July 9, 2008
Article of the Moment: PW’s Kai-Ming Cha Says “The Future Looks Bleak”
This blog post by PWCW mainstay Kai-Ming Cha on the recent Anime Expo is one of those articles to note for the content of the piece but also who's saying it. Basically, the suggestion here is that most young manga readers are devoted to a couple of popular expressions within that part of comics rather than that part of comics entire or, more widely, comics. The reason why it's important who's saying this is because when manga started to sell in big-box bookstores a similar argument was made by several American comics boosters -- albeit in dismissive fashion after not observing or knowing about anything except that their tastes were being vaguely challenged or threatened.
As a result, any industry observer making any observation along these line opened them up to derision and charges of player-hating (sorry, but I think it's the closest term) from people whose advocacy for and support of manga seemed to depend on an emotional investment in the publishing success of that expression of comics to equal that of American comics fans and that group's joy in the superhero movies and TV shows and whatnot. So I think this blog post provides the notion of a potentially limited manga readership a bit of legitimacy it didn't have before, and it's good to have the idea on the table.
I think what surprises me is that there's any expectation remaining that there would be a roughly-as-sizable, life-long readership building out of the last decade's rise in manga consumption, and again I think it might be a reaction to another dismissive argument made by some that ignorantly labeled that initial swell of readers a fad. My hunch is that there's some middle ground to be explored there. Fads last a summer, not a decade. This is something different, even if it does come with a built-in expiration date. During the time when American comics could best claim mainstream appeal they were dealing with a limited-interest readership in certain portions of the form, and that didn't invalidate anything about the number of people reading the material or what was made possible in those years due to that massive readership or in the future with the devoted readers that caught the bug during that time of wider availability.
In an ideal world, Kai-Ming Cha's observational post and the general notions behind it will be considered along with all the other ideas out there when it comes to shaping a vital and worthwhile manga market for five, ten, twenty years from now. Because as gets pointed out in a subsequent post,
things are definitely changing. Also:
didn't know about the forthcoming book.
posted 8:05 am PST |
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