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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotal, but my wife is obsessed with webtoons and eagerly awaits new updates to the (50? 100?) different stories she’s following. It’s similar to the way I consume podcasts. She especially likes romance webtoons.

Before finding webtoons she had no interest in graphic novels, comics, anime, etc. and still doesn’t. She just likes her webtoons.

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It's all about content and demographic targeting. Female targeted comics basically do not exist in the west. Shoujo manga is not popularized / suppressed by the western community. Webtoons have a lot of female creators early on represented that continuously pump out women targeted content. Women could easily be 80% of the core video game playing population if the correct content was made. It's an absolute joke that it's been more 10 years and we still haven't gotten a single twilight video game.

> Shoujo manga is not popularized / suppressed by the western community.

Really, do you have some numbers? Here in Germany, Shoujo/Shounen Ai are the most popular genres. I would imagine that those are pretty popular in France as well for example.

I do not have the numbers unfortunately, this is just my impression from being in New York. I know that some of my female friends feel forced to read stuff like One Piece (which is great) to fit in with the "community". I don't know how it is in Europe but I would suspect that it's still male dominated with shoujo/shounen ai being maybe 30% of sales if at that? I'm pretty sure here in the US it's like 15%.

Absolutely not. I unfortunately don't have sales numbers like it's the case in Japan but the Shoujo/Shounen Ai/Yaoi manga consistently rank very well. If you aren't into those, going to a bookstore is basically pointless since they occupy most of the shelf space. As an example, the top 20 Tokyopop manga in the month of March 2019 [1] had 8 Shoujo, 4 Shounen-Ai/Yaoi, 5 Other and 3 non-defined in it with one Yaoi manga selling the most. It wouldn't surprise me if the sales are actually around 65-70% of the total number, and that's with One Piece still being around.

[1] https://www.japaniac.de/tokyopops-meistverkaufte-manga-im-ma...

Here is also the top 15 of 2017 for KAZÉ (the covers say it all): https://www.anime2you.de/news/183746/die-top-15-meistverkauf...

Hmm I guess I'm wrong, or maybe Germany is just different. Do you know if that's reflected in the overall community including piracy? Do people in Germany not like Attack on Titan and One Piece?

How does your source compare with this: https://www.amazon.de/gp/bestsellers/books/698198

The list is about what I'd expect with mostly shounen near the top but there is decent yaoi representation. Not a single what I would consider normal shoujo though.

American: https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-Manga/zgbs/...

I would say this more about reflects my guess. 30% for the DE site and 15% for the American one.

Hm, it would be a hard guess but in my opinion, readers of Shounen likely read the manga online on some reader or website (at least comparatively more than Shoujo fans). As mentioned in the earlier post, One Piece is absolutely relevant, being the last one of the Big Three still ongoing. SnK is ok, as are other Shounen. Sword Art Online is weirdly popular, although it's hard to classify that as Shounen/Shoujo, it attracts a rather large female audience for some reason.

I wouldn't necessarily give an Amazon list too much weight. Bookstores here in Germany are everywhere and people like to buy there, especially because you can take a quick look into the manga you are buying. So the lists from publishers tend to be worth more. The good part about the Amazon bestseller list is that it includes Carlsen manga where I couldn't find any info from the publisher regarding sales.

Another publisher I couldn't find anything on is Egmont Manga. The list for spring 2019 says it all though: https://www.egmont-manga.de/fruehjahr-2019/

So no, 30% is definitely wrong.

Almost no one besides the publishers have numbers, but it is rare for more than 1 or 2 (probably sailor moon or fruits basket) shoujo books to be in the Amazon top 100 manga titles at a time. And that cool Josei title everyone is talking about was no where near that list.

When the Manga boom was at it's height in the US (like 2005 or so) IIRC the consumers of Manga were something like almost 60% women or girls, and I doubt it has changed drastically. And while I remember Peach Girl and Nana and Hana Yori Dango (and the aforementioned fruits basket!) being popular at the time, I don't think they were 60% of the sales. And Shoujo is less successful in the US today than 15 years ago.

(There are plenty of theories for why, elaborated elsewhere.)

Presumably, from the rest of your comment, the perspective of said Twilight game would be of the main female character? Don't remember her name, but most of her screen time is spent merely looking disinterested. Not sure how well that would translate to video game mechanics.

