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Forum - View topicManga Answerman - Why Aren't More Anime-Related Manga Published in English?
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Shiroi Hane
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 7580 Location: Wales |
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When CR started doing manga I said they should concentrate on titles where they had the anime and it ended “unfinished”, like Kamisama Dolls etc. Never happened. So many anime are adverts for original stories we never see in English...
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jdnation
Posts: 2032 |
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People would rather subscribe for digital all-you-can-read services, than pay for specific digital purchases.
So I guess for the subscription services, they measure how many people are reading it and then might make a decision for print based on those statistics. I'd also guess that publishers also look at the unofficial scanlation statistics to see which fan-translated titles are garnering interest before licensing. And of course there are likely those titles that will sell on the creator name alone, either the artist or writer which might make it a no-brainer, but those are rare as creators are usually stuck to a franchise for a number of years outside of those like the Deaht Note duo who will work on shorter series. |
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Sir Daniel Fortesque
Posts: 236 |
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I wouldn't buy digital because the price is usually more expensive than physical, Kodansha manga is $11 digitally but I can get em off Rightstuf for like $7. I also prefer tangibility to things I buy. I would however pay for an all you can eat service like Viz's Shonen Jump if more publishers got in on that.
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 941 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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That would be great to have, but probably doesn't make financial sense for them to actually do.
That's the most key thing to me; tangibility of what I buy. I'm kind of okay with digital music because I can download it and keep it and back it up, but (correct me if I'm wrong here) the various comics and manga digital purchases use DRM and are tied to a specific app. I'd tolerate it if it were akin to Spotify; a subscription cheap enough to not exceed my "give a damn" threshold with unlimited access to at least a majority of titles I'd want to read. |
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zawa113
 Posts: 7358 |
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There's actually a lot of manga that get physical editions in parts of Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Polish, Spain etc), and their markets are almost certainly going to be smaller than the US market (just based on number of speakers). How are they able to justify publishing while the US can't? Like France has Tomorrow's Joe (granted, France IS huge on comics, so I'm likely underestimating their market size), Acid Town is published in German and Polish, The Breaker is published in Polish, France got Rainbow, there's just tons of titles that have gotten physical releases in Europe and it seems it worked out ok for them. Do they charge less for the licenses? I can't imagine that's quite it.
And I also don't do digital. Part of it is that I just don't have a good reader, but I prefer physical books. I would LOVE to buy copies of stuff like (only naming things with digital only copies here) Chihayafuru, Space Brothers, Saint Young Men, Perfect World, Altair, Can You Just Die My Darling?, and probably others I'm forgetting. I don't mind if they go straight to omnibus form either, but I need my physical copies (lack of space be damned!) Besides, I know how Kindle works, you're just semi-permanently renting those titles, but if they're taken off, you can lose them. Also, I doubt we would've ever gotten Yona of the Dawn or Snow White with the Red Hair, or a variety of other manga licensed here without those anime for them. I'm honestly surprised it took so damn long AFTER the anime came out for them to get picked up though. |
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fuuma_monou
 Posts: 1829 Location: Quezon City, Philippines |
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The U.S. comics market is ridiculously small relative to the population of the U.S. |
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 539 |
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Yeah, it's been my experience that when fans wonder why the manga to an anime property hasn't been licensed, they're vastly overestimating the viability of the series in the US. So many of these attempts at a franchise have come and gone and nobody remembers them (Kaze no Stigma comes to mind).
According to The Rise and Fall of the Comic Empire, the comic industry today sells about as much as it did in the 80s--but only has about a quarter of the readership. It's mostly getting by as an IP farm. I mean, kids' comics and manga are doing gangbusters in the US and are noted points of growth for the industry, but why would the industry pay attention to those? There are Batman books to put out! /sc |
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AmpersandsUnited
Posts: 633 |
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The last time I looked at the numbers, which was admittedly a few years ago, the French comic market was much larger than the American comic market. The basic reason more manga aren't licensed in America is because Americans don't read much comics outside the ones attached to currently popular anime. Licensing anything else is a huge gamble. I would assume France has a much more diverse and healthy manga licensing scene than America does.
Not everyone wants to read children's books, though. It's nice kids like to read Dogman and it sells well, but anyone above preschool age wouldn't be interested in those titles. The market for actual readership in comic books keeps shrinking year after year, but companies know how to fudge the number to make it look like everything is fine: increasing cover prices, overshiping to stores, including manga in the reports. As you say, they're little more than IP farms these days and only kept around for that. But we've also seen the rise of highly successful crowdfunded comic books, so there will always be a dedicated market towards them at the very least |
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TonyTonyChopper
Posts: 257 |
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Being European and kind of being an outsider to this to some extend i do find the English manga market in particular sometimes laughable considering how big it is in potential it's really not taking a whole lot or risks i mean once in a while some intresting stuff happends but really not all that much.
