Monthly Archives: June 2010

Ed Chavez on Arty Manga, Past and Future

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The essay below is by Ed Chavez of Vertical Press.
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30 years ago all translated manga were practically arty comics. The designs were nothing like what was available in the West. The stories were told with a focus on characters, instead of narrative. And while the very first manga in English, Barefoot Gen, came from mainstream anthology Shounen Jump, many of the other titles that followed it in the 80’s were from seinen or alternative manga publications that at the time were just starting to make an impact on the Japanese manga scene.

The industry has changed in almost every way imaginable on both sides of the Pacific over these now four decades. In fact so much has changed that both regions can now say with confidence that they both have legitimate art manga scenes. Whether either market is actually viable is still questionable, but at least for the time being, artsy manga is here and I can say with confidence that more is on its way. And for the sake of this discussion, I would like to go into a little detail as to why that is and what publishers in the industry are doing to maintain that small subset within manga alive and well.

But before I dive into that, I feel I must provide my definition of “arty manga”, as this piece will focus solely on that subset and not just your average seinen or josei title like Oishinbo, InuBaka or even Twin Spica. Japanese comics for older readers have been around since the bronze age of English manga. Akira, Lone Wolf & Cub and Crying Freeman are examples of that. With publishers like Dark Horse and Del Rey Manga these titles should flourish as they have for hits like Genshiken, Hellsing and Chobits. I do not want to disparage the artistic value of any of those titles. However, all of these properties were at one point marketed towards the mainstream overseas by some of the biggest publishers in that market. And in many cases, these titles had media tie-ins that helped their brands receive more recognition from the sub-culture in the West.

An “arty manga” is generally not blessed with either. It is “successful” in spite of being under-supported or is published by the manga equivalent of a Top Shelf or First Second. It has been recognized by editors across the globe even when it doesn’t have a specific genre to be pigeonholed into by critics. An arty manga might not have dialogue. There are times when its designs are so bad they feel so right. These comics have so little going in their favor that even in Japan they are often just called comics (using the English term). And in some cases the artists even create new terms to more closely describe their brand of sequential art.

I suppose classical works are now being called arty, as some can reveal a chronological history of manga story-telling methods and artistic designs analogous that can then be used for study similar to an art appreciation course. But titles like Dororo or even some Tatsumi works transcend time and continue to have themes that can be appreciated from a mainstream seinen or shounen perspective generations later (though many manga readers will likely get hung up on character design).

With so many hurdles to overcome why even approach arty manga? The answer is simple… Unlike more mainstream manga, which is a bit of a contradiction in the US, arty or even literary manga tend to have a feel and tone that is closer to western graphic novels than to the best-selling shoujo or shounen properties on either continent. When approached with enough restraint and common sense, an arty manga has the potential to be a hit with readers, critics and sales directors alike for the following reasons…

1) Comics like Tokyo Zombie and to an extent many of Junko Mizuno’s works fill a niche for fans. These fans may not be manga fans, either. These readers may have an interest the world of Japanese film or Japanese design. Japanese sub-culture is much broader than just anime and manga, and by exploiting specific designs and genres smart publishers with a keen understanding for the pulse of sub-culture trends in North America can make properties or artists that are experimental even in Japan accessible to a steady readership without having to appeal to a manga-cow audience at Borders or B&N.

The development of “gekiga”, a term that is loosely thrown around by some pundits and marketers in the west, has created a reasonable base for titles that are labeled as such (even if they were originally seinen properties in Japan).

2) When critics outside of the “mangasphere” get a hold of a manga there is often some trepidation. Most appear to be too foreign and while even the best seinen and josei titles can stimulate readers, length is often an issue. So unless the property is extremely compelling or intriguing from a journalistic perspective, like Tezuka’s Buddha, it may be challenging to give an appropriate review.

Because of the challenges to produce these works in Japan, most arty manga tend to be shorter and many are plot driven (instead of character driven which is the industry standard). This allows critics, academics and journalists to really dig deep into these titles without having to devote time and resources to acquire translated versions of every volume of an 11 volume on-going series.
The informed publisher will have staff on hand to select and dissect properties that are challenging but relevant to their market. Through marketing they will find ways to exploit current events, trends or existing authors/books to help promote their titles. The smart publisher makes an effort to present their content as Japanese, but they must be always aware that their readership is not and may not have an interest in the nuances of manga culture, let alone Japanese culture. And when a critic can find a comic that transcends languages, cultures and time they will respect that and champion it as seen with arty mega-hits like A Drifting Life and Buddha.

3) Producing arty manga is a challenge within the manga industry. In Japan artists working within the experimental field have historically not received page rates. Instead they toil away submitting work, hoping that one day their stories or series will be collected into graphic novels from which they receive royalties. Print runs for these GNs are not significant relative to traditional manga releases (in my experience working for Kodansha print runs average around 30,000 for seinen magazines, but can go much lower for their more experimental spin-off lines).

Arty manga is rarely localized by the US manga powers—Viz Media, Yen Press and TokyoPop. Publishers like Drawn & Quarterly, PictureBox and Last Gasp (often with the help of JaPress) tend to provide most of this content with my company Vertical dabbing into the field now and then. Speaking from personal experience, releasing an arty title means a lot of overhead but can often mean significant returns in the long-term. Designing a book that will appeal to a mainstream readership is critical. So everything from the jacket and orientation needs to be scrutinized just as much as the top-class translations these publishers often commission. All of that costs money and demands time. However that is because these books are not mass-market. They are works of love and they deserve more.

