There’s a brief-but-interesting Q&A at Playthings with Liza Coppola, Viz Media‘s senior vice president of marketing, in which she talks about promoting popular manga like Fullmetal Alchemist, Death Note, Naruto and Rurouni Kenshin. That’s pretty standard territory, of course, for the person in charge of marketing.
But Coppola’s first response, to a question about what fuels the popularity of those titles, made me reconsider something about American superhero comics:
I believe [these] properties are very popular due to [their] rich storylines. They are stories that have rich, complex main characters that all have a vision—whether it’s becoming the ultimate ninja, discovering the master alchemy formula or being suddenly given the power of life and death. They’re ordinary characters that have some form of a “gift” that they’ve discovered within themselves and they must learn to live with all the complexities that come with that talent or power.
I think those aspects are every kid’s aspirational dreams—to wake up and suddenly become something you weren’t before, but your essence remains the same. You are still the same nervous, geeky kid but now you have discovered a hidden talent. With manga, the storylines are deeper and more involved. Characters have motives that are slowly revealed as the story progresses and they have secondary characters that are just as rich and fleshed out as the main characters.”
It’s not the “rich, complex characters” part; while that’s often cited as one of the reasons for manga’s popularity, particularly among young readers, it’s ambiguous. Are the Elric brothers in Fullmetal Alchemist any richer or more complex than, say, the orphans in Runaways? I enjoy both series, for different reasons, but I can’t objectively say whether one character is richer or more complex than the other. After a point, those words hold about as much meaning and worth as “cool” or “edgy.”
No, what made me pause is the part after that, in which Coppola says those characters “all have a vision — whether it’s becoming the ultimate ninja, discovering the master alchemy formula or being suddenly given the power of life and death.”
And they do. All of those protagonists want something, something tangible. But I’m having trouble thinking of main characters from superhero comics whose motivation is equally concrete.
Spider-Man, Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, the X-Men — they’re all after a vague concept: justice (or, in the X-Men’s case, maybe acceptance through justice). Their goals, while lofty and altruistic, are unattainable, which makes them difficult to relate to. It’s sort of like the beauty-pageant contestant who wishes for world peace.
But the characters in Naruto and Fullmetal Alchemist and Death Note want something more selfish, more personal (and, at least within their fictional universes, more readily attainable). And we can identify with that selfishness: We all want to be the fastest swimmer on the team. We all want to meet the sales quota so we’ll earn that bonus. We all want to help our parents so we’ll earn their praise. We all … want – and not necessarily for everybody else.
Maybe this is something everyone but me realized long ago; I can be slow on the uptake. But I can’t immediately think of a superhero who has that personal (selfish?) vision.
June 28th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
This is a very interesting topic, actually. Now that you mention it, the majority of characters who actually have some tangible goal or vision in superhero books tend to be the villians (world domination, constructing the ultimate mind control machine/weather machine/death ray/love slave, defeat that fool Richards, etc.). Meanwhile, the heroes are more like police officers, fighting to ‘do good’ and keep the peace, i.e. maintain the status quo. Is this a matter of cultural or generational values (even in Death Note, the ‘hero’ is percieved by the police as being a villian and, in the Marvel or DC universe, he certainly would be considered one as well), or is it a simple difference in what makes for a good serial adventure/story?
June 28th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
Spider-Man…[is] after a vague concept: justice.
No. Spider-Man is after a solid concept: self-respect.
Peter Parker, ultimately, wants to be able to face himself in the mirror. He strives for a “normal” life, but is aware that such things may not be possible given his myriad commitments, and so settles for a more achievable goal.
Is that selfish? I dunno.
//\Oo/\\
June 28th, 2006 at 12:53 pm
I’m not convinced that the abstract nature of the goals of the X-Men or Superman makes them harder to relate to. If that were so, then I don’t think we’d be able to relate to fictional characters like Tarzan or Sherlock Holmes. Neither of them have real, hard, concrete goals in the same way that the manga characters have, but they have still managed to endure.
I think the difference isn’t cultural, either, since there are plenty of counter-examples of Western fiction that feature characters with concrete goals (Parsifal, Frodo, and Conan) and Japanese fiction with characters that don’t (Lone Wolf and Cub). I’m not sure you can say which approach is more prevalent once you step outside genre/medium boundaries and start talking about fiction as a whole.
Those kinds of goals present an obvious problem for serial fiction, though, because they delineate a clear endpoint. That, in turn, makes any individual story either a step towards or away from that endpoint; the former brings you one step closer to the most dreaded two words in serial fiction as practiced by superheroes (“The End”), while the latter just frustrates your audience if you do it often enough.
I’m no manga expert, but my impression is that the “endless serial” as practiced by American superhero comics is not as prevalent in manga. Is this true, or am I just exposing my complete ignorance of manga for all to see?
