obfuscobble:

spacetwinks:

honestly when the manga bubble