Price points are often higher reflecting the production costs. Marketing budgets are also higher and used more effectively. And while I am reading that some believe this is because many of these publishers are comics specialists, I will say Dark Horse is a comics specialist and well they haven’t taken the scene by storm with their actual gekiga releases such as Satsuma Gishiden or the Color of Rage. At the same time, Dark Horse readers, whether they read manga or AmeComi or both, might not be art comics readers. D&Q readers are. Picturebox readers are. Last Gasp readers know what to expect from their comics. And in the case of Vertical, our readers tend to be fans of Japanese genre fiction and Japanese film, so they get many of the same themes and genres in comic form. I want to believe these publishers also exploit their books knowing that.
These business factors can turn a micro-niche release into a financial success. However, the same formulas also should prevent a publisher from over-reaching by releasing too much into a market that is growing steadily, but appears to be waiting for that next title to break free from the “manga/comics ghetto.”

That said, even with all those variables working in a publisher’s favor not every title will work, nor will every artist. For every A Drifting Life there will be a The Box Man and for every Apollo’s Song there is an Andromeda’s Story, just like Naruto has its Cat Eyed Boy and Fruits Basket has its Tantric Fighter… The successes earned their praise because of the quality of work. Sadly there are many more titles that do not receive their due everywhere for reasons too many to list.
So while others focus on demographics, libraries or designers, I say publishers need to make sure the arty, literary, indie, experimental, alternative…manga they select are always simply great comics. Whether spelled with a “k” or with a “c”, good comics will never be denied their place in homes and stores.
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The entire Komikusu roundtable is here.

Indie is as indie does

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I’ve enjoyed watching this roundtable unfold — comics that we’d call “Indie Manga” are the ones I seem to spend the majority of my reading time digesting — some of which has been licensed and adapted for English readers, and others in their original form, still under the radar or not yet thought to have a potential readership.

 

Traumerei by Shimada  Toranosuke(top) and Ashura by George Akiyama (bottom), indie manga in both content and pedigree

In thinking about this post and what I could add to this discussion, I had a private goal of sneaking in and name-checking as many cool titles as possible, to proselytize those weirdo books that we love over at Same Hat (the blog I run for  indie/horror/weirdo comics fans get together and talk shop). I was struck yesterday by something Kate wrote in laying out her smart and right-on points about marketing indie manga to readers. She said,

Buddha, Ode to Kirihito, and A Drifting Life are three examples of manga that appealed to a wide range of readers, from folks interested in good stories to folks interested in reading works by seminal Japanese artists. It’s this piece of the Venn Diagram that I’d like to address, in the form of three simple suggestions for marketing books to both audiences.

These are all interesting manga titles that have crossover appeal to non-manga fans, and were published by publishers other than the mainstream big companies. But are they “indie manga”? Is it the case that a work by Osamu Tezuka can even be categorized as such? This may seem like an obvious place to start, but if we’re going to discuss how to market these books, it’s important to figure out what the hell these terms mean. It seems to me that the two defining characteristics of indie manga are:

  1. Who licensed and published it in English
  2. The content of the manga itself

I wanna try to unpack these two defining characteristics in this column. A few months back, About.com’s Deb Aoki hosted a special “Indie Manga” edition of the fantastic comics podcast, Inkstuds. That discussion was a blast, featuring commentary from David P. Welsh of The Manga Curmudgeon and Chris Butcher of Comics212/The Beguiling. (I recommend that post if only for the fantastic list of titles that get mentioned as starting points for indie comics fan looking to dabble in manga). I talked there about how what we think of as indie manga is very much defined by which publisher licensed it in the States, rather than where it appeared in Japan originally.

When manga fans I know on Same Hat talk about our favorite indie manga — they’ll throw together the formalism-meets-pornography experimental works of Shintaro Kago with a horror serial like The Drifting Classroom by Kazuo Umezu and alongside Red Snow by Susumu Katsumata. For American readers it’s easy to draw a line through these titles as similar in their “indie-ness”, but looking at their demographic/publisher/bookshop placement in Japan this makes no sense at all; If Shintaro Kago is “underground” in America, he’s mega-underground in Japan– no manga shop in Tokyo save for Taco Che and other speciality weirdo shops would stock his books. Meanwhile, Kazuo Umezu is a super-mainstream godfather of gag and horror comics, and his Drifting Classroom was published as a popular kid’s comic in Japan (and is now sold shrink-wrapped for Mature Audiences in America). Lastly, Red Snow is a gekiga collection full up on realism and rural life.

In America, perceived similarities (indie-ness?) between these creators in American comic fans head space are felt because of the publisher or imprint they are published in America… but in Japan folks would majorly scratch their heads at these being discussed together.

In the introduction to Secret Comics Japan, one of the three defining anthologies of indie manga to date, an interesting and similar point was made by the editor, Chikao Shiratori. Shiratori is a comics essayists and worked as Managing Editor of GARO in the ’90, and also helped put together its spiritual sister publication (and literally the BEST primer on indie manga out there), Comics Underground Japan. In that introduction, Shiratori said:

Today, categories like “major” and “underground,” have become ambiguous and are crumbling. It might just be that the medium has truly matured, and now no single manga or manga magazine can dominate over the others as they once did… This book is entitled Secret Comics Japan. What, then, is a “secret comic” in today’s Japan where underground exist in the majors and majors lurk in the underground? In Japan, reading manga is part of daily life in almost any age group; however, things have not reached the point where your average person will actively seek out good manga, manga that will stimulate them and make them think and feel deeply. Understand, in Japan today, manga and manga-type media have become so widespread that to read manga everyday doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a manga fan, any more than watching television regularly makes you a television fan.

