These days, it’s taken for granted that the comics industry has become a media juggernaut in the western world-as evidenced by the myriad movies based on comic-book heroes that have been released over the past decade and by the exceptional profitability of Marvel’s cinematic universe. It’s estimated that the American comics industry earned $1.28 billion in the North American market alone in 2020. However, it turns out that Japan’s manga industry is vastly more profitable: Japanese manga creators and publishers raked in $5.6 billion that same year in their home country alone.
Koyoharu Gotouge’s Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba (serialised from 2016 to 2020) is an example of manga’s runaway success. Sales of this series-a dark fantasy historical adventure about a young man named Tanjiro Kamado and his cursed sister living in Taisho-era Japan during the early twentieth century-have surpassed expectations on both sides of the Pacific. While it’s unlikely that, as some have claimed, this work alone outsold the entire worldwide comics industry in a single year, its international success cannot be ignored. And anime too has seen record popularity and growth globally.
This success has caught the attention of creators and producers of comics, especially in the United States. The veteran comics writer Chuck Dixon, who did prolific work on Batman in the 1990s, has not only praised manga publicly for its “dedication, passion and craft” but has criticized the recent work of some of his fellow American comics producers, particularly Marvel and DC. He and others have characterized the current mainstream comics landscape as lacking variety or as over-politicized and didactic. Long-simmering disagreements on this issue among American comics creators and producers have recently bubbled to the surface-which can only play to the advantage of manga and anime creators.
Back in the 1980s, many in the west worried that Japan might come to dominate the world economically. These days, many westerners have the same worry in response to China’s economic rise. But now, western worries about Japanese dominance are back in the spotlight, at least in the pop culture world, because of how decisively manga is outperforming its American competition. Why is this happening, and what might creators in the western world learn from this development that might enable them to garner similar success?
Some of the responses to the situation have been counterproductive. Prominent figures like Power Girl co-creator Gerry Conway tried to have mangaka taken to task for their supposedly rampant sexism and misogyny. (Even if one ignores the myriad successes of female Japanese creators, such attacks are little better than the name-calling of yesteryear, along the lines of dirty little Japs or yellow perils.) Other comics creators merely seem keen on doubling down on politics. Maybe most of them are doing this only to keep themselves afloat financially, or to placate activists and avoid the risk of culture war backlash against them. But it’s unclear how long current trends can be sustained. While the industry proved resilient enough in 2020, who’s to say that luck will hold? Changing course isn’t impossible, however. For example, Dixon has suggested that American comics producers could avert disaster by taking cues from their competitors, rather than antagonising them-and antagonizing their own audiences. One model they could look to is that of France, whose art has historically had a major influence on Japanese culture. Even though the French had their own version of the Comics Code Authority in the ’90s, French creators and fans came to embrace manga in the same way that they had embraced the Japonisme of yesteryear-so much so that the French manga market not only overtook the Franco-Belgian bande dessinée market in sales, but also transformed the local comics scene, giving rise to manga-inspired forms like manfra and syncretic nouvelle manga.
The US is no stranger to this approach: consider the emergence of works featuring “Anime-esque art.” And Marvel has invited mangaka to make series based on their intellectual property, with surprising success. Yet this approach doesn’t involve just echoing or mimicking those properties’ aesthetics. It extends to creating consistent, engrossing stories, with interesting characters who can speak for themselves. The ability to do this is not somehow culturally exclusive to the Japanese: as shown by risk-taking endeavours like DC’s Doomsday Clock (running from 2017 to 2019), Americans are just as capable as any other people of creating works that reflect universality.
