. I have also been quite disturbed by this constant denial among Western anime fans of the asymmetry in popularity of comics and animation between Japan and the West. Why Western fans of Japanese comics and animation have the need to state over and over that comics and animation are mainstream in the West and that in Japan nobody reads comics and watches animation? I believe that is due to the fact they feel bad from not meeting people in real life who are into anime and so they think for themselves: "but everywhere in the world it must be the same, even in Japan nobody knows Miyazaki and One Piece is as well.", as a subconscious way to comfort themselves. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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I don't think anyone here has said that manga isn't popular in Japan; the only people who would say so are those either not familiar enough with manga that they don't realize how popular it was or people who don't like manga much and would assume that since they don't like it, other people must not either. Also, just wanted to ask: Which years were those? Were they before or after the crash? Because that makes a tremendous difference. I'd say they definitely WERE mainstream if, according to the numbers you gave, the number of comic books sold was equal to one-third of the country's population, considering video game numbers were way lower back then and that was considered mainstream too. They're mainstream in the sense that everybody knows about comic books, everybody can recognize the most popular characters, and everybody can tell you stuff like Batman's origin story or where Superman lives or Spider-Man's secret identity, even before these movies came out. Way more people on Earth than those who can identify even Monkey D. Luffy. The main thing about why the numbers were a bit lower was that, until the 90's, in the United States, comic books were largely considered a medium strictly for children (stories like Watchmen notwithstanding), a notion intentionally perpetuated by the Comics Code Authority. And by that, I mean that adults were shamed of reading comics, even if they weren't intended for kids. (The Funny Pages managed to not have that stigma, even though they were required to keep everything G-rated.) Well, that, and because of Diamond, comic books were, and still are, mainly sold in specialty shops. Speaking of the Funny Pages, due to their distribution in newspapers, their readership compared to the populaton would be much closer to that of manga, which is the comparison I wanted to make. The western comic book industry and the manga industry operate quite differently from each other in their means of publication, distribution, public image, psychographics, and their sources of revenue. The comic strip business, on the other hand, is much closer to manga, for reasons I explained above, that they're dirt-cheap to read, and that they're collected into volume releases for the more dedicated consumers (though they're viewed as even more fleeting than manga, so demand is pretty low, though not low enough that they wouldn't keep selling them). |
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