Here, Shiratori hints at the other piece of my haphazard definition of indie manga — the content of the book itself! Seems to be the fundamental point of everything right? Indie to me used to mean topics and styles outside the mainstream. The weird, raw or uncommon forms of expression that you just don’t encounter without working and digging for it. This has been consistently where my comics sensibilities draw me when it comes to manga, and why anthologies such as the two mentioned above, along with Pulp Magazine and the book Sake Jock meant so much to me when I was younger — they were the Rosetta Stones of weirdo manga.

My current relationship to manga and comics in general feels different today. While my shelves are stocked with books that most likely will never be licensed into English — like the strange finds and old genre classics from my most recent trip to Japan — the world of indie manga seems vast but no longer untamed. For the initiated and devout manga fan, it’s not that hard to find out what the RAWs and MOMEs and POPGUNs of Japan are, or where the weirdest work is happening right now. (If this is you and you want to learn more and blow your own mind, I implore you to read the online English translation of the book on indie manga in Japan: Manga Zombie). Manga is awesome, sure, but the stuff I’m most excited about are self-published comics by friends and contemporaries, and Chinese and European indie comics– specifically cuz i dont know much about them! Isn’t that what “underground” is all about?

Getting back to this discussion’s thrust: it seems that indie has been used by fans and companies as shorthand for a few things:

+ Classics and Gekiga: Osamu Tezuka as Indie? How about Shojo masters like Keiko Takemiya and Moto Hagio?

+ Genre stuff that’s not SF, romance, or action:  Horror serials and shorts, historical fiction, erotic comics. Interestingly enough, this is the approach that seems to often have been used on marketing European comics published here in N. America.

+ Stuff that is similar to American indies: Personal/introspective autobiography comics or stuff that follows the American “comix” scene. How often have we heard marketing refer to the “R. Crumb” of Japan, or use Tomine and Spiegelmen as their yardsticks in relating a manga?

+ Deeply weird stuff: the art and experimental comics (Yuichi Yokoyama), the genre-busting or straight-up explicit stuff (Toru Yamazaki’s Octopus Girl, Suehiro Maruo), genres we don’t have in America (gag comics by Tori Miki, Usamaru Furuya)

As the market and readership for manga in America has expanded, we’ve found ourselves walking through a range of the four manga above — some marketed as indie to English readers, others marketed as strictly “comics” without pinning them to their Japanese origin, and others marketed by their genre. A quick glance at the early history of manga in America underscores this point. (For folks more interested in this topic, Same Hat readers have assembled a work-in-progress chronology of early manga publications).

The Early Days! (late 1980s!) Genre comics were published piecemeal alongside other European and American genre comics. The few manga at the beginning was published in Epic Illustrated, Heavy Metal — bodacious SF and manly comics that weren’t demarcated by their country of origin, but by their adherence to genre tropes.

The Golden Years! (late 1990s!) Everyone starts taking weird changes, and Viz uses their Pokemon money to fund Pulp (spitting out art comics, genre comics, and deeply weird stuff!); To me, this was the golden age of indie manga, when it felt like the manga market pie was getting big enough that there was a piece for every reader, and every style.

Nowadays! (late 2000s!) Indie is everywhere? Or maybe we should just call them all graphic novels by now? Dynamic and interesting works are being put out by a number of publishers? In one sense, the defining characteristic seems to be a similarity to the house style/speciality of the American indie publisher that put it out…

Interestingly enough, this focus on genre stratification, and the curation role of the indie publisher (be it Fantagraphics, Last Gasp, or Viz) was raised at the very start of manga’s publishing in the late 1980s, by translator/author/manga master Frederik Schodt. Back then, he wrote an essay about manga’s potential success among English readers:

The first reason is the sheer size of the Japanese industry and the variety of material it churns out. Probably ninety-five percent of Japanese comics are not worth translating. A lot of them are soft-core porn for men or trashy romances for women, stuff we Americans could create on our own, thanks. And who wants to read volumes about the problems of hierarchical relationships in boring office jobs or the spiritual rewards of selling discount cameras in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district? But precisely because there is so much stuff produced, there is something for nearly everyone, if selected properly. You want a story on the Russian revolution, or an analysis of gourmet cooking? You wan wild, original art work? You want something that looks just like an American comic? If you can name it, Japanese comics probably have it.

And later on that same topic from an interview I conducted with Fred in late 2008:

I think most people who read manga in America are not aware of the fact that the filter is huge. The filter that an American publisher is using when they decide what to publish here is very big and tight and they ultimately have to import what they can sell here, which is not what someone in Japan would necessarily want. That’s why for years all the manga here were kind of SF, young male-oriented works. It’s only recently that shojo manga caught on, which was a big surprise to everybody in the industry. Even to this day, I’m not sure how much of the popularity of manga is here to stay, or how much of it is a bubble or fad. It’ll be interesting to see.

Okay, so I went long on history and terminology and short on solutions for marketing and selling indie manga to English readers. I think others have tackled this well, but here are my final thoughts on finding readerships. Considering the two definitions of indie manga from the start of this column (the content itself is truly “independent” in nature and/or the English publisher that licensed it specializes in indie books), here are thoughts:

1) Branding the Japanese source of the books and harnessing that curatorial indie brand:

Manga fans know that GARO was an important publication and an easy parallel to make. But what about AX and COMIC BEAM as the place in Japan for the coolest shit? Top Shelf seems to be doing this well in the way they’ve framed their upcoming AX Anthology, and similar things are happening with the term ‘gekiga’ due to Drawn & Quarterly’s promotion of the genre/movement.  The ’90s anthologies I love and cherish understood this too, positioning their collections as THE gateway (drug?) to a certain scene and era.

