To sum up, Direct Market retailers need to get manga books in their stores, prominently display them, do their damndest to sell them and to get the people who already buy them to do their buying there instead of elsewhere. That's pretty much a bare-minimum industry-wide bankruptcy preventer at this point. But beyond that, the publishers that depend on the Direct Market for an obscenely high percentage of their profits (despite some legitimate inroads being made into bookstores) need to remove obstacles to their readers (and to those bookstore inroads) by experimenting with publishing their books in manga format.

No, they shouldn't do it all at once--they're still too dependent financially on the Direct Market's audience of fanboys, for one thing, a crowd notoriously resistant to change and one that's unlikely to buy anything that even looks like "that crap from Japan"--but certain books would actually make sense for demographic, aesthetic, or storytelling-style reasons. I've suggested Ultimate Spider-Man because it basically is shonen manga, in pacing, characterization, tone, and content, if not in artistic style. I've also suggested Sandman, because that book's anomalous audience--teenage girls and young women--is one that snaps up shoujo manga with gusto, so I imagine that, in the immortal words of Egon Spengler, the door swings both ways. I've seen folks suggest not-quite-mainstream, not-quite-altcomix books like A Distant Soil and A Thousand Ships, which make sense because of the clear-line black-and-white art the books employ (theoretically this should reduce in size well without losing much in the way of comprehensibility or attractiveness), the epic/romantic feel of the stories, and (oddly enough) the queer-friendly tone that is (increasingly obviously) appealing to the teen-girl manga-reading audience.

There are some promising signs in this regard. DC has published a Sandman spinoff involving the insanely teen-girl-popular character Death that not only employs manga-style art, but was released in actual manga format. I'm unaware if further volumes are planned, but the addictive serially-released nature of manga volumes means it would behoove DC to get cracking in that department one way or the other. Meanwhile, Marvel is at the very least trying very hard to use manga content, in several ways: On big books like Uncanny X-Men (an actual Japanese person!), in their now-largely-defunct Marvel Mangaverse titles (which usually related to the original Marvel characters only in name) and in their kinda sorta manga line, Tsunami (well, at least that was the idea at the time; for the most part it's now the pacing that's manga more than the art or the creators). Rumor has it that, indeed, Ultimate Spider-Man will be collected the manga way; I'd speculate that when the first Tsunami collections bow, they too might be manga-sized; the Epic books may get that treatment as well. Dark Horse already has manga books, so they're in okay shape, but it seems criminal to sit on books like Hellboy and Sin City (not to mention their teen-girl friendly Buffy tie-ins) without putting them into what's become the popular format. Image has the benefit of a high profile name with virtually no central administration, so individual Image creators appear to be exploring the possibilities--Devil's Due's Semantic Lace was published directly into manga format. CrossGen may do a lot of things wrong, but I think they've been right on the money with their incessant experimentation with format; aside from manga-sized collections of individual titles (called "travellers," I believe), they've also gone a route that few American publishers have dared, and published big omnibus collections featuring issues of several different series for relatively little money. This, of course, is the publishing model available at newstands all over Japan, where a guy on his way home from work can spend a few bucks on a big collection, and even if 80% of the (often 40 pages or longer) stories in there don't tickle his fancy, he's still gotten his money's worth with the other 20%. Unfortunately, CrossGen's publishing savvy can't change the fact that these well-packaged, well-formatted volumes contain CrossGen comics. (I appreciate that they're trying to cover all the genre bases, but it's amazing how so many books that are supposed to be so different all look and feel exactly the same: "You know what this line needs? Another book featuring female characters with heads of really full wavy hair!")