Category Archives: Roundtables

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.

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.

***

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.

Komikusu — Introduction

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A couple weeks back Sean Collins wrote a post over on Robot 6 asking folks to propose comics arguments they’d like to hear more often. In comments, on that thread, Kate Dacey offered this response.

There’s a similar divide in the mangasphere [between art comics and more popular titles] as well: a lot of sites focus on mainstream shonen and shojo titles (the manga equivalent to tights and capes, I guess) while neglecting the quirkier stuff. To be sure, there are many sites that cover the full spectrum of titles, or focus on a niche, but the pressure to stay current with new releases and draw traffic discourages a lot of folks from waxing poetic about the stuff at the fringes. Looking at my own site stats, for example, a review of Black Bird or My Girlfriend’s A Geek will attract a much bigger readership than, say, The Times of Botchan.

Which brings me to the argument I’d like to see explored somewhere: how do we interest older readers in manga that’s written just for them? What kind of marketing support would, say, the VIZ Signature line need in order for some of those titles to crack the Bookscan Top 750 Graphic Novel list? Are there genres or artists we should be licensing for this readership, but aren’t?

That sounded like a great argument to have to me…so, with Kate’s help, I’ve organized a roundtable on HU to explore the issues Kate has raised. The critics who have agreed to participate are, in no particular order:

Kate Dacey of The Manga Critic.

Ryan Sands of Same Hat!

Brigid Alverson of lots of places, inlcuding Mangablog.

Erica Friedman of Okazu.

Shaenon Garrity who writes at tcj.com.

Deb Aoki of About.com.

Ed Chavez of Vertical.

Peggy Burns of Drawn & Quarterly also graciously granted permission for me to reprint a short email she sent me in regard to the roundtable, so that will be appearing in the mix as well.

The title of the roundtable was suggested by Ed Chavez:

I would possibly call it… “Komikusu” (Comics) is Japanese for manga

The reason I’d say that is in the seinen and the experimental manga world most manga is not called manga it is literally called comics. However for the longest time pubs and editors there have gone about presenting this category (particularly seinen which happens to be the most stable demographic in manga) as sequential art for the masses. Not just for kids or teens, men or women, but for anyone.

Erica Friedman will kick off the conversation tomorrow, and others will be posting throughout the week. Many thanks to Kate Dacey and Bill Randall for their suggestions and help in pulling this together. And of course thanks to all those who agreed to participate: I’m really looking forward to it!

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Update: Erica’s post is now up.

Hooded Polyp: Beyond the Binary

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Much has been said, this past week—not to mention and this past year or so—about David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp, and I feel I don’t have much to add to the discussion of the work itself that I haven’t already said in my earlier examination of the book. However, I think much of the discussion in the present forum has highlighted how excitingly—albeit also frustratingly—open discourse on comics is in these times of redefinition. My contribution, thus, will at least initially concentrate on this discourse rather than on the book, which is perhaps fitting in that Asterios Polyp itself can be seen as meta-discourse on comics.

I agree fully with Caroline’s Sunday post that the binary of visual and literary is ultimately a false one, not the least in comics, but it remains central to contemporary comics discourse, and critical approaches that do the form justice as a synthesis of word and image have yet to develop beyond pubescence. Caroline rather cavalierly accuses Mazzucchelli and his critics of missing the point by perpetuating this pernicious binary, while bluntly claiming that the book “pays disproportionate attention to one side of the binary, the “visual.”

I see Mazzucchelli’s aspiration precisely as the “performative enactment of the ways in which comics defies the binary between literary fiction and visual art” that Caroline solicits from progressive comics. As she rightly points out, ‘literature’ does not necessarily equate ‘words only’, and Mazzucchelli follows that insight in order to craft comics as literature. Reducing Asterios Polyp’s thematic core to a set of trite literary clichés, as several of the present pundits have done, is symptomatic of how vigorously said false binary animates comics criticism—like so many important works of art, Asterios Polyp’s originality lies exactly in how it presents these common tropes in highly sophisticated comics form.

Furthermore, Asterios Polyp is hardly a manifestation of “delayed modernism”—I don’t believe there is such a thing: comics as we know them are gloriously a creation of modernity and they experienced ‘modernism’ along with all the other art forms, long ago. Rather, Mazzucchelli’s project is emphatically post-modern, in that he addresses the modern(ist) legacy of comics in an attempt to assert its value, as well as to suggest its current limitations. His choice of protagonist, plot structure, and symbology is patently deliberate and highly self-reflexive—in order to examine the notion of comics as literature, what could be more natural than approaching some of the most tried tropes of modern literary fiction in the exaggerated, simplified form developed and refined historically in comics?

As I wrote in my essay, Mazzucchelli reveals his post-modernist hand in a crucial feat of obfuscation. Presenting us with a self-consciously heavy-handed refutation of his protagonist’s dualist worldview in lucid, fully-realized comics form, he leaves unstated essential aspects of his story. When probing these, his “formalism” takes on literary meaning in the broad sense of the term, and the book ends up, on one level, as a deconstruction not only of its constitutive tropes—literary as well as cartoony—but of comics as literature in the narrower modernist sense.