2) Accepting small audiences when they are and should be small for truly independent work, and finding lovers of the type of story that book tells.

As Peggy said in her email, they have success with Tatsumi because “we promote him as one of our D+Q cartoonists, and because we publish books for adults.”  Here’s another interesting marketing example: the works of genius creator Naoki Urasawa are very much NOT indie — not in Japan and not in America. Yet Viz’s Signature line editor noticed in an interview that Pulitzer-winning author Junot Diaz had name-checked Monster in an interview in the mainstream press, and got him to write a blurb for the flap of Monster / 20th Century Boys . This is a coup in one sense, but does it sell books? How do you telegraph the indie/genre cred of comics from Japan?

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The whole Komikusu roundtable is here.

Peggy Burns on D&Q’s Success With Gekiga

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Peggy Burns, Associate Publisher at Drawn & Quarterly, was not able to participate in this roundtable…but she did graciously agree to let me reproduce an edited version of the email she sent me when she declined. It’s below.

Hi Noah,

Thank you for the invitation but I do not think I would have much to contribute. We have had a lot of success with gekiga, but I sincerely think that the reason why someone like Tatsumi made the cover of the Paris Review, NY Times Arts section and on the NYT graphic novel bestseller list is because we promote him as one of our D+Q cartoonists, and because we publish books for adults, there is no added marketing necessary to get this point across to stores or readers.

While I wish mainstream manga sites the best, I feel no need to convince them to write about us, if they do not already.

Best,

Peggy

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The whole Komikusu roundtable is here.

Blog Maintenance

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The powers that be are going to be doing some work on the site this evening. It shouldn’t be too disruptive, but comments may be disabled for a little bit, and you may notice other oddities. Everything should be back in place by early tomorrow. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience.

Three not-so-radical ideas for marketing manga to grown-ups

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One of the things that struck me when reading Erica and Brigid’s contributions to the roundtable was that each proposed solutions that made sense for a particular audience. In Erica’s case, that audience is comprised of adult manga fans who have a passionate engagement with the medium, a knowledge of its history, and an active interest in the Japanese publishing scene, while in Brigid’s case, that audience is comprised of adults who are receptive to the idea of reading a graphic novel, but don’t know much about manga. As publishers like Vertical, Inc. and Drawn & Quarterly have demonstrated, these two groups’ reading interests do overlap; Buddha, Ode to Kirihito, and A Drifting Life are three examples of manga that appealed to a wide range of readers, from folks interested in good stories to folks interested in reading works by seminal Japanese artists. It’s this piece of the Venn Diagram that I’d like to address, in the form of three simple suggestions for marketing books to both audiences.

1. License manga that appeals to older female readers.
There’s almost no English-language manga about women over the age of 22 (at 28, the heroine of Tramps Like Us is positively geriatric), and little to no josei that features genuinely strong, independent female characters. (It’s telling that two of the best josei titles to be licensed for the US market, Bunny Drop and The Antique Bakery, feature male protagonists.) That’s where an artist such as Murasaki Yamada comes in; her work has things to offer the hardcore manga fan and casual reader alike, from her pedigree (she cut her teeth writing stories for COM and Garo), to her elegant, naturalistic style and feminist outlook. Which brings me to my next point…

2. Tell a good story about the book.

In their responses to Brigid’s post, Noah and Ryan Sands raise an important issue: meet-the-author events and book tours are an important marketing tool for generating interest among book-buyers and media outlets. Though a few publishers have brought Japanese artists to the US for signings, the process is complicated, in Noah’s words, “by language and distance.” In the absence of opportunities for authors and readers to interact face-to-face, publishers need to step up to the plate to tell readers what’s so special about the books they’re licensing. Drawn & Quarterly’s presentation of Black Blizzard is a good example of how to do just that. Consider the back jacket copy:

In 1956, at the age of twenty-one, Yoshihiro Tatsumi arrived as a major new talent in Japan’s burgeoning manga industry with the publication of his graphic novel Black Blizzard. With influences ranging from Osamu Tezuka to Alexander Dumas to Mickey Spillane, Tatsumi’s noir thriller displayed a cinematic, hard-boiled aesthetic, as well as a prodigious knack for inventive, fast-paced storytelling. Long out of print and never before published in English, Black Blizzard is a rare piece of Japanese cartooning history and an enduring work of high entertainment. Drawn & Quarterly Publications and series editor Adrian Tomine are proud to present this lost treasure from a modern master.

Without even opening the book to look at the pictures or read Tomine’s interview with Tatsumi, readers know immediately (a) who Tatsumi is (b) where the work fits into his development as an artist (c) who influenced him and (d) why Drawn & Quarterly’s edition is significant. Bonus points for connecting Black Blizzard with more familiar Western points of reference.

Now imagine doing that for an artist like Murasaki Yamada — not only are you appealing to manga enthusiasts who know about COM and Garo, but you’re also pitching your work to readers who enjoyed Persepolis and Fun Home by positioning Yamada as a similarly important female voice in comics (and one with an interesting biography as well — in addition to writing for two seminal manga magazines, she also ran for Japanese Parliament).

3. Get librarians in on the act.
As my colleague Eva Volin pointed out in an earlier discussion about manga marketing practices (this one focused on manga for younger readers), there are a number of compelling reasons to pursue the library market:

1) There are a lot of libraries.
2) We buy a lot of books.
3) We rarely return the books we buy.
4) If the book we buy turns regularly (circulates a lot), we buy extra and/or replacement copies.
5) If a category turns regularly we increase the amount of books we buy in that category.
6) By doing all this we create loyal readers who will often go in search of books at bookstores to buy and keep for themselves.