France Italy and Spain (Germany) in particular have often way more intresting stuff i'm also talking alot about the classics !!! The English market should be more bigger in potential yet most publishers do really boring save stuff like the newest shonen jump fluff moe and fanservice and all other generic trash you can think of. Take SevenSeas for example they started out as a really save company releasing boring generic stuff but then they suddenly got into classic manga yet it seem the classic line already seems to have stopped before it even started. The same thing can be said about Vertical INC i loved Vertical INC for the longest time but in the last 5 years i have hardly bought anything from them ... Then you have like Udon wanting to publish The Rose of Versailles how many years is that still gonna take ? Then there's DMP manga which calls himself an inovative company yet many casuals have never even hard of them ... They also do alot of generic stuff but they also bought all the rights for Osamu Tezuka which turned out to be a curse. They took all the easy accessibility out of it and even worse they still have to publish a kickstarter almost 2.5 years old so not any Tezuka in English has even been published in like forver ... And even when it finally does most titles (in print anyway) non backers will not even able to buy them ... Before you are going to complain that enough manga is being released in English most of it is just not the stuff i would actually wanna buy ... also Space Brothers digital only are you kidding me 
Anime on the other hand in English compared to other regions seems to be more evenly matched and sometimes the English industry beats Europe to the puch with it. With things like the old Legend of the Galactic Heroes for example Lavish collectors editions of some Anime do also seem to be more of a USA thing. Also companies like Discotek/rightstuff releasing alot niche titles do help as well. |
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Ali07
 Posts: 3333 Location: Victoria, Australia |
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This is the reason I don't believe I'll ever see The World God Only Knows get licensed. I'd buy them in print, either as single volumes or omnibus releases. Just want this in my hands in English. 
Understandable. And, I will still only stick with print only. Because, I have no guarantee that something released digitally will see print. I'd be throwing money at a product format I don't particularly enjoy, in the off chance they'll re-release it in the format I want it...and then have the pleasure of buying it again. Not for me. My wallet will only stretch so much, so I will stick to the series in the genres I like that publishers decide to print. Yes, there will be series I'd like to read that I never will. But, there is still a lot out there in print for me to enjoy. |
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moff
Posts: 19 |
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Those markets are way bigger than the US one, with the exception of maybe Poland. It also helps that a lot of anime aired there on free TV back in the 70s/80s/90s, so when kids who watched them grew up, some of them wanted to read the source material. And the US physical size definitely doesn't help from a logistics POV. |
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daisicles
Posts: 28 Location: USA |
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It depends on where you buy from, really. A couple of publishers offer pdfs straight from their own storefronts, which aren't tied to any single app, but with other publishers, I typically find that they allow downloads of their books in epub format when you buy on Kobo. Kobo has an app and a couple of my books are restricted to that app, but as long as the sale page for a given book specifies file format down in the book specs, you should be able to download them and read them in other apps. I generally don't buy from Amazon or Comixology any more bc they don't provide me with the easy download option like Kobo does, even when they're cheaper. Last edited by daisicles on Sat Jun 29, 2019 2:52 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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jdnation
Posts: 2032 |
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Regarding the North American market.
Aside form the fact that marvel and DC have run their IPs into the ground in terms of books as there's only so long you can go by doing the same characters all over again and rebooting your universe... The other issue is that comics and animation is still seen as a children's medium. Sure manga does gangbusters, but that's also in the kids market and young readers from what I could see - appealing titles like One Piece, Naruto etc. and that includes more adult titles like Attack on Titan, that are still picked up by younger readers anyway. Americans would rather wait for live-action theaterical movies and TV shows. That's where the money is being made. It's also why you'll see more Hollywood licensing of anime/manga titles to adapt. And they'll do that until they run it into the ground too. At least manga doesn't have the same issue with old sagging IPs, and know to end something when it does (endless merchandising excepted). It's only issue would be certain genre fatigue (for example, eventually isekais will run their course), but then they'll just shift to another trend. For this reason the manga industry is much more flexible. I believe this will change with more immigration from Asian countries where they will like to continue reading the stuff they are used to reading at home. It is also the case that American comics don't seem to have anything the equivalent of weekly chapter releases like manga does, and prefers a more monthly schedule with full colour, so audience retention is lower. Certainly there are several Batman titles releasing weekly, but those are each separate stories, and continuity about any one of those is a mess of confusion to keep following. And frankly, most new comics fans would rather buy the older classic stuff than the newer stuff. |
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Calsolum
 Posts: 899 |
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It's probably just the old man in me talking but I abhor digital-only releases.
Granted my subscription to J-novel club introduced me to Faraway paladin and unwanted undead adventurer because I got a subscription to read realist hero(or it might've been Faraway paladin that lead me to realist), I'm not a fan of the model at all. |
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OjaruFan2
Posts: 664 |
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Why? |
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