June 28th, 2006 at 12:58 pm
“No. Spider-Man is after a solid concept: self-respect.”
I was thinking more about Spider-Man, too, but along different lines than you: His motivation, at least initially, was alleviation of guilt over the death of his Uncle Ben. Four decades later — or 10 years Marvel-time — I don’t know if that’s still his goal.
I’m not sure that I buy “self-respect,” though. There are countless ways to gain self-respect that don’t involve dressing up in tights and fighting bad guys.
June 28th, 2006 at 1:04 pm
The difference ia that various manga heroes want different things, and approach their goals from unique angles. From an outsider’s perspective, how is it possible to make such distinctions between superheroes? They all blur together.
June 28th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
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Not nearly as common, I’d say. Even series written in a fairly ‘endless’ style tend to run relatively short lengths of time — there are very few manga series which have been running since the 70s (and not all of those are serial), compared to a fair number of superhero comics.
You could define the goal of Lone Wolf and Cub as “To get revenge on the Yagyu. To get the money for this through practicing the trade of assassin, yet retaining rigorous honour,” and a fair chunk of the series is directly about the revenge.
June 28th, 2006 at 1:38 pm
Sorry, the above was to Edward Liu. So much for my quoting skills.
June 28th, 2006 at 1:43 pm
I’m not so sure there is a difference between what Superman ‘wants’ and what Spider-man wants, for example. While Parker learns that great power is a tremendous burden, he still ends up slugging it out with criminals to uphold his sense of moral duty – same as Supes, Batman, etc. Even an anitheor like the Punisher with a clear ‘mission’ is ultimately on a never-ending quest.
Still in contrast, like Edward said, there is a fair share of that in manga too – exactly what is the goal of the cast of Cromartie High, for example?
I think the real question is, does the lack of a clear cut goal or end result hurt or help audiences relate to american comics characters? After all, using serial TV as example, the fact that the cast of Law and Order keep doing the same shtick day in and day out hasn’t hurt. It’s like comfort food. But is there room to grow an audience beyond the people who find the same old/same old worth revisiting?
June 28th, 2006 at 3:19 pm
“But I can’t immediately think of a superhero who has that personal (selfish?) vision.”
So, is Booster Gold the superhero that will lead comics into manga-like popularity?
Batman wants no-one to go through what he has.
Superman doesn’t want this world to end like Krypton did.
Captain America doesn’t want to see another World War.
Superheroes are probably more idealistic than manga characters but there is desire there. But the desires in manga appear (from what little I’ve read) to be more concrete and specific where, ultimately, the desires in superhero books are idealistic and probably unattainable.
June 28th, 2006 at 3:37 pm
I think that’s true to an extent. Not to keep bringing up Death Note, but the main character does have an altruistic goal – rid the world of criminals. I think that ‘unattainable’ quality is really a sticking point here.
For each Superhero story, there is, usually, a short-term goal – stop badguy/save day/rescue girl. Same with many manga – look at Pokeman, to put it simply – there’s the over-reaching goal (become the Pokemon Master, and each episode invovles a challenge or battle that stands in the way of achieving that. Over all, however, there isn’t that over-reaching goal in most superhero books.
I like what Dirk brought up though – that while there are common themes in alot of manga, there are different genres and focal points for those themes. Be it teen romance, sci-fi space opera or supernatural guardian, the one thing they seem to have in common is the promise of some end-point, of success or failure for the characters.
Thinking about it, The Watchmen may be one of the few works of Superhero fiction that qualifies in this regard – maybe.
June 28th, 2006 at 3:39 pm
I meant PokeMON, not PokeMAN. Sheesh.
June 28th, 2006 at 7:09 pm
I’d say that the X-Men’s delimma, and the different approaches to solve it (replacing humans or living alongside them) is pretty tangible and something to which teenagers relate. Then again, I’ve always had the impression that most X-Men fans came onboard for the ninja and soap opera stuff. Or maybe that was the initial attraction, and the resonance of the outsiders-looking-for-acceptance theme is what hooked them. That might explain why so many people are annoyed with the post-Claremont (and maybe late Claremeont, for that matter) direction of the title, when the soap opera aspects took the front seat. Maybe this also explains why Grant Morrison’s run (which emphasized the problem of human-mutant relations) was well-received by a lot of readers. I’ve never been a big fan, and only read the series irregularly, so I might be wrong about this.
Honestly, the quest themes in the manga cited aren’t all that different from disposable kids’ shows from my childhood (escape from a bizarre planet/dimension/etc. being a popular quest). The fundamental difference being the manga series eventually reach a conclusion, while Dungeons and Dragons presumably never would have.
July 3rd, 2006 at 12:57 am
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