If you want librarians to buy your books and talk them up with patrons, however, you need to do more than just send out fliers and point to reviews; you need to meet with them face-to-face, explaining how your books fit into a well-rounded graphic novel collection, identifying the likely audience for your books, educating them about the creators, and giving them samplers or review copies. You also need to provide convenient ways for librarians to preview titles online — and you need to tell them about those online resources. The SigIKKI website is a great tool for librarians interested in building a graphic novel collection for adults, as it allows browsers to read entire volumes of manga for free and provides background on each of the featured artists, but if you’re not already a manga fan, how would you know about the site and what it has to offer?

Librarians can perform another valuable service for you as well: they can host events to raise awareness about your book, introduce readers to one of your authors, or engage them in a discussion of a broader theme. Done right, these kind of events can draw in long-time manga readers and newcomers alike, especially if you find a compelling hook for the material: a local mountaineering expert discussing the backstory to Summit of the Gods (and maybe sharing a few of his own pictures of Mt. Everest), an art historian tracing a particular manga-ka’s style back to nineteenth-century print-making traditions, a translator discussing the difficulty of adapting a script for English-speaking audiences, a film historian comparing scenes from a Masaki Kobayashi samurai film with sequences from Satsuma Gishiden.

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Update by Noah: The entire Komikusu roundtable is here.

Breaking out of the walled kingdom

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There are two kinds of people in the world, my father used to say: People who divide all the people in the world into two types and people who don’t.

Comics readers tend to be the former: They look at the world as made of up of the initiated, people who read their particular type of comic (be it superheroes, shoujo manga, or introspective graphic novels) and those who are outside the walled kingdom.

There is some validity to that, because most comics genres, like most other genres, require a certain initiation. In the case of superheroes, you almost have to be born into it; one could spend a lifetime learning all the backstories, interrelationships, and alternate universes. Manga readers have to learn a code of visual cues such as sweatdrops and cultural clues such as honorifics and holidays, not to mention how to read right to left.

People who don’t normally read comics, on the other hand, don’t usually define themselves as “people who don’t read comics.” Most, in fact, will pick up a graphic novel if the subject matter interests them. They might not be able to enjoy something very genre-bound like Blackest Night or Battle Angel Alita, but they might read Fun Home, Mom’s Cancer, or The Photographer, because those books tap into more universal experiences and interests. A lot of people read those books not because they are comics (although the medium may make the story more compelling) but because they are books.

A lot of literary manga deals in topics that adult readers are interested in: Oishinbo (gourmet food), Ooku (historical drama and switched gender roles), Suppli (workplace comedy and romantic angst). These are good stories about things people care about, and you don’t have to understand the intricacies of samurai life or the Japanese school system to enjoy them.

But before you can read them, you have to find them.

Noah asked us a simple question: How do you market art manga to readers? The answer is equally simple: Don’t market it as manga. Market it as books.

Some specifics:

Don’t shelve it in the graphic novel section: The first step in reaching that broader audience is not to confine the manga to comics stores or even to the graphic-novel section of the bookstore. Ideally, booksellers should keep a couple of copies around, some in the graphic novel section and some elsewhere: Put Oishinbo near the food section, Barefoot Gen near the World War II books, Suppli by the chick-lit, Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto next to the science fiction. Scatter a few literary fiction titles (Tokyo Is My Garden, Red Snow) among the “staff picks” novels in the center tables.

Flip it: The purists hate this, but for older readers, reading “backwards” is a deal-breaker. Furthermore, it marks the comics as manga, and for those who aren’t famliar with the medium, that starts a whole chain of associations: porn, big eyes, teenage girls, boobs-n-battles. A lot of readers, wrongly, think of manga as a genre; manga for grownups must be marketed separately from the shonen and shoujo teen fare. Titles with broad crossover appeal should be made accessible to all readers, not just the cognoscenti. You can always publish an unflipped deluxe edition for the hardcore otaku.

Hire Chip Kidd to do the cover: Or someone like him. Make it arty and attractive. Do not fill it with slashing shonen battle action or an upskirt shot of a schoolgirl. (If those things appear in your manga, you probably shouldn’t be marketing it to adults anyway.) This should be a book you are proud to be seen reading on the subway, not something that would embarrass you if your boss saw it in your briefcase.

Send it out to “mainstream” reviewers: There are plenty of graphic novel-friendly reviewers at big newspapers and magazines, and they have a lot of pull. I first heard about Fun Home on NPR, and not because they were having “comics day” or anything; it just was a compelling story. As a journalist, I can tell you that a new and interesting topic is always welcome. A manga about a family with an autistic child? Bring it on! A manga about bluesman Robert Johnson teaming up with bank robber Clyde Barrow? Sign me up! These are topics that are interesting just by themselves, and the fact that someone in Japan has chosen to make a comic about them makes them even more interesting.

Also, you know what can really sell a title? Online previews at hip websites. There’s something inherently cool about manga, so the occasional free sample would most likely be welcome. Smith Magazine, for instance, hosted the webcomic AD: New Orleans After the Deluge, and Words Without Borders has a whole graphic lit section. These websites already cater to readers with a literary and artistic bent, so they are likely to be a receptive audience for art manga.

Go digital: You knew I was going to say that, right? Everyone is doing it! The Kindle, the iPad, and the plain ol’ internet are places your potential audience can discover your manga and instantly read it. Here’s the thing, though: Go ahead and put your manga into comiXology and Longbox and those other … things… but let them stand alone as well. Recently, Longbox developer Rantz Hoseley talked about the possibility of having a link directly from a story on, say, the NPR blog, to their digital edition of a comic. That’s a great convenience, but the occasional comics reader just wants to read the book, not sign up for some complicated digital storefront that they will never visit again.

