Forum - View topicNEWS: Manga Market in Japan Hits Record 612.6 Billion Yen in 2020
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cchigu
Posts: 250 |
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#921807
Posts: 1 |
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Reports like this make me so happy. I hope manga and anime industry will just keep on growing!
Meanwhile western comics have gone full on woke and are almost dead. 
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ETX
Posts: 344 Location: England |
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Isekai hater #163842864 We get it. |
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otastorian
 Posts: 64 Location: otakuhistoryguy.blogspot.com |
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Thanks for saving manga, KnY. Here's hoping that the upcoming Getter Arc anime causes a boom in mecha manga (hey, a man can dream right?).
I honestly don't care for either of those genres. Now 100 generic super robot anime, like it's the 80s again? I'm absolutely down for that. |
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Shay Guy
 Posts: 2333 |
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An average of 6% annual growth over a seven-year span is not "almost dead". |
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AmpersandsUnited
Posts: 633 |
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Those charts from ICv2 include North American manga sales as part of the "comic industry". 90% of the industry is manga and Dog Man.
Source: https://www.gamesradar.com/graphic-novel-sales-up-42-in-north-american-bookstores-this-quarter/ |
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Redbeard 101
Oscar the Grouch
Forums Superstar  Posts: 16963 |
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Keep telling yourself that sparky. Right now Western (mostly American) comics are about as popular now as back in the 90's. The largest multi-media franchises in tv and movies are based on them. Sorry to break it you sparky, but you're quite off on your little trollish delight. |
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Blanchimont
 Posts: 3573 Location: Finland |
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Maybe he did exaccerate a bit, but it's a fact super hero comics/graphic novels have been in decline over the past years; Surprising New Data Shows Comic Readers Are Leaving Superheroes Behind Tilting at Windmills #281 – Looking at BookScan: 2019 |
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El Hermano
 Posts: 450 Location: Texas |
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Superheroes, the characters, are doing quite well; WandaVision is pretty popular at the moment. Superheroes, the comics, are not. Even before the pandemic comic companies have struggled to get movie and TV show audiences interested in the comic versions since unlike how a popular anime will boost the source material manga or light novel's sales, that never really happens for comics. I'm sure people will argue why comics are doing poorly until the end of time, but at the end of the day when movies like Aquaman and Black Panther can pull in over a billion dollars worldwide, the Aquaman and Black Panther comics should not be shipping only 25,000 copies and being cancelled a few months later.
Comic books didn't die because they "went woke", they went went woke because they're desperately still trying to find a new market after their old one got taken away from them 20 years ago when the manga boom hit. Even good books like Christopher Priest's run on Deathstroke only sell around 6000 more copies than Ms. Marvel or whatever people want to use as a counter-example. In reality every phase they go through of courting a specific market is just a symptom of that blow they were dealt. Initially it was manga-like comics like Runaways and Young Justice to appeal to the new influx of manga readers, these days they're trying to appeal to the more progressive crowd. Ultimately, I feel the future of comics is just being kept around for the sake of existing while the main fandom and money is to be made in (live-action) TV and movie adaptions which bare little resemblance to them. |
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ATastySub
Past ANN Contributor
 Posts: 697 |
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Maybe you should read what you linked. First off, the article starts with him removing things from the list based on what he personally believes are "comics." Even after that he still largely ends up agreeing that the year is an improvement, even if he is questioning the data. His questioning, and the throughline in the piece, is that the data from bookscan tends to under report because not all stores report to bookscan. Furthermore, it goes on to say that while what you might hold onto as the important characters or works of the artform are making way for a newer generation that doesn't hold those same ideas, and their interests are leading sales into new directions. So yes, some Super Heroes may be down but comics as a whole are up. Largely due to the very same "woke" ideas that the poster you're backing up attempted to paint as the problem. |
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Ushio
Posts: 636 |
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He's referring to DC and Marvel superhero comics which haven't been doing great for years. The western market is dominated by stuff like Dog Man by Dav Pilkey and Raina Telgemeier's stuff which between the two of them make up 30% of US comic sales from US creators. |
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Horsefellow
 Posts: 262 |
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It's the outdated habit of people assuming American comics are just DC/Marvel stuff. When people talk about the "big two" in comics, it's actually Scholastic and Manga, not Marvel and DC. It's just no one really sits around on the internet arguing over what happens in the latest Dog Man book, just what goes on in superhero stuff. |
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BBally
Posts: 84 Location: UK |
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Except European comics are not "almost dead" and they count as Western comics and both that part of the world and Japan has ton of comics and manga/anime work that can be considered "woke". Like that one time when Luffy punched one of the Celestial Dragons for shooting one of the Straw Hats allies because he was a fishman, which was very on the nose regarding its bigotry and slavery themes. One of the bestselling titles in Japan recently is Moriarty the Patriot, a Sherlock Holmes prequel with Professor Moriarty as the main protagonist that tackles the corruption of Victoria era England's class system. 
