[Resource of the Day] – A Look Inside American Manga!

As I’ve written my business plan for Army Ant Publishing, I’ve done extensive research on the world of publishing. Here is an article I found useful:

The Comics Journal interviews Dallas Middaugh by Dirk Deppey via The Comics Journal.

I’d just like to go on record saying that I love The Comics Journal, because it’s one of the only comic book media sources that isn’t run by people obsessed with capes and tights. These guys really go beyond the norm and interview some cool people. They also ask really well-informed, intelligent questions. For example:

DIRK DEPPEY: I want to start out with some general questions about manga in the United States over the last five years or so. You come from the relatively unique perspective of having watched it unfold in a professional capacity, first at Viz and then later at Del Rey, so let me ask you: When the migration to bookstores began in earnest, was there any sense that the manga boom was growing along predictable lines, or did it all come as a complete surprise to you?

DALLAS MIDDAUGH: I have to give credit to Tokyopop on this; they were the ones who really blazed the trail that the rest of us followed. They set the standards and the price point that the other companies would eventually follow. At Viz, we were learning as we went. You have to understand, Viz had been selling manga in pamphlet form to the Direct Market since the early 1990s, and all their experience was in servicing that market. It wasn’t until PokÃ©mon and Sailor Moon became a phenomenon in bookstores that it really occurred to anyone that a market for manga might exist there.

DEPPEY: Now, many so-called “independent” publishers, which is to say virtually every publisher who wasn’t Marvel or DC, have long had difficulties in getting market penetration in the Direct Market; the standard wisdom is that 50 percent of comics shops stock almost nothing but the Big Two, another 20 percent carry a smattering of other genre titles, and maybe 30 percent have anything close to a wide variety of material. Most indy publishers never seem to reach past that last 30 percent of retailers. Was Viz ever able to buck that trend?

MIDDAUGH: Not really, no. The comics shops never warmed to manga, so far as I can tell.

DEPPEY: After leaving Viz, what led you to believe that you’d be able to compete with them and Tokyopop through a new line of manga at Random House? Granted, Random House had just signed a co-publishing deal with the Japanese publisher Kodansha…

MIDDAUGH: Well, understand that while Tokyopop and Viz are the two largest manga publishers in the market today, Random House is the largest book publisher in the country. They have a distribution network, a sales force and an infrastructure capable of getting to markets that other publishers would have a hard time reaching. The deal with Kodansha certainly helped, but given the astonishing growth of manga over the first couple of years, it was only natural that one of the major American book publishers was going to make a move to enter the market. The Kodansha deal simply gave Random House an extra nudge in that direction.

What Random House’s deal with Kodansha really did was give us the opportunity to choose from a solid list of available titles, and start out with a small stable of books that we knew would do fairly well: Negima, Tsubasa, xxxHOLiC and Gundam Seed. Those titles went on to sell in good quantities, and bookstores responded appropriately, so even though we were beginning with just a fraction of the output that Tokyopop and Viz were offering, we entered the market with an immediate clout that might not have been available otherwise.

And that’s just a small piece of this interview, which is very in-depth and informative. I loved this, too:

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?”

Look, I think superheroes are a perfectly valid genre for comics, but the fact remains that only so many people are going to be interested in reading about them. I mean, let’s take a story about someone finding a magic ring. In manga, the story would focus about how the ring changed that person’s relationships, how it affected his life, and how his everyday circumstances would be different — and there would be adventures, too, but that wouldn’t necessarily be the primary focus of the story. These are things that resonate with boys and girls alike. If it were a Marvel or DC comic, the person would find the ring, make a costume and go out to fight supervillains, and that would be the main focus of the story. An exclusive diet of that isn’t enough to build an audience for your books.

Naruto is a story about ninjas and fighting, sure, and boys like that, but it’s also about the relationships between the characters — who likes who, whether or not they’re cooperating with one another, that sort of thing — so there’s enough personal interaction to attract girls to the story, too. And Naruto isn’t the only kind of story you’ll find in the manga shelves; there’s lots of different kinds of stories, and what you see coming out of American comics can’t match that.

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.

Wow. If you’re thinking about getting into manga publishing, read this piece. It’s worth the time investment!

Writing Scraps

by Sean J. Jordan