Harness serendipity: All these factors boil down to the same thing: Make it easy for potential readers to stumble upon a book, and once you catch their interest, make it easy for readers to buy it. Go back to the dichotomy I started with: Serious comics readers know where to find comics and how to buy them, but it’s a system that is invisible to most people and forbidding to those who do know about it. Superhero fans may be willing to go out of their way to a special store and pre-order their comics sight unseen, but the rest of the world doesn’t operate that way. Even the graphic novel section of a chain bookstores is terra incognita to most customers. The key to expanding the comics market, for art manga or any other type of graphic novel, is to step outside the closed circle of the comics world and find the readers where they already are. After that, the books should sell themselves.

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The entire Komikusu roundtable is here.

The Solution to the Scanlation Solution

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This article was originally posted on Okazu, as a discussion of scanlation in general, but this discussion is even more relevant to “arty,” more grown up comics, which will, by it’s nature, appeal to a smaller audience than anything mainstream. The smaller the potential audience, the smaller the potential market. Because it’s hard to get what they want to read, this audience created scanlation to serve their needs.

Here is a history of scanlation – and a suggestion for a solution that can be most effective for the titles least likely to reach their market with the current distribution models.

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Scanlation – the widespread, illegal act of scanning in books/comics/manga, sometimes translating them into another language and distributing them for free through digital formats and technologies.

Scanlation is, everyone will agree, a big problem. The comics publishing industry is losing sales even as downloads of scans hits numbers that most comics publishers can only dream about. The comics/manga journalists agree, talking as they do to the publishers and creators – who feel particularly angry in regards to the wholesale refusal of their “fans” to respect their IP rights. And the pundits who discuss the quickly disappearing value of copyright and IP ownership agree.

Cartoonist Scott Adams recently blogged on this disappearing economic value of content as it becomes easier to search for – without necessarily being involved in a ‘scan’dal himself. (Adams allows free and fair use for all his work, and encourages fans to do mashups, parodies and original work based on his material.

So, if everyone agrees that scans are bad, why are they so rampant? How can we fix this pervasive problem?

In order to fix the problem, we have to step back and realize that scanlations are not the “problem” – they were the solution.

I’m speaking here as a fan of manga, comics from Japan. When I started to read manga there were – to be generous – very few titles licensed and translated.

The fans who loved manga saw the problem clearly – there was a lot of cool stuff being drawn in Japan and very little of it was translated into English. So, they formed groups called “circles” – passionate volunteers who pooled skills and resources into scanning in manga and translating them. This way, they could share the series they loved with other people who would never otherwise get a chance to read them. It was (and largely still is) a love for a title that leads a person to scan it – not a desire to harm, but a deep desire to share and expand the audience.

Scanlation was the solution to the problem. It wouldn’t hurt anyone – none of those books (or anime series) were ever going to make it over here, so no harm, no foul. At least one person had to buy the book (or VHS tape) in order to render and scan it, so there was at least one additional sale to “pay” for the work. No scanlation circle ever made a cent on their efforts. They gave their love away for free, so they could call it fair use. And they were very specific – if you paid for a version of their scans or subs, you were ripped off and you were committing a copyright violation.

Then the digital revolution really hit and suddenly more series than ever were being scanned and subbed. It isn’t hard to get a scanlation – all one needs is a browser and a search engine. What had formerly been distributed to dozens of people was now being distributed to thousands or tens of thousands worldwide. Hits on popular scanlation aggregation websites go into the millions, bringing at least one such site onto Google’s list of top-visited sites.

And, in the middle of this, distribution companies started to license more series than ever. But now it was even easier to scan than before – often a scanned raw version is available, so no original copy is bought. Scanlators can put out a whole volume in days in just about any language a group might want. And the more popular, the more ubiquitous the content becomes, its economic value drops ever closer to zero.

What we need now is not a solution to the problem, but a solution to the solution.

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Scanlation affects three entities. The fans, for whom it is uniquely an excellent – and elegant – solution. The publishing companies, for whom it is a strongly negative factor in both incentive to license and in actual sales. And the creators, who are often clueless about the scale of the issue, feel helpless and angry if they are aware of it, and whose bottom line is the most damaged by it.

For the sake of meaningful discussion, I am going to ignore the existence of overtly criminal scanlators and subbers. These are people who illegally distribute books and series that are legally licensed and available in their country. They know they are committing a criminal act and do not care. Their audience is either naïve and unaware that these distributors are illegal – or they are aware and, like the scanlators, do not care. These people are engaging in IP theft and copyright violation with criminal intent. They are not relevant to this discussion, in which we are going to address the “problem” created not by the desire to steal – but by the desire to share.

I say that scanlation is a solution. The problem it solved was “things I want to read are not licensed for my country.” This was true in 1998 and now, in 2010, it is largely *still* true. I follow a genre called Yuri (lesbian-themed stories), which has had a Renaissance in Japan, but is almost completely unlicensed – and in many cases unlicensable, as the content is difficult, if not outright impossible to market in the western world.

I learned Japanese to be able to read these books but, for most of the audience, this is neither sensible nor viable. Scanlation of this genre is still driven by love of the genre and desire to share with other fans – this is the motivation of an “ethical” scanlation group.

Let’s take a look at a typical “ethical” scanlation circle as they exist now.