The manga industry had featured topics that were considered "woke" since the 60s when Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy used the human-robot relations storylines to tackle topics like bigotry, in one storyline about robots leaving mans world for their utopia, this was openly compared to the immigration of Jews to what's now Israel. (Images below won't when I use [img]) https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ernumq1WMAIBfwo?format=jpg&name=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Era824bVEAEXITb?format=jpg&name=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Era824aVEAAhr4S?format=jpg&name=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Era824cVQAA8Kua?format=jpg&name=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ernumq1WMAIBfwo?format=jpg&name=large https://twitter.com/porntagonist/status/1150835214333014016 Superman Smashes The Klan was a top 10 bestseller in many stores. https://www.comixexperience.com/news/2021/1/1/comix-experience-best-sellers-2020 Basically, it's not the politics or topics like racism or whether something is "woke" that's the issue, it's the execution or the quality of writing that's the issue. Comics by Perch, a comic tuber uploaded video with a discussion the raise of manga and the decline in US comic within the Big Two that's, notice how he doesn't bring up the term "woke" when talking about it as he raises other issues American comics suffer from. And the guy worked in a comic store and has experience researching comic sales, so he knows more about this stuff than random outrage youtubers crying about how everything is woke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ-7DfpWG4g |
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BBally
Posts: 84 Location: UK |
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Some videos that discuss about the topic of "politics in Anime"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDQkf-0ke9o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tW0coTrOl94 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQFqQmnYHPI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMXN6B-tqZM Honestly, what's with this revisionist history within members of the Anime fandom who pretend that Manga and Anime never touched "politics" or themes like racism? |
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AmpersandsUnited
Posts: 633 |
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Anime and manga are far more complicated and nuanced that what you're trying to make them out to be. Two of the most vile, evil, and racist characters in One Piece are the fishmen Arlong and Hody Jones. Fishmen are not entirely innocent any more than pirates are not the 'good guys' nor are the marines the 'bad guys'. Sweeping generalized statements do not paint the whole picture. Most of the villains in the series are evil pirate with only a handful like the Strawhats who are genuinely good people. Just like because some Marines are corrupt doesn't mean they're all the bad guys. The Fleet Admirals might be enemies, but they're not bad guys just because they don't tolerate pirates who mostly kill and steal stuff. And I shouldn't have to go too in-depth with this, but Moriarty is not the 'hero' in Moriarty the Patriot. No more than Light Yagami was a hero in Death Note. You can make any series sound that way if you want. Redo of Healer is an openly queer series about a bisexual man who has the powers that the genre typically regulates to women, healing, and using it to dismantle the corrupt, facist oligarchy and freeing the oppressed races subjected to racism. These are all 100% accurate descriptors for the series, but people who actually watched Redo of Healer knows I'm painting it in certain light with those words. As always, people's issue isn't 'politics exist', just when they're hamfisted and awful. Most of the changes in American comics people dislike are done because they're company owned rather than writer owned, so we're unlikely to ever see scenarios that happen in manga. The chances of a new writer coming onto One Piece or Jujutsu Kaisen and killing off all the established main characters and replacing them with self-inserts is pretty much zero. |
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