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Wed, 04 Feb 2004
Manga: fad or the future?
A lot of folks have been talking about the Manga explosion of the past
year. According to this article on ICV2 Manga saw a 75-100% growth, and they call it
"the fastest growing area of pop culture". What's most interesting to
me is that these figures only account for sell-in, not sell-through.
That means sales to retail outlets have increased. That's not a surprise since the number of titles offered has exploded. When I see
Tokyopop release up to 40 new Manga gns in a single month, I can see the coming glut and
inevitable retraction on the part of retail outlets. There are simply
too many titles being released too quickly, at least for me to keep up
with.
That being said, certain titles, particularly the Shonen Jump titles from Viz and selected TPop titles have seen pretty good sales at Hijinx. Other titles have been simply sitting on the shelves collecting dust. While I'm all for growth in any area of the comics industry, I see some parallels between the current Manga boom and the black and white boom and bust of the eighties. While some titles are truly worthy and popular, it's really hard to seperate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. It seems a lot of publishers seem to think that if it's small and translated from the Japanese, it's a guaranteed winner. That simply isn't the case, and I would suspect we'll see some contraction of the market in the coming year.
I'll continue stocking a wide variety of Manga, but I simply can't afford to carry every single title, or I'll go belly up! That's why I rely on my customers to keep me up to date on which titles are crucial to stock, and which are forgettable. Luckily I have such a diverse customer base that I've been getting reliable tips from my regular Manga customers and have had the right titles to satisfy demand from customers off the street.
As to the title of this post, Fad or Future, I think the answer is a little of both. There is certainly a faddish nature to the stuff, but like many fads, I think it will continue to have legs long after this initial window of popularity is over. After all, I still sell a fair amount of Pokemon cards, despite the fact that Pokemon is considered "dead".
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