An “ethical” scanlation circle only scans series that are unavailable in their primary language. They strongly encourage their readers (what I refer to as “the audience”) to buy the book (to become “the market”) when it is licensed in that language. They do not charge for their efforts, do not have ads on their website, do not take monetary contributions to their efforts. Ethical scanlators may ask for donations, but are more likely to want resources (bandwidth, seeders, expertise, etc.,) than money. It’s a labor of love. These circles are often composed of people who do buy that original copy or two – and many of their senior members may also purchase the book in the original form to support the creator. Ethical groups pull their versions off the Internet – and ask their fans to stop sharing theirs, should they have them – as soon as news of an official license is announced for a work. And because ethical groups are trying to help, not harm, it’s a high probability that if creators asked them directly to stop scanning their work, they would.

I believe 80% of groups would stop, because as sad as it would make them feel, they really are only trying to help. That would leave 20% who voluntarily enter the real of “criminal” scanlators, in the sense that they know they are going against the creator’s wishes and violating their IP rights, but for whatever reasons, don’t care. Japanese and American manga publishers have just created an alliance to attack this 20% tip of the iceberg. I think this makes sense for them and wish them well at it. It is wholly within their rights and responsibilities to protect their IP. Interestingly, many of the ethical scanlators also dislike the aggregation sites precisely because these sites distribute material they have no right to distribute, i.e., work done by scanlation circles. Ironic as it is.

Despite the ethical scanlators’ best intentions, not all of their audience is as ethical as they are. Not everyone in their audience wishes to support the creators or the publishers. Many plead lack of funds as a sufficient reason to only download scans. Some fans have oddly selective memory and will recall a slight from years ago by a publisher who dropped the ball, and will use that as justification for never buying from that company – even if by doing so they would be supporting a creator whose work they love. For many of the audience scans are their only option, as no companies in their countries have made an attempt to license what they would like to read. For these people, scanlation continues to be fair use of the content.

Lastly, there is the issue of translation. One of the pervasive arguments against scanlations is that official translations are better in all ways. Unfortunately, this is very often not the case.

Publishers are bound by contracts, copyright, and requirements from the licensors, creators and market forces. A name may be commonly translated by the fandom in one way only to be altered by the licensor or creator to something that looks/sounds/feels utterly absurd to a western fan. I can remember reading a book in which the main character’s family name was Naitou, but for some reason, the creator wanted it spelled Knight-o…which just looks silly on the face of it. If a character’s name rides the edge of a possible copyright infringement, it must be changed, not because the publisher hates the fans, but because there is no comics publisher around that can afford ongoing lawsuits with major western media companies who guard their copyrights with an absurd, creativity-killing zeal. Publishers are at the mercy of hired translators and editors who they hope are accurate and skilled. And, lastly, publishers are bound by the need to *sell books.* This means that a publisher may make a decision to change something to make the book appeal to more than just the core audience – sometimes at the risk of offending the core audience. Scanlation groups are not bound by any of these issues and are free to translate names in a way that is a common usage among fans, or which makes the most sense.

Scanlation groups often do a tremendous amount of research, to explain puns and literary references, offer historical context, descriptions of military terms, define common honorifics and generally provide the reader with as authentic a reading experience as possible. Publishers, for any number of reasons, will often not do this. In one case I can think of, a licensed series that previously had detailed translation notes has now had them cut back to nearly nothing, so that many of the references simply go undecoded. It might be because of money or time, but many licensed series can’t provide that level of detail. Not every scanlation group does this, of course, nor does every publisher skimp, but I can easily call to mind several series in which the scanlation groups did a better job than the legit publisher and several groups who work is professional quality (in some cases because professionals work with them.)

And, finally, there is the issue of out-of-print material. I will admit that, up until a few years ago, I was providing a scanlation group with material from a magazine that is long out of print, never had collected volumes and was in danger of disappearing, forgotten. I have stopped, because of my shifting feelings about scanlations, but I do not regret having done what I did.

Some of the American comics scan sites distribute back issues – the infamous HTML Comics touted that as their raison d’etre. The owner of this site, which has now been shut down by the FBI, insisted that the companies left him alone because he only made old material available. It’s true that a die-hard fan can find any number of avenues to find and purchase Thor #142, but for a casual reader, it makes no sense to attend a show or hunt online for a single volume that you simply want to read once. That’s why libraries exist in the real world – and there are no pamphlet comics libraries available to the average person in Whatevertown, USA.

The sole problem, really, with scanlations is that they are illegal (and, perhaps, immoral.) The scanlation group is distributing something they do not have the right to distribute. In effect, if they could gain permission from the creator, scans would *still* be a very elegant and simple solution to the problem. Permission is very much the crux of the matter here. Musician David Byrne wrote about a creator’s right to grant permission on his blog, in which he says plainly, “It’s not just illegal because one is supposed to pay for such use and not paying is, well, theft — it’s also illegal because one has to ask permission, and that permission can be turned down.”

So, in the past, the problem was “things I want to read are not available” and the solution was “scanlations.”

Now, what is the current problem? Not scanlations, which are the solution to a previous problem.

I propose that the problem we are really dealing with is this:

1) Readers want what they want to read, in their language, for a reasonable price (or free), in a reasonable time frame, in a format that is not reliant on a single standard, format or hardware.

2) Creators want the right to make decisions about their work, grant access and distribution rights, give *permission* and make a fair wage from their work.

3) Publishers want to be able to sell materials that they have paid to license (or to create) and make enough money in doing so that they can pay their employees, themselves and have money to invest in new properties.

For readers, the problem hasn’t changed all that much. Readers’ expectations have changed, because at this point it seems absolutely absurd that I really can’t just get what I want to read in my language. Regional licensing? Why? Clearly it doesn’t help Czech readers to learn that a Korean version has been licensed, or English readers that France will get a release of a book they’d like to read too. The fact that DVDs are still region encoded when most DVD players are no longer limited by that seems more of a sad memory of some ancient gerrymandering of the planet than anything useful or intelligent. Where is our global economy?

