As easy as it is for anyone to say "I knew it!" now, I started talking about the coming fall of manga in North American nearly four years ago - back when people still thought it was going nowhere but up. (Yes, I'm going to use to term "manga" here for clarity because some people seem confused when Japanese comics are referred to in English.)
Some people assumed I must be a superhero fan, or just simply a hater, for my negative outlook on manga for the past few years. Others insisted I had no idea what I was talking about because they were convinced that manga was taking over. Well, first of all, if I hated Japan I wouldn't speak the language fluently and I sure as hell wouldn't live here. I happen to love my country, Canada, and wouldn't have left if I didn't want to be where I am now. If I hated manga I wouldn't bother talking about them, blogging about them, or paying any attention to them at all. And if I hated foreign manga fans, I wouldn't spend some of my spare time translating articles about Naoki Urasawa, Takehiko Inoue, or anyone else into English either. Obviously I have no problem with access to the material I translate, I'm not a freelance translator hoping to get noticed, and I don't get paid for anything I do on this website, so I'm not doing it for myself!!
Nope, I am not a hater. I had reasons to feel the way I did about manga, and it was partly because of a sense of deja vu I had when I got out of the animation business and found myself in a new job that included translating and adapting comics in 2006. What I think about the creative state of manga, or of the domestic business model, is irrelevant. It was simply obvious to me that manga in North America was following nearly the same path as I saw animation heading on a year earlier.
I'm not going to get into the state of the animation market in 2005, but many North American animation licensors were already tightening their belts back then while the fans were still enjoying the boom. Only a couple years later, some of those licensors simply ceased to exist. The market adjustment was sudden and brutal.
Fast forward a few years and I'm sure people in manga can likely say the same thing about their industry now. It's no surprise either, or it shouldn't be, because the so-called manga boom's spring board was the popularity of animation. In Japan comics are the source material and feed the animation industry, but in North America the mainstream audience got into manga because of the cartoons. Take a look at when manga sales really took off in North America and I think you'll find it coincides with the launches of the most popular Japanese cartoons. Manga sales jumped in 2005 and peaked in 2007, right? Well, look up the Japanese cartoons that hit the airwaves in prime time slots in 2005 and it's pretty obvious what happened.
Unfortunately for the comics, the animation industry was already beginning to hurt behind the scenes at the same time as it was breaking through in the mainstream. Manga was a victim of its own success because the industry that helped launch that success was already teetering on the edge of disaster. Manga just hit too big too fast to possibly be to able to sustain themselves while animation faded. After all, manga was just different (although often affiliated) companies peddling mostly the same thing, and with the same methods as the animation before it. I don't think it's over at all, but did anyone really think manga wouldn't be tripped up when the animation rug was pulled out from under it?
If animation was going to have to weather a market adjustment, then so was manga. It didn't help that print publishing was already on the decline too. The warning signs were there all along, true believers. The whole Japanese pop-culture boom generated a lot of smoke and noise but there wasn't really much of a fire yet. Fires need to burn bigger, hotter and for a lot longer than anime or manga have in order to burn a lasting impression on an entire culture. Nonetheless, the new manga/anime self-proclaimed 'otaku' fanbase got high on the fumes and declared a revolution while manga was still only an unidentified blip on the cultural radar. Nobody yet knew if that blip was a pop-culture ICBM from Japan coming to change everything, or just a flock of sea gulls. Fast forward to the problems of today, and it seems to me that a lot of people who are looking skyward for answers are getting pooped on.
It's sad to watch happen, but a lot of the little guys are falling off the bandwagon and being run over by the big publisher express which, despite having to down-shift a gear or two, appears to have more than enough fuel in the tank to keep rolling along just fine. But whether Japanese comics can make a comeback or not may have more to do with what happens in Japan than it does with anything going on in North America. In the end it's about good content, and the huge archives of decades worth of great material has already been raided and mostly cleaned out. Japan needs to create good new content. If that happens everything should work out okay. On the other hand, with the problems print media is having, creation alone may not be the answer.
What about digital, you ask? As long as the iPhone and iPad continue to spread the Job's virus and turn the world into squeaky clean Apple zombies, don't expect digital publishing to be much of a help. Very little Japanese content is getting through the iTunes adult content koodies filter.
Anyway, whatever happens - and I hope things turn around - no one should be surprised at what's going on now. People can rant, finger point, argue and debate about the impact of things like piracy, the recession, bad translation/writing, and censorship all they want. Whatever the underlying factors in the downturn are, it likely wouldn’t have changed a damn thing. This happening was inevitable and it's better sooner than later. Whether manga's place in North American culture is for real or not has also been a pointless argument up to now because how can you possibly judge that in the middle of so much hype? However, now that the honeymoon is over we're going to find out soon enough if this manga thing will last.
I hope manga is here to stay (or rather, “there” to stay), but a lot depends on Japan and so far they haven’t proved to be a very nimble player in our rapidly changing world.
In closing, how could I possibly pass up the opportunity to fire back at all the people here and abroad who called me a hater, or said I didn't know shit, with a great big "I f*cking told you so!!!"
(That was petty way to end this, but it felt good 
)
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