The Occidental Tourist: The Year Of Ordering Dangerously

The American market for manga is very different to the market for Western comics - and very different from the manga market of only a few years ago. Rob Vollmar looks at how SAILOR MOON and manga formats have created a minor boom.
29 July 2002

There was a time when new comics sales dominated the pie chart of every comics store's monetary intake. Though collections like WATCHMEN and THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS have proven themselves perennial sellers, there was such a scarcity of substantial collected works (trade paperbacks, graphic novels, etc) remaining in print that one could hardly have called it a body of literature representative of an actual art form.

At Atomik Pop in Norman, Oklahoma, where I sell comics and many other things, new comics sales are now engaged in a monthly photo-finish race with graphic novels, and they don't always win. As slowly as they established a presence in the Direct Market, graphic novels and trade paperback collections have revolutionised the way that we buy and sell comics. My store, in particular, doesn't keep nearly the back issue presence that it used to, because most of the saleable storylines and titles of the recent past are available in this more durable form.

For all the sense that that makes, keeping stories in print instead of driving a secondary market of back issues that benefits the companies that originally produced the material in only the most intangible of ways, the majority of the superhero fans are still primarily buying monthly pamphlets. They sense, and not inaccurately, that the comics industry as they know it is hinging in a very real way on their continued participation in the wicked game of serial monthlies.

Manga fans, whose numbers increase every day, have recently abandoned monthly pamphlets almost wholesale.

Without a doubt, many manga titles were introduced to the Anglophone audience through a serial pamphlet format, but it is my belief that it was the inherent weaknesses of this format (high price, month long wait) that held manga back for so long from finding their true audience.

As I - and many others - have stated in the past, manga are almost defined, or at least differentiated from Western comics, by their decompressed pacing that, most pragmatically explained, stretches actions or conversation across several pages when they might otherwise take just a few panels. As a result, the appreciation of a good manga story is skewed considerably by forcing audiences to wait an entire month to see the next instalment of the equivalent of five minutes of an hour long television show.

Then there is the question of price. A series like OH MY GODDESS, which just opened its twelfth segment at an average of ten issues per segment, represents, on the conservative side, a potential investment of $330 dollars (eleven segments x ten issues x $2.95). That sum is nearly double what it would cost to read the same material in collected form, not to mention that the comics that it represents are a good deal more tiresome to store and maintain for re-reading.

Tag on the fact that 99.99% of all manga are published in black and white, making them literally pale in comparison beside their American cousins, and you've got a pretty compelling case for the pathetic sales of monthly manga pamphlets.

Up until last year, fans of translated manga, at least at my local store, were divided roughly in half on the singles vs trades issue, despite the price disparity and the durability issues. It is possible that many of the half who still clung to buying singles were transplants from the mainstream wash-out of the early 90s, and were thus more culturally programmed to buy in monthly doses.

In addition, trade paperback prices on manga, as of our December 2001 inventory, averaged out at $15.95. Despite the considerable length of some of these volumes, the fact that they were essentially black and white reprints didn't help push the impulse button hard enough when it came time to turn awareness - perhaps sparked by a chance viewing of the anime version of the series on television - into hard sales.

It was, in fact, the SAILOR MOON manga that I first saw hit that perfect stride of price, value, and audience. The monthly book had been silently plugging along for some time when the anime series first hit cable. The effect was electric. We had girls and women, mostly ranging from ten to thirty, coming in off the street when they saw a giant Sailor Moon painted on our front window. While some, especially the younger ones, picked up the single issues, most invested in the pocket sized collections, affordably priced at $9.95, of which there were ultimately ten in the main series.

That meant for each SAILOR MOON customer/devotee that we were able to woo into the store, we were armed with a product that could yield us one hundred dollars in sales. And it happened just like that, more often than not. That doesn't account for if they bought or rented the anime or started buying the card game. It doesn't account for the dozen or so soundtracks available for import sales, nor does it account for sales of stickers, key chains, plushes, spin-off series, or magical tiaras.

The SAILOR MOON phenomenon came and went, but, as it did, many of those new female readers, having found themselves being catered to, were hungry for more. Due to the interest we found and cultivated in that initial SAILOR MOON explosion, we put together an entire section devoted to the shoujo genre, while also building up our new money powerhouse, the HELLO KITTY line from Sanrio International. It's big money. It's half of the damn world.

More importantly even than the masterstroke of actually reaching a broader female audience with this product, I think, was the price point itself. There is something magical about manga that crosses that ten dollar mark, evidenced by the next manga smash, Dark Horse Comic's reprint of LONE WOLF AND CUB.

The complaints were flying as soon as the project was announced. First Comics had already done it, and no one needed more copies, no matter how good it was. The format, a digest sized brick-looking thing (which, incidentally, launched the series to unparalleled heights in Japan), was going to be too small, ruining Gojima's art and straining the eyes.

Whatever the Direct Market's misgivings may have been, the series exploded off the racks at Atomik Pop. Issuing at around three hundred pages monthly, the value at $9.95 was irresistible to many and wound up on several subscriber pull-lists, an unheard of happening for a monthly trade paperback.

Like SAILOR MOON before it, LONE WOLF offers a staggering potential for long-term sales, with its projected twenty-eight volumes. In all candour, first week sales have cooled considerably now that the project is less than six volumes away from completion, but so far most of the additional volumes that we've accrued in this slow-down have found eventual homes, even as pre-order numbers were adjusted downward accordingly.

Faced with the stench of real money to be made from new audiences both within the Direct Market and without, TOKYO POP, which had already exploited this price point with some success with its shoujo titles, dropped most of its pamphlets, along with its outstanding and much missed SMILE MAGAZINE, in favour of a bold new line of hot-selling manga (most right at $10) that includes GTO, REAL BOUT HIGH SCHOOL, CHOBITS, and a host of others.

Most, if not all, of these series tie in with anime properties just being released on DVD, which can spell, for the savvy retailer, a lot of ancillary sales that superhero fans might neglect in their haste to pick up their stack of expensive serialisations.

At this present moment, the publishers of translated manga, the retailers who are open to their intended audience, and the audience itself, are about to answer a very important question: Can you have too much of a good thing?

The floodgates are opening, and soon we will know if this new audience for inexpensive yet cumulatively lucrative manga collections has a breaking point. The safe money will invest in series that take advantage of the perceived value of these high-volume, low-price collections, but only the ones that offer tangible tie-ins from other media sources or feature high-profile creators, and are preferably published by reputable companies with established track records of consistent performance.

To successfully sell this product - bringing in revenue streams that continue to elude the haggard superhero racket - it is left up to the retailer, above all, to develop an informed set of critical standards about the material that is offered, and through this understanding, create a healthy synergy with the ample related merchandise available to slowly grow the audience for it. Without this powerful tool, we, as a community and an industry, are invariably bound to repeat the mistakes of the black-and-white and speculator gluts that decimated the once-robust Direct Market.

Rob Vollmar is the Eisner-nominated writer of THE CASTAWAYS and the recently released BLUESMAN: BOOK ONE.

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