For the creators, the problem hasn’t changed at all. Where once upon a time, the companies took your content, threw you aside, then wrung the content dry, now the fans do it too. Nice way to say “thanks” for all that hard work.

And for the publishers, the problem is seemingly endless and constantly shifting. How to determine what titles are most likely to actually sell, to license work people want, get it to them quickly and with high quality, and for free, then provide a way to sell books as well, without involving a distribution model that relies on some third-party company whose decision-making is schizophrenic at best and seems pretty heavy-handed all the time, or whose hardware requires a proprietary format.

The solution we need must address at least the first two of the above three issues. It’s already clear that publishing is changing, and if the role of publisher disappears into a world in which readers and creators interact directly and meaningfully then I, as a publisher, don’t mind all that much. But, I do think there is a place for publishers in the new solution, even though the concept of “publisher'” will change.

Now, all that has gone before is a discussion of “The Problem,” which was really just the solution to an earlier problem. It’s time to consider the “The Solution” to our new set of problems.

I had this discussion on Twitter and received an enormous amount of excellent feedback. Here are some (not by any means all) of the specs of the new Solution. None of these are my ideas, this is a synopsis of the collective mind.

But, before we move into the specifics, I want to be up front and address the obvious argument against what I am about to lay down – it all seems utterly unreasonable. Of course it is. It’s crazy thinking. Off the rails. This is not a solution that fixes a problem – what we need now is a solution that creates an entirely new vision. I believe that the heart of this new solution is in the core of the old one – the passion and love the fans have for comics and manga. I’ve seen both technology and process shifted by scan groups as a way to better serve their audiences. If we can harness that to begin with, we’ll have a strong start.

The solution needs to be platform- and technology-independent. Not hardware dependent, not company/distributor dependent. Manga Expert Jason Thompson posted recently about how badly the iPad serves manga with schoolmarmish  standards of what is “appropriate.”  Many articles exist about how Kindle and Nook at this point, are not good for graphic novels. There is more commentary about the increasing difficulty of distribution of printed comics and manga than any one person can really keep up with. We need something better, something that allows creators to make their own decisions about how their work is viewed and readers to make our own decisions about what content we choose to read.

There must be self-regulated community standards so that children can find comics that suit and so can adults, without having to be “protected” from porn by over-zealous hardware gods.

Creators should get payment for every download/view and also reasonable payment for every approved modification, parody or use of their material. For instance, if a creator approves a translation of their comic to Uigur, a small fee (one in proportion to the number of people on the system with that as their primary language) can be paid by a group, so they can then translate that work into their language. The download/view fees will then pay the creator royalties for their content. Comic artists will have control over what happens to their work, and will be paid for the use of it.

“Publishers” will be anyone who is not a creator, but modifies a work by translating, editing, retouching, relettering, etc, for an approved project. This will give passionate fans the ability to share their favorite works in a legitimate manner. Perhaps these “publishers” can get a percentage of the approved projects that are downloaded/viewed. For instance, if that Uigur scan group is composed of 5 people, every time the Uigur translation is read, the translator, editor, proofreader, letterer and retouch person might get a small percentage of the download/view fee. 95% of the fee would get to the creator who approved the work and each of the scanlators might get 1%. Tie scanlation circle ratings to the relative financial success of the work, and the ratings will indicate to a creator not only the skill a circle brings to the problem of translation, but also their marketing strength. Circles will have a direct motivation to make sure the creators make money on their work, or their own ratings will fall.

There needs to be a creator community and a reader community as part of this solution. Every scanlation group has a community and it’s this that keeps the group – and the love – alive. Fan work can/will be encouraged, but also managed. Some creators are already going this route on their own – taking their work online and developing their own methods to monetize it. This solution would provide a home for all creators, worldwide, to do the same, in a way that allows them to focus on their work, not on the technology of distribution.

Reader and system suggestions – and free previews of series that are not in the readers’ normal genres – will help stimulate reading.

And, for those of us who still love the feel, smell and look of books – print on demand capability, with reasonable price points. Like pamphlet comics? As long as the creator gives their approval, each chapter can be printed that way, or as a whole GN volume. The creators will have the opportunity to merchandise directly in the form of whatever products they want – T-shirts, postcards, or limited printed lithographs of a cover piece. It will be up to each creator to decide what they want to do and what form it would take.

Take the passion already put into scanlations, give it the power of community, suggestions and ratings, add the freedom of webcomics, a creator community in multiple languages and above all of this allow *permission* to be granted by the creator and fees to be paid for the use of the content.

I am not smart enough to do this, but I am convinced it can be done. It’s not in a company’s best interest to come up with the solution – companies have to pay bills, they have to protect the IP they have and the status quo of how they work.  It’s not in our best interest to let the companies dictate the formats and hardware we use to read our manga.

I challenge all of you out there to create this new solution. And I challenge you to all work on this, not wait for someone else to build it. Scans were developed by fans to solve a problem. Don’t focus on the problem – or why this can’t work – focus on the solution and how it can – then let’s make it happen. Also, let’s lose the fannish binary of  either/or. There can be *multiple* streams of distribution in this world. There’s no reason to think that this solution can’t exist parallel to seven other forms of distribution, including magazines and books.

For the creators who want control of our work and readers, who want freedom to enjoy that work in our own way this is an unparalleled opportunity. We can all create a new paradigm that will make readers, creators and publishers equal stakeholders in an industry and in the content we all love.

Erica Friedman is a content creator, a publisher and a reader.

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Update: The entire Komikusu roundtable can be read here.