This made me remember how badly I wanted a reverse Zelda game though, where Link gets in trouble and you have to rescue him as Zelda :)

Have you seen this?

https://clockworkzelda.tumblr.com/

No, but that's very cool! Thanks for linking it to me, sorta :)

I was excited and was seeking out the original poster to see if they were after some programming skills, but it doesn't seem like the project went past the concept art phase. Shame, I would have loved to work on it.

I think you’re wrong on both counts. I know plenty of female targeted comics in Belgium and France.

And half of gamers are women. Women just like to play different games than men. Casual games that are dismissed as ‘real games’ by many. But even before smartphones casual games were a billion dollar industry.

There’s a study [1] that spells out which game genres are dominated by women. They surveyed 270,000 gamers about their favorite game titles. According to this study, women make up about 70% of match 3 and family/farm simulation games’ audiences. About half of casual puzzle and atmospheric exploration games are played by women, too. The gender ratio plummets when we get to first-person shooters, tactical shooters and racing games. At the bottom of the chart, a mere 2% of sports game-players are women

[1] https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre...

You cannot compare the female targeted comics to something like marvel superheroes. I'd be shocked if it has even 1% of the popularity of male comics.

And of course I'm talking about games that cost 50+ million dollars to develop. I find your comment about different games to smack a bit segregationist. The female market dominate many hardcore games including the most popular game of 2016/2017 Arena of Valor: https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2018/01/02/57... You'll also notice a marked rise in gamers who play more recent games like Overwatch and Fortnite because they pander to men just a little less. Anyway I'm talking about core games and if you target correctly there should be as many girls playing those as in mobile games too.

>It's all about content and demographic targeting. Female targeted comics basically do not exist in the west. Shoujo manga is not popularized / suppressed by the western community. Webtoons have a lot of female creators early on represented that continuously pump out women targeted content. Women could easily be 80% of the core video game playing population if the correct content was made. It's an absolute joke that it's been more 10 years and we still haven't gotten a single twilight video game.

Man, that's a pretty big reach to go from shoujo manga is unpopular to "the west is suppressing women's media". While growing in popularity for some time, I believe that manga in the US was and still remains a niche market that remains associated (to a greater extent than comics) with low social status groups.

I will say that the American comic scene is pretty inbred though. Yes, there are indie comics, but in the US, the vast majority of comic sales are from two companies marketing their shared universes and associated characters [1]. In comparison, manga tends to have each author put out >=1 distinct series, typically with their own separate worlds. I believe the same applies to the french/belgian comic scene as well.

[1] https://www.comichron.com/monthlycomicssales/2018.html

If I may ask, where does she consume them?

I wouldn't know specifically about OP but probably one of these: https://www.webtoons.com/en/ https://www.lezhin.com/en

Line Webtoon [0] has a ton that I enjoy reading. It does just about everything perfectly that I have wanted over 20+ years of reading web comics.

I enjoy reading a lot of web comics (Girl Genius, Gunnerkrigg Court, PA, etc), but have _always_ wanted an RSS feed or similar that would make it trivial to read / continue-reading a comic that doesn't update every day. (I very nearly wrote a scraper to scrape some when getting to their archives proved hard, but decided not to.)

The webtoon app remembers which ones you read, which episode you are on, and _where in the episode_ you are. The only down side is that reading progress seems to be saved on the device, so reading on a web browser vs reading on a mobile device. The mobile app will ping me whenever one of the comics I follow has an update. (I dislike that it pings me for random "you might like this comic ..." notifications, but it's I think the only thing I dislike.)

If you like Romance, I recommend "Siren's Lament". If you like post-apocalyptic/horror, HIVE is well done (though I stopped reading it, it was what got me hooked on the platform).

I still periodically open a half dozen browser tabs to check up on the web-only comics I enjoy, but finding/consuming more than a few is a pain in the neck, and I frankly would read them 100% on Webtoons if they were published there.

0: https://www.webtoons.com/en/

That's a good point though. Webtoons have the app, english-speaking manga communities have gathered around scanlation hub-sites like the now defunct batoto and their like. However, webcomics are in general stuck on late 2000s individual webpages with a small roll of "friends of the creator" links.

> I enjoy reading a lot of web comics (Girl Genius, Gunnerkrigg Court, PA, etc), but have _always_ wanted an RSS feed or similar that would make it trivial to read / continue-reading a comic that doesn't update every day.

I don't know what PA is, but Girl Genius and Gunnerkrigg Court have RSS feeds that tell you when a new page is available. Of the webcomics I read, only a very small minority doesn't support RSS, although that might be selection bias on my part. Most seem to be using some kind of WordPress plugin specialized for comic websites, which provides RSS support out of the box.

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