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PR: Square Enix Manga & Books Team Up With Penguin Random House on Comic Partner Initiative To E

They would have to draw in an almost completely different group of customers. That is there is not a lot of people who buy both American comics and manga. In shops where they get a lot of foot traffic, that is in the surviving malls or right outside a college campus it is worth trying to carry both. Keep in mind that they are in competition with the remaining bookstores for manga sales. If a local comic shop wants to add a new line of merchandise, something related to the comics they already sell is better.

Comparing sales of manga volumes to sales of American comics in trade paperback form is a bit comparing apples to oranges. The bulk of American comic sales is still in the form of monthly comic books. A lot of people do not see a need for the collected volumes since they already have the content in "floppy" format. Manga hasn't been offered in comic book format since the early 2000s. (the last to be offered in comic book format was Dark Horse's "Blade of the Immortal" in 2007)

Square Enix has been distributed by Penguin Random House for some time now (along with Seven Seas and Marvel) This is likely due to the death spiral of Diamond Comic Distributors.

“While we're seeing significant market growth for manga among western audiences, our retailers have expressed challenges with overwhelming options and knowledge gaps,” said Morgan Perry, Marketing Manager, Square Enix Manga & Books. “With the Comic Partner initiative, our aim is to make it easier for our comic shop partners to unlock the potential of manga sales by curating great content for them, providing marketing support and educating sales associates about this art form – after all, manga are comics.”

you live in shopping distance to one of the largest cities in the country. Lots of people means more customers and more cash flow. These shops can afford to experiment with manga. Those that get a lot of foot traffic past their doors can probably pull in manga customers to buy the stuff. Comic shops operating outside of major cities don't often have that advantage..

Manga sales are supporting manga in America. They are not doing anything to support American comics. Actually there are two separate comic industries. American comics and manga have different publishers mostly.

Trust me, local comic shop owners are well aware of manga sales. They would love to get a part of that pie, but as Square Enix noted there are a lot of barriers. Display space, money to buy stock, knowledge to know what the hell to buy and the process of attracting a whole new set of customers to name the obvious ones. Oh, and for American comics, shops have mostly only other comic shops to compete with, for manga they have the surviving book stores and online retailers as competition.

I'm sorry, but Washington DC and Montgomery Maryland are every bit a major metropolitan area. For that matter so is the entire East Coast corridor from Boston through Washington. To see what I'm talking about you would have to get far enough west into the hinterlands that it is not practical to shop in DC.

Back to the beginning of this discussion, your question was why Square Enix had to reach out to comic shops since in your experience all comic shops carried manga. I've been trying to explain that all local comic shops are not the same and there are many reasons why one would not carry any manga or if they did would only have a few flagship titles from Viz and Yen press.

And I don't know why that area being a major metropolitan area have to do with local comic book stores.

mdo7 wrote:

Quote:

And I don't know why that area being a major metropolitan area have to do with local comic book stores.

Large city=high population density=lots more customers=large store with with more money.

Adding manga to an existing store is a large investment. The shop has to buy its stock (unlike book stores comic shops cannot return unsold volumes for credit). It has to devote considerable display space to show the manga. And it has to entice an entirely new set of customers to shop there. A large shop has the margin for error to make such an investment, a small shop, not so much.

Long run, the comic shop as a thing is unlikely to survive. That you got right. Their customers are getting old. I wont say that no younger people are buying American comics but they are rare and are not enough to sustain the shops. When I started to buy manga in 1997 there were six comic shops in the valley here. Of those, one is left, the shop I patronize. A seventh has come and gone and the eighth opened a couple of years ago. My shop was the most conservative about buying stock and doesn't carry manga. Back in the nineties when I asked about manga the owner said "I can't sell it, but here is the catalog you can special order any thing you want." I've been doing that for 25 years plus.

Back in the late 1990s manga in comic book form had been selling for a bit over a decade. Trade paperback collections of the floppies was not a given. As I went around to multiple shops in several states it was obvious that most of the shops had tried manga, it didn't cost them much and could be displayed right beside the normal comics. However it wasn't selling well. Viz issued Mai the Psychic Girl in 1987 and 1988. I think it was one of their first two series. I was able to pick up a complete run of 27 issues from one shop's back issue bin. When I bought those comics they had been sitting unsold for over 10 years. Two of the local shops also carried a stock of anime on VHS tapes. Those were not selling either.

In the early 2000s two things happened. Manga moved to graphic novel format only. This tripled the cost of stocking individual items. The other was that book stores started carrying manga, big time. The manga customers for comic shop mostly disappeared. The young people buying manga didn't have to go to those intimidating comic shops anymore. They could buy it in the malls where they were already shopping.

Yes, a forward thinking comic shop should consider devoting a lot of space to manga. But you know, brick and mortar stores of all kind are doing poorly. Most of the book stores have gone away but the survivors are still carrying a lot of manga. Shops also have to compete with online sales. Long term it probably wouldn't help. It will still be a dying industry.

Just for the record, I was not a 90's kid. I was a 1950's kid. I was born in 1945. I was in my early 50s when I got into manga. I've never lived in a major metropolitan area.