USA Today reports that, while manga continues to tighten its grip on North America, in Japan the hold is loosening, with sales falling 4 percent last year to $4.1 billion.
That figure may seem staggering and impressive when compared to the estimated $330 million graphic novel market in the United States and Canada — $170 million to $200 million of which is chalked up to manga — but that decrease marks the fifth straight year sales have dropped in Japan.
What’s more, sales of manga magazines, which serialize most stories before they’re collected in tankobon (”stand-alone book”) form, have dropped from a peak of 1.34 billion copies in 1995 to 745 million last year. USA Today notes that 1995 was the year that weekly Shonen Jump stopped carrying Akira Toriyama’s insanely popular Dragon Ball.
Theories about the decline are interesting, particularly in light of the recent round of blogosphere discussion about the health of the U.S. comics industry (or is it just the direct market?), and a perceived approach of “superhero exhaustion.”
The article points to: the readership’s obsession with cell phones, video games and the Internet; an overall decrease in reading; boredom with plots and characters, combined with “a shortage of good artists”; and a plummeting birth rate.
Yeah, that third potential factor — boredom with plots and characters — is what brought me back to the blogosphere conversation.
More on this later, I think.
October 19th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
Sweet, One Piece is on taht Jump cover!
Yes, so I’ve heard that even some of the top selling manga over there are getting stale and repitive like Naruto and Bleach, and there’s very few golden pieces left like the aforementioned One Piece. Hmm, I guess that’s what happens in a business where teh majority of its comics are drawn AND written by one person instead of having skilled people specialize in one or the department. Very few people are talented enough to pull such a task off and I suspect that’s why characters and stories are getting boring or drawing quality isn’t top notch.
October 20th, 2007 at 8:58 pm
In the long-term, can this really come as a surprise? I mean, that’s what popular things do - eventually, they become unpopular.
Besides, given the degree to which the American comic book market has begun banking more and more on manga, it was almost like Murphy’s Law waiting to happen - as soon as manga gains mainstream acceptance, that’s when the bottom falls out of the market. See also: American comics in the early ’90s.
October 20th, 2007 at 9:26 pm
I guess all comics markets, whether Japanese or American, inevitably continue on through a boom and bust cycle due to the shifting reactions and views of art and writing. It all just depends on whether the market decides to continue to gain the boom after crawling out of the bust that decides their survival. And if manga really is becoming popular over here the genre as a whole shouldn’t worry about itself.