I’m not sure that manga readers here are really manga readers and I would even go so far as to say that they’re not even comics readers. There’s a love for the medium, but only within the shojo or shonen genre. They love the anime, and honestly, while I was watching the Le Chevalier D’eon anime, I couldn’t help but thinking “this is cartoons. It’s for kids.”
- Kai-Ming Cha
I am outright terrified that the North American manga publishing industry is going to turn into a mirror of the superhero publishing industry; comprised of adult fans clamouring for vaguely more mature versions of children’s material, operating in a two-company system, growing steadily more insular and inaccessible to the world at large. I don’t think it has to happen, of course, and I’d like to think I’ve discussed a few of the ways in which it won’t, but there’re my fears. Hopefully they’re never realized.
- Christopher Butcher
Kai-Ming Cha is stating the obvious here, although it's something that tended to get lost in the early heated pro-manga vs. anti-manga debate - Most consumers of any form of entertainment have narrowly defined tastes. Only a minority of readers are ever going to possess a broad and deep love for the medium. It's a lot easier for fans to identify themselves in relation to a certain camp, like superheroes, manga, fantasy, or science fiction. I'm reminded of all the hype about how the
Harry Potter series got kids to read again, as if reading those books would eventually lead them to seek out
Steinbeck and
Shakepeare.
His second point is also equally obvious - People's tastes change over time. The young readers who enjoy
Naruto or
Fruits Basket now are not necessarily going to like them when they become adults. This is one reason behind the arguments for a more diverse market: A wider selection of genres and styles attract a greater demographic range. However Kai overstates his case when he worries that the present generation of readers will outgrow manga, leaving only the next batch of incoming readers to take their place. How is the market's youthful bias different from other forms of entertainment? Most film and television is aimed at the lowest common denominator, so it doesn't surprise me that manga publishers market fantasies to a largely young audience. I don't see that changing in the foreseeable future. But one shouldn't underestimate the crossover appeal of some youth-targeted popular entertainment. So to me it's not at all a clear-cut case of manga readers only coming from a certain a juvenile age group.
Nevertheless the recent financial troubles of retail chain
Borders Books and publisher
Toykopop have shown that the previous period of spectacular uninterrupted growth has ended. The manga boom has gone on long enough that it can no longer be dismissed as a fad, but this also means that a generation has grown-up reading manga. This raises the question of what will happen to that audience. No doubt some will abandon the comics medium entirely. Some will continue to read manga or other comics on a casual basis, and others will become hardcore adult fans. If the manga market starts to hemorrhage readers and doesn't replenish them with sizable numbers of younger fans, then manga fandom will, as
Christopher Butcher fears might happen, resemble the aging superhero fandom that made the direct market a dead end in the nineties before manga infused the western comics industry with a much needed dose of new readers. I'm inclined to believe that manga will continue to be mostly successful in attracting new readers, but Butcher is right in saying that publishers and retailers still need to get better at marketing to an adult audience. I'm inured to the crowds of gawky teenagers blocking my path when I wander the manga shelves of my local Borders, but they must deter a lot of would-be adult readers. There's still no real help for the uninitiated to differentiate between the different genres targeted to different audiences in the graphic novel sections of most bookstores. Further complicating the issue is that cultural differences can cause manga originally aimed at a younger Japanese audience to be repackaged as appropriate material for an adult readership, and vice-versa.
Looking at it from a wider perspective, manga is here to stay. Other countries have been exposed to manga and anime before the English-speaking world caught on, and even if the worst case scenario happens and Japanese comics market collapsed in America, it would continue to thrive elsewhere. Like it or not, manga is at the center of the comics world.
