American Manga

It seems that DC comics is the only anglophile comic publisher that gets what it means to try to bridge the gap between Japanese Manga and American Comics, and they're only starting to take advantage.

It's been a noticeable trend at the chain bookstores that the smaller, less-expensive manga trades published by Tokyo-Pop and the like have been taking over the shelf space that used to be reserved for the traditional comic book sized trade-paperbacks of anglophile comics. The Manga has even been making gains on the shelf-space at stores like Books-A-Million. The big two comic publishers in the states [DC and Marvel] seem to have ceded the bookstore market just as they ceded the newsstand market.

When a big selling book for Marvel or DC can expect to go as high as say 200,000 copies in a month, but a Manga anthology sold on newsstands like Shonen Jump can sell 2 million copies a month, something is wrong.

I'm not going into the causes and cures right now, but I am heartened to see that DC has at least made an attempt to produce a product that can move into the Manga market. All of the companies attempts up till this point [including Marvel's smaller edition's of X-Men trades] have had the problem that they are not formatted the same as the traditional Manga trade. Marvel and DC and the other American companies simply shrink their existing trades to a close approximation of the Manga dimensions. They forget that part of the appeal of the Manga is the rather fat little book that you get for your 8.95 [most of the time around 250 pages to the 120 or so that the American versions go].



What I saw was a manga sized edition of Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest. Not only was it manga sized, it was formatted in the same black and white style on the same style paper and with the same dimensions [it even goes 224 pages like a manga book].







I don't think that this means that DC has changed it's entire marketing strategy, but it seems like they may be trying something different. This book, coupled with Jill Thompson's Death: At Death's Door, a manga sized and style telling of part of Neil Gaiman's Sandman book from his sister Death's point of view, are definitely a good sign. Now if they just keep this up and don't decide to get all pussified like Marvel is getting.