Article 10: Exile On Mainstream

Has manga taken over from superheroes as the comics mainstream, or is it just another niche? Paul O'Brien looks at the facts and figures, and explores just what we really mean by 'mainstream'.
26 September 2005

Manga, they say, is the new mainstream. I disagree. Not with the word 'mainstream', but with the word 'the'. It's a new mainstream. An additional one.

The very concept of 'mainstream' is slippery, of course, because it's relative. The ends of the spectrum are pretty clear - FRIENDS and such like at one end, experimental mime troupes from Mali at the other - but a massive gulf exists in between. Drawing dividing lines is difficult if not impossible. On one perfectly arguable view, for example, there are no mainstream comics at all in America, with the possible exception of stuff like DILBERT, because the entire medium is simply too marginal.

Obviously, that hard line definition isn't desperately useful to us, but at least it gives us some idea of what we're looking for. If the word 'mainstream' means anything in the context of comics, it denotes those comics that come closest to reaching that sort of mass awareness - the ones at the mainstream end of the spectrum. Broadly speaking, you're looking for a combination of a large audience together with awareness beyond that audience.

Back in the dark, dark days before the manga boom, some indie purists used to argue that indie comics were actually more mainstream than superhero comics, because superheroes with a marginal genre, while indie books did drama, and comedy, and horror, and so forth, all of which were far more mainstream.

It's a cute argument, but entirely wrong. The argument goes awry by trying to ignore the medium altogether and simply judging the claim to the mainstream solely by reference to genre. A story that might be thoroughly mainstream if told as a novel or a TV show is immediately banished to the cultural wasteland when told as a comic. That's just the way it is.

Even if you take the view that these comics would have mass appeal, if only the audience knew about them, that still doesn't make them mainstream in any meaningful sense. It just means they have breakthrough potential and might be mainstream at some indeterminate point in the future, which isn't the same thing at all.

No, before manga, the superheroes were the mainstream of comics by any sensible definition. They sold more copies to more people, and had a much larger presence in the public consciousness.

So where does manga come into things? One of the interesting things about manga is that it isn't an outgrowth of the existing comics market. Despite the migration of a relatively small number of early-adopters with an interest in the medium of comics, who wanted to explore this new material simply because it was comics, for the most part manga has succeeded by constructing a new audience of its own. This shouldn't really surprise anyone, since the superhero audience is comprised of superhero fans and there's no real reason to expect that they're suddenly going to start buying anything with pictures in it.

Instead, while the direct market continues to plough its own furrow, the manga publishers have constructed a new manga marketplace in the bookstores, selling very different comics to a very different audience. It seems to be tacitly accepted in some circles that this audience automatically qualifies as more mainstream than the direct market one.

To be fair, this isn't an entirely illegitimate assumption, for reasons I'll come back to. But let's keep some perspective. The Book Standard Bestseller Awards make interesting reading in this regard. Basically, they doled out awards to the best selling books in various genres, as judged by Nielsen BookScan figures from 31 July 2004 to 1 August 2005. Of course, it's dangerous to generalise too much from the bestsellers, which by definition are not representative. You really want to look at the run-of-the-mill sellers. But at least it gives us some indication of the upper range of comics sales in bookstores, and how that compares with other genres.

In fact, the best selling graphic novel during that period turns out to be neither superhero nor manga, but rather IN THE SHADOW OF NO TOWERS by Art Spiegelman, with sales of 49,000. The best selling manga book was HACK/LEGEND OF THE TWILIGHT, VOL 3, with 45,000. The best-selling superhero book was HUSH, with 20,000, but that doesn't tell us a great deal, since we all know the audience was much bigger when you factor in the direct market readership. Besides, we have plenty of information about the direct market sales of more representative comics without needing to get worked up about HUSH.

You can probably tell where I'm heading with this, but I'll make the obvious point anyway. The top selling manga book is selling in numbers comparable to a middling direct market book. Presumably the run-of-the-mill manga title isn't doing quite so well. So, looking purely in terms of the sales on individual books, there doesn't seem to be a huge gap between the size of the manga audience in the bookstore and the superhero audience in the direct market. And, one might reasonably ask, what makes 45,000 manga readers more 'mainstream' than 45,000 superhero readers?

Well... several things, to be fair. For one thing, the comparison is dodgy because you'd also need to know the number of books being published in each marketplace. For example, if there are twice as many manga books as superhero books, then even if each individual book sells the same number of copies, there will be more manga sales in total. On top of that, you might have the same guy buying six superhero comics, compared with six different people each buying one manga, in which case the manga audience would be much broader.

For another, the superhero audience is very insular and confined to the direct market, which is largely composed of specialist stores targeting a very specific demographic. Bookstores are certainly a more mainstream retail outlet than direct market comics stores, and the manga audience is probably drawn from a much broader base. So 45,000 manga readers may well represent broader cultural penetration than the equivalent number of superhero readers. This is also a good point, although the diversity of the manga audience is something that can be overplayed. It's not like it's selling in large numbers to middle aged women.

It's interesting to compare the 45,000 number for the best-selling manga book with other genres on the list. It's not a particularly huge number. FLIPPED by Wendelin Van Draanen won the Romance: Juvenile Fiction: Love & Romance category with 50,000 sales. The adult poetry category was won by THE ODYSSEY, still shifting 65,000 units a year. Debbie Stoller sold 74,000 copies of STICH 'N BITCH: THE KNITTER'S HANDBOOK to win in Crafts & Hobbies. On the other hand, it's enough to beat the top sellers in categories such as law, pets, joke books and golf. (It also beat Diana Gabaldon's OUTLANDER, which sold 39,000 copies to win Romance: Time Travel, a category which sounds suspiciously as if it was invented solely to justify giving Diana Gabaldon a prize. The list includes an equally dubious award for the micro-genre of Mystery & Detective: Cat Sleuths.)

45,000 is a perfectly good number, don't get me wrong - especially when you consider that it's been built from a standing start over only a few years. But it's in the level of the specialist sub-genres and the hobby books. Even steering clear of the massive blockbuster sellers like Harry Potter, it's still comfortably below such categories as historical romance (134,000), antiques and collectibles (93,000), economics (593,000), Italian cookery (184,000), baseball (212,000), fantasy (519,000) and reference books (238,000). In context, manga is still a bit of a niche market.

Which makes me doubt that it really can claim the breadth of appeal that would be necessary to justify proclaiming it as the one true mainstream in preference to superhero comics selling... well, more or less the same amount. I'd be the first to agree that the manga market has much greater potential for mainstream growth, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. A different niche is still a niche.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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