Article 10: Vis A Viz

Viz's SHONEN JUMP has been a huge industry success story - but can its success be replicated? Paul O'Brien looks to the example set by another Viz; the British humour comic that briefly stole the mainstream, but failed to change the market.
24 November 2003

It didn't take a genius to see that the big comics story of 2003 was going to be the continued rise of manga. But the rate of growth in the manga market this year has been spectacular.

The most striking example has been the astonishingly high sales of Viz's anthology SHONEN JUMP. The American edition has seen its sales rise by 60% this year, and even broke the 500,000 mark with the August issue. Granted, it achieved those sales partly through a free gift, but so what? It shifts a comfortable 300,000 anyway, and by all accounts it achieves an unusually high sell-through in doing so.

Now, admittedly these sales still fall some considerable way short of the original Japanese title, WEEKLY SHONEN JUMP. That book shifts a mighty 3.5 million comics a week. From the perspective of English language comics, that's an unfathomably high level of sales. Still, SHONEN JUMP has clearly taken its position as a breakthrough title in the USA.

So what happens next?

I'm reminded of back in the late 1980s when the humour comic VIZ achieved breakthrough status in British newsagents. In a somewhat similar way, it crossed over from cult to mainstream status. VIZ's routine was - and still is - adult comedy, reusing the format of short strips which have been commonplace in British children's comics for decades. Unlike SHONEN JUMP, it was original material. VIZ started off in 1979 with a print run of 150, and peaked a decade later with a circulation of one million.

Now, the UK population is only about 60 million, so if you're selling a million comics, you've clearly broken through into the mainstream. In theory, then, VIZ represented a fantastic opportunity for comics. A new, wider audience was reading them - or rather, reading one of them. So the obvious question for British publishers to ask was how to capitalise on this audience, and turn them into a solid comics audience.

Broadly speaking, the publishers came up with two strategies. Option one was the Blatant VIZ Clone. Boy, were there a lot of those. And I can't emphasise enough that these were not just any clones. They were blatant clones. A child of five could see that most of the creative input had come from the photocopier. Not surprisingly, most of them died an early and well-deserved death.

At around the same time, there were also a scattered handful of more serious anthology titles - CRISIS, DEADLINE and the like. In theory, DEADLINE should have been an ideal vehicle to lead VIZ readers into longer-form comics, but somehow it never seemed to quite work out that way. At the time, I always got the uncomfortable impression that DEADLINE in particular was one part comic to three parts lifestyle accessory - an image that may have helped to confine it to cult status.

Anyhow, neither approach ended up working. VIZ, not unreasonably, ploughed on with the format that had served it well since 1979, and shrugged its shoulders as the zeitgeist moved on. It still sells somewhere around the 200,000 mark. Meanwhile, the rest of the British comics industry got back to the all-important business of slow, lingering death.

From this, we see that you can have a hugely popular mainstream comic, yet still completely fail to translate that into wider industry success.

Now, there are of course plenty of differences between VIZ and SHONEN JUMP. SHONEN JUMP doesn't exist in isolation in quite the same way that VIZ did. It may be the market leader but it exists against the background of a wider and growing audience for manga reprints. For the publishers who specialise in that, the next step is pretty obvious: more of the same. Of course, that's in the context of keeping up quality control, and being careful not to flood the market and so forth. But basically... more of the same.

The reprinters are in the lucky position that, with appropriate packaging, they can produce more of the same without additional titles being seen as clones. From the perspective of their audience, a second title along the lines of SHONEN JUMP would probably not be seen as a SHONEN JUMP clone. Rather, it would be seen as more original material from the mother country.

For domestic American publishers, however, matters are more difficult. On one view, the manga publishers have done them a favour. Thousands of new people are reading comics. Unfortunately, they're not reading American comics. This is fine if America fancies having a comics industry dominated entirely by imports from another country - which, after all, has worked oh-so-well for the UK. But on the assumption that the Americans would like to get some of this audience to read home-grown material, the question is how to capitalise on them.

One of the great advantages of Japanese comics is that they are immediately and obviously different from home-grown American material. This exempts them from many of the preconceptions that readers have about comics. Partly this is about the genres and art styles; partly it's to do with the packaging. And a large part of it is the market positioning of manga. One of its key sales pitches has been, "You liked the cartoon, now try the comic." Manga thus positions itself as an adjunct of the anime market - and then, in due course, as a separate parallel comics industry in its own right. It isn't seen as truly part of the American comics industry, and thus it isn't tainted by association.

This makes its audience an extremely difficult one for American publishers to appeal to. Manga readers, I suspect, quite consciously see themselves as readers of manga rather than of comics. At this stage, most of them are no more receptive to American comics than Marvel zombies are to non-superhero comics. This is a significant hurdle to overcome.

By this stage it's pretty clear that the pamphlet format will play no part whatsoever in reaching this audience. They're accustomed to paying $4.95 for 300 pages of SHONEN JUMP. Try to charge them three dollars for a twenty-page comic and you won't see them for dust. It's hard to see how the economics of pamphlet comics can ever be made to work for this audience.

The trade paperback is somewhat more acceptable, but still a notably different format from the usual manga books. The difficulty, however, is that if an American publisher tries to produce a comic in the paperback or digest formats that work for manga, then there is a high risk that that will be seen as copying. And why would they want copycat manga when there's an inexhaustible supply of the real thing?

Similar problems arise when it comes to the content. Manga audiences, for the most part, just aren't all that interested in anything that American publishers have been producing in recent years. That applies to both the mainstream and alternative wings of the medium. Selling them the same old stuff repackaged is unlikely to work. But again, if you drastically change style in order to produce what the manga audience currently reads, then you will be (rightly) seen as producing copycat manga. (And it doesn't help that American publishers won't have the benefit of anime tie-ins for their original material.)

Publishers have struggled to find a way out of this dilemma. Unfortunately, the presently fashionable approach seems to be awkward hybrids - either Americans attempting to emulate manga (DEATH: AT DEATH'S DOOR) or Japanese artists completely miscast on characters they seem to have no interest in (such as the lamentable WOLVERINE: SNIKT). Occasionally this results in something with curiosity value, but it's no answer to the fundamental problem. It's an attempt to appeal to two totally different audiences at the same time, which only makes the job harder.

To find a solution, publishers need to come up with something which is close enough to manga to appeal to that audience, but retains some distinctive American character. Simple manga cloning and awkward hybrids are not going to get the job done; something more unique is going to be required. The catch is that nothing of the sort seems to be on the horizon.

SHONEN JUMP may have helped manga cross over into a mainstream audience; the next big issue is whether the American publishers can cross over to the manga audience. And so far, the signs don't look too promising.

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

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