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NEWS: Del Rey Interview on TCJ

Bookstores aren't ordering everything they can get their hands on, any more. There are levels to manga sales like in any other category, and it works in much the same fashion as other categories. There are the top-level bestsellers -- your Narutos, your Fruits Baskets, your Negimas -- that get all the attention and continue to demonstrate the health of the market. Then there's a body of midlist titles that do respectable business and make a majority of the sales, and a bottom level of titles that are selling 2000, 3000 copies; nothing to write home about.

It's possible to make mistakes in the manga market. ADV had an aggressive line of titles a couple of years back, but discovered that they'd overplayed their hand and cut back accordingly.

DEPPEY: I must admit to being utterly fascinated by Western comics publishers' inability to learn from the lessons offered by manga's current success, especially the way that manga sales have shattered beliefs that the U.S. Market has been cultivating over a decade, now -- "Girls don't read comics, there's something in how their brains are wired that just doesn't respond to the way comics work." I've actually heard people use that argument, believe it or not, and now it's impossible to pretend that this is the case. Why do you think Marvel and DC have been unable to attract the kinds of readers who've turned to manga?

MIDDAUGH: Well, the short answer is to quote back what you wrote in that essay ["She's Got Her Own Thing Now," TCJ #269]: They're asking how they can get manga readers to read Spider-Man, and that's the wrong question to be asking. What they should be asking is, "How can we tell stories that will resonate with ordinary people outside the confines of comics shops?"

Speaking for myself, the straw that broke the camel's back fell during this year's Emerald City Con in Seattle. I'd stepped out to smoke a cigarette and was watching the passersby. I noticed a family leaving the convention -- a Mom, a Dad, and a little girl no older than eight years of age. The girl was decked out in a beautiful, elaborate kimono and clearly distressed by what she'd just encountered. "But they didn't hardly have any manga at all!" she said as they walked away.

When I was done with my cigarette, I went back inside and relayed this story to an acquaintance prominent in the art-comics publishing scene. "I hate to say it, but good," was his reply. Indeed, I told the story several more times that day, to both indy-comics and superhero-comics professionals, and the reaction was more or less the same each time. A young reader disappointed by the selection offered to her? Good. The future of comics walks out the door, unable to find what she wants? Good. I left the convention early, lost in a foul mood. I swear: I love the comics art form with a passion, but my utter contempt for the American comics industry grows like a cancer with each passing day.

DEPPEY: Do you see any indication that Western comics publishers are learning from manga's success?

MIDDAUGH: Not really, no. If anything, they're getting worse. I tried to follow that recent miniseries that DC did, Infinite Crisis, and it was just impossible to read without having a Ph.D in superhero trivia, you know? I've been reading comics all my life, and I still couldn't make heads or tails of it. You've got Superman, Earth-II Superman, Earth-Prime Superboy, a Superboy clone, and all of these obscure references to past storylines piled on top of one another. Unless you're already deeply into that sort of thing, it just doesn't make any sense at all. You can't build a market that way. It's odd that these people keep hoping for a manga bust, when it's the American model that's more likely to come tumbling down.

DEPPEY: I don't know; I found the whole Tenjou Tenge fiasco to be woefully symptomatic of DC's general approach to comics. They just shoved it down readers' throats and ignored the reaction from fans, which is easy to do if you own the environment the way they do in comics shops, but far dicier when you're a minor player entering a new market.

MIDDAUGH: We found the Tenjou Tenge controversy to be very instructive: The readers want the original work, as the author intended it to be read. When we'd earlier found ourselves in a similar position with Negima, we listened to the fans, released the series with an older age-rating and shrink-wrap, and we've done just fine with them.

DEPPEY: Oh, I don't think the Direct Market's headed for any kind of dramatic crash; I think the decline of the current American model will likely take decades. There's no real entryway for new readers, but there's still a sizeable pool of die-hard fans willing to spend money, so in the short term, there's no real reason to affect any kind of real change to the way things are done. The problem is, the current Direct-Market client base averages between 25 and 35 years of age, which means that 10 years from now, it'll be between 35 and 45 years old. In 20 years, it'll be between 45 and 55 years old, and readers will drop off through sheer attrition along the way. It won't happen tomorrow -- hell, in the short term, there's even room for growth, as readers with more spending money than they had when they were teenagers buy up paperback collections of the comics they've got bagged and boarded, and companies pump up comic sales through miniseries, special-event comics and variant editions. But it can't last.

Is the essay "She's got her own thing now" available online?

Kudos to LydiaDianne for finding this article...I'm not a reader of tcj...why would I since I don't follow American comics, and their 'virtual storefront' of a webpage reminds me of the Direct Market shops...hiding the fact that they have plenty of manga-related stuff inside.

Actually, there's one thing I would like to have had asked -- will Del Rey branch out beyond their relationship with Kodansha?