As metadiscourse, Asterios Polyp as bold and sophisticated as anything in comics, but its success ultimately might have to be gauged elsewhere and on more uncertain terms. The readings made here of the main characters, Asterios and Hana, have tended toward the ungenerous, and this is no doubt in part Mazzucchelli’s own problem for miring them in this seemingly prescriptive construction of a story, which threatens his larger ambition of transcending the limitations of his form. It’s arguable how well he succeeds, but I, for one, find the lives they live beyond what he makes visible recognizably affecting. Asterios’ worldview doesn’t provide a satisfying framework for understanding his actions, but we can try by going beyond it. And for Asterios, and therefore the reader, the true Hana remains intuited rather than stated. But they are both there, beyond the binary.

Hooded Polyp: Earthy Anecdotes

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In Caro’s recent post she argues that Asterios Polyp fails to deliver a kind of literary complexity.

The result is the reiteration – on the level of performance if not assertion – of a hierarchical division between “the literary” and the “graphical”: a dichotomy that is aggressive and dismissive in precisely the same way as Asterios’ treatment of Hana. It is completely uninformed about how literary fiction works. It creates a destructive incoherence at the center of the book.

I’ve probably bashed Asterios Polyp enough for one lifetime at this point. But I thought it might be interesting to look at a couple of examples of works that I think demonstrate the kind of literariness Caro is looking for.

I’ve been rereading Wallace Stevens recently, and I’m quite taken with this poem, the first in his first collection:

Earthy Anecdote
Every time the bucks went clattering
Over Oklahoma
A firecat bristled in the way.

Wherever they went,
They went clattering,
Until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the right,
Because of the firecat.

Or until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the left,
Because of the firecat.

The bucks clattered.
The firecat went leaping,
To the right, to the left,
And
Bristled in the way.

Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes
And slept.

As with a lot of Stevens’ poetry, nobody seems all that certain what the fuck this means. I’ve seen various efforts to parse it as some sort of allegory (the firecat means “change” was one particularly painful example.) But none of them are very convincing. Even the relation of title to poem seems maddeningly obscure. How is this earthy? Is there some sort of bizarre sexual double entendre known only to Stevens? That seems fairly unlikely — and yet, no other explanation presents itself.

The confusion here is, I think, on one hand simply a result of looking too deeply, or of coming at the poem from the wrong perspective. A lot of Stevens’ writing seems to me to be inspired not by abstruse epistemological theories or Romanticism, but by children’s poetry. “Earthy Anecdote” makes most sense if read not as allegory or complicated symbol, but as nonsense verse. Dr. Seuss’ battling tweetle beetles aren’t symbols of the futility of martial endeavor. They’re just goofy fun for kids. Similarly, the clattering bucks and the firecat are entertaining images. It’s fun to say “bucks went clattering over Oklahoma.” (Go ahead, try it. I’ll wait.)

At the same time…Stevens was also, and undoubtedly, inspired by abstruse epistemology and Romanticism. And he was writing verse for adults, not kids. Starting his first volume of poetry off with a bit of extravagant silliness is a fairly dramatic line in the sand — even if the line is curved. It’s a certain kind of statement; an elliptical declaration of love for the earthy, clattering bucks rushing about in glorious, purposeless panic — metaphors in frantic search for a meaning. In that vein, perhaps you can see the firecat as Stevens himself, leaping here and there to goad his images (and perhaps his readers) into a lather, before closing his bright eyes in self-satisfied pleasure. Or, alternately, Stevens might be the bucks, thrashing this way and that in an effort to avoid a meaning which is always leaping to thwart them — and which, in lazy triumph, curls around the poem at the end despite every horse’s best efforts.

None of these explanations are “right”, I don’t think. Rather, the point of the poem is the pleasurable possibilities of the point of the poem. That’s how the modernist puzzle works; the poem is playing with its own interpretation. Form and content (buck and firecat?) aren’t separated, or even separable; the content of the poem is its own metaphors. The reader doesn’t so much understand the poem, as shuttle about inside it. It’s a joke where the punchline is that the form of the joke is the punchline.

There are not a ton of comics that play these kinds of shell games with meaning, form, and content. But one example that does spring to mind for me is Yuichi Yokoyama’s Travel. In my review on Comixology I wrote:

Yokoyama had wrong-footed me. I was looking for realism, and so I found the epistemological uncertainty frustrating. But the book isn’t realism — or not exactly. It’s pomo; Yokoyama’s tongue is in his cheek the entire time. Take the scene of ducks flying over the plane as hunters shoot at them. The footnote points out that the hunters all miss, and indeed, you can see the ducks traveling in a perfect V, not even disturbed by the shells exploding in pristine, regimented bursts all around them. The demands of narrative (somebody shoots, somebody hits) are sacrificed, with a wink, to the exigencies of layout. It’s as if the hunters and the ducks are not adversaries at all, but part of some single great mechanism, controlled by one guiding hand. As, of course, they are.

In Travel, as in Stevens, the sleight-of-hand manipulation of the tropes of the medium, the formal elements of the work, are themselves the content. As a result, modernist works like this are like two facing mirrors; absolutely flat surfaces leading into infinite depths.

I’m not saying that this is the only kind of worthwhile art by any means. I don’t want all art to be playful modernist puzzles anymore than I want all art to be slasher films or shojo. Still, Stevens and Yokoyama are great, and I wouldn’t at all mind seeing more comics that followed in their hoofprints.