I've watched Japanese comics -- manga -- chart an interesting course in the American marketplace. American comics companies started selling Manga about 20 years ago. For years, it stayed a niche market. Then Pokemon and anime on Cartoon Network started pulling teens who had grown up without comics into anime fandom, and they started picking up compilations of manga sold in bookstores. Eventually, the monthly comic book style manga died away, supplanted by these graphic novels, which became one of the few segments of the book publishing biz that was expanding. The market overheated a couple of years ago, and some publishers went out of business while others stopped putting out new Japanese reprints and turned to American-produced manga-style comics.
Now comes the latest twist: Several newspapers, including the LA Times, will start running manga and manga-style comic strips. I'd previously noted a growing recognition of manga's influence in the Times' Calendar section, with critics throwing around terms like Shoujo (girls' manga) and yaoi (gay manga) without bothering to translate them. Whether this will affect the manga market remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, the new controversial TV series "The Book of Daniel" (hey, isn't there already a Book of Daniel in the Old Testament? Trademak infringement!) is advertising a subplot where, as the Times puts it, " a moody teenage daughter . . . is caught selling marijuana to finance her manga animation . . . ." It's unclear whether the reporter means the daughter's drawing manga, animating manga, or buying manga and anime. But in any case, it's another sign that manga is either in the throws of popularity in the US or has passed into so-five-minutes-ago non-hipness.
*** Update****
Turns out the newspapers aren't putting actual Japanese comics into their papers; they're putting in comics drawn by Americans in a manga style. It's sort of the California Roll of manga. Here's a USA Today.com article about it.
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