(Originally posted at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat.)

My manga posts seem to be generating a lot of attention, to the point where I feel I need to expand on my theory a bit.

Yes, I do feel that manga is the future of comics. Why? For starters, it's what real people are actually buying. The industry (and by that I mean the five big superhero publishers, the indie companies that ape them, and the retailers that sell their wares) try very, very hard (or at least talk a great deal about trying very, very hard) to get young kids, girls, and other atypical comics readers to read comics--but the thing is, they're already reading 'em! They just happen to be reading comics from Japan. So in a very simple sense, comics stores need to be selling the comics that people want to buy. Like Dirk Deppey always says, the longer it takes the Direct Market to realize this, the worse off the DM (and by extension the American comics industry) will end up. I do see some inroads being made--both of the big comic book stores in New York City, Midtown Comics and Jim Hanley's Universe, now have manga featured prominently either on their very popular website (in the former case) or in their heavily trafficked store window (in the latter). However, it's safe to say that Midtown and Hanley's are on the leading edge of smart-retailership in general, so this doesn't necessarily indicate industry-wide foresight.

At this juncture in the argument, many people say that, in fact, manga will not save comics--the only thing that manga will help the American companies sell is more manga. By manga, such pundits are referring to Japanese comics written and illustrated by Japanese people in Japan, then at some point translated into English and sold in America. (At this point, the big manga companies aren't even "flipping" the stories to be read from left to right in Western style--that's how into the Japan-ness of the material the audience is!) This is to say that to them, manga really is a "genre"--when, as many have pointed out, to say that is akin to saying that Hollywood is a "genre." (Technically they're both modes of production capable of producing work in a wide range of genres, but, I suppose, with a proscribed range of affect. At a certain point, though, that proscribed range doesn't really matter--Hollywood has produced both Taxi Driver and Spy Kids, and manga has produced both Screw Style and Yu-Gi-Oh!) Right now there's little evidence to contradict this assertion about the provincial nature of manga readers, since the attempts at cross-pollinization have been fairly sporadic, and since the places where, in the main, manga is bought and sold are NOT direct-market comics retailers where buying patterns could be anecdotally, if not statistically, monitored. My own extremely limited experience with manga-reading kids does indicate a certain degree of over-the-top cultishness that brooks little deviation from the norm of big-eyed Japanese-style drawings done by people with Japanese names. Moreover, much of the manga phenomenon in America is tied to anime cartoons and gaming of both the card and video varieties, which would appear to provide even more ways for the manga consumer to spend his every entertainment dollar on stuff from the land of the rising sun.