Comment by hakfoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hakfoo | Hacker News Reader

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There's probably some value in the argument of "there are missing spots in the traditional American media marketplace, and right now they're being filled with imported products."

I never really got into American comics, but I have shelves full of manga/manhwa. There's probably things that can to be cherry-picked from it:

* Improved availability to consume the entire franchise. Even one of the worst of the worst, One Piece, is basically a single straight run of 101 (currently) books which are easily obtainable. If I wanted to read "all of Spider-Man", it's likely hundreds of volumes across dozens of sub-titles, some of which are essentally unobtainable except as expensive collectibles.

* Little to no "Cinematic Universe" stuff; this ties into the above concept; I don't need to follow twelve other series to know about the single story I've become invested in.

* The classic "Weekly Jump" style phone-book magazine format is almost a proto-subscription in terms of risk aversion and explorability. If you know you already like one or two products, you can safely buy the (impossibly cheap) book, which gives you chance to explore the other 18 titles in there.

* Some of the zanier premises that work out. One of my favourites was Eyeshield 21, a 37-volume story which effectively turned high school football into a shonen battle drama. Could that have flown even in the US?

It also helps that it is extremely rare to see a manga have a rotating creative team, so you get a much more consistent story and tone, the whole way through.

Having a creator come onto an American comic with a specific enthusiasm for one specific character, theme or trope, and have that dominate for years of that creators' tenure, is really annoying. Also, that creator needing to be aware of previous history (or choosing to ignore it entirely) means you're getting a mixed bag.

I lost interest in Western comics after DC rebooted their universe ("Which time?" you ask? New 52) and it became clear that unless your favourite character was marquee (Superman, Batman, etc), it was completely out of control what was going to change or be ignored about their history. I ended up thinking "if comics aren't going to respect me as a reader, why am I staying around?"

This, of course, got worse with the advent of the MCU and its imitators. Western comics are mostly just idea factories for films now; the "big name" creatives of the past are largely retired, or writing for TV/movies, and the people replacing them have nowhere near the vision (or freedom from Marvel or DC) to create compelling stories.

Manga is completely demolishing Western comics' sales at every turn, and Oda being able to craft twenty years of a narrative (while making me feel rewarded for investing) is an amazing feat.

> Western comics are mostly just idea factories for films now

I'm not denying this, but I find it a hypocritical view when you then compare it with mangas. 99% of manga is produced as an attempt to generate a franchise that will spawn anime series, anime movie(s), real-life movie(s), collectibles, and boatload of related merchandise. If US comics did the same, you'd be looking at 100x the audiovideo production they currently generate.

The view you expose is a typical Western position.

You make a good point. I guess it feels that the manga-to-anime pipeline feels more about straight adaptation, while the comic-to-MCU pipeline is much more about picking over a buffet of characters, beats, "things you know", etc to create "an MCU movie."

I find that this didn't exactly drive people backwards to appreciating or supporting the comics more.

I'm more of a manga reader than an anime watcher, and I can still find enjoyment in reading manga pre-adaptation and then choose not to watch the anime; I guess the same thing can be said about comics ("and then choosing to not watch the movie"), but it somehow feels more authentic, as if they can co-exist separately with the same amount of care from the rights holders?

Perhaps I'm confusing the feeling of authenticity with the idea of there just being so much history for something like Spider-Man, that you're going to have to condense or adapt or like, merge different things into one movie.

I don't know for sure; I still think that the work-for-hire nature of Marvel/DC really leads to a cynicism on my part. You've still got stuff coming out from Image and Dark Horse and the indies that you can "read comics for the comics", but something just feels off.

It's probably a bit of idealizing Japan for being Japan, but I never get the feeling of "if you don't watch the MCU, we don't care about you" like I do with Marvel Comics. If an MCU concept does well enough on film, they're going to backport it back into the comics regardless, so why should I invest in the comics when they're going to be manipulated by something I don't enjoy?

"I'm not denying this, but I find it a hypocritical view when you then compare it with mangas. 99% of manga is produced as an attempt to generate a franchise that will spawn anime series, anime movie(s), real-life movie(s), collectibles, and boatload of related merchandise."

The most popular western comics tend to be owned by a corporation like Disney that hires and fires artists in search of a bottom line. The comic will stay in production until it is no longer profitable.

The most popular manga seem to have some amount of ownership retained by the original author. The manga tend to come to an end when the author retires.

This doesn't mean manga artists are free of capitalistic concerns and western artists are all hacks (though emotionally I feel they kind of are...) but at least when it comes to the most popular books the two systems don't seem to operate that same way.

You're moving the goalposts.

There is not an argument of superiority - both systems are geared towards making money for corporations, they just go about it in slightly different ways. And there is no question that the Japanese thoroughly explored the merchandise and adaptation space much earlier (and with a more systemic approach) than US publishers; so to criticize the US industry for moving towards that same model, seems pointless.

(As for exploitation of workers, US artists and writers might be poor but are not known to kill themselves because they're overworked... They also tend to get more recognition: most popular mangas are produced by pools of artists in studios, often without their names actually attached to them (beyond the title-creator); whereas the story/pencils/inks tradition in US comics tends to surface contributors in most cases. In economic terms, both categories are typically screwed over by corporations anyway, just in different ways.)

I should probably clarify that I don't actually think of American comics as research and development for related media.

That said, in the Japanese system we can distinguish between author and publisher. In the American system the author (for purposes of copyright) is often the publisher.

Authors can have motivations other than making money (even if they want to make money). It's harder to impute such motivations on nonhuman entities like Warner Brothers or Disney.

So the idea that American comics are research and development for related merchandizing seems closer to the truth to me than it does for Japanese comics, either though I wouldn't really describe either product that way.

I don't think the sort of recognition letterers, colorists, or inkers get is worth a whole lot in economic terms under the American system, though I'd agree that manga studios should credit everyone who works on the book.

Yea this is the effect of keeping stories and characters way past a human being's shelf life and span of interest. Call it capitalism and milking money off established IP, I suppose.

A good amount of manga does seem to allow their characters and works to die off (with a few exceptions).

> Western comics are mostly just idea factories for films now

Personally I'm still finding interesting continuations in the recent evolution of the x-men mythos, where they have an actual nation now, all mutants included. DC comics seem to have come to a standstill with supermans/batmans in different favors and what-ifs.

I wonder if the big comics publishers have ever explored something like Jump. You have to fill a lot of pages with a lot of, honestly, garbage. Stuff that gets cancelled in 3 months. Shipping all over the place costing up the wazoo. And you probably can't get away with as much massive exploitation as in the Japanese industry.

There are of course a lot of short story magazines doing similar stuff, but given how labor intensive comics work is, the genre hyperfocus the major publishers suffer from, and the impracticality of the physical format for distribution in the US... maybe a digital thing could work somewhere.

Digital as a subscription service has most of the good things about the Jump-style concept.

* The pricing needs to be at a level where casual fans can say "I'm reading 2 or 3 things, and that's enough to justify the overall subscription."

* The audience gets a regular drip of new series launches, so there's low-risk discovery.

* A customer's tastes for individual series can change, and series can end, without having to change the overall product they're buying.

They can probably get better analytics than fan surveys with an online product too.

They absolutely need to present it as "the entire Marvel/DC/Top Cow/etc universe for $XX per month" though, to avoid silo-related frustration. Nobody wants to pay for a subscription to Batman and then hit a paywall that says "Batman went to the Utility Belt Accessories Trade Show in Metropolis, buy a Superman subscription to continue reading."

Manga sometimes has situations where a story moves from one serialization to another, but that's less necessary when you aren't dealing with physical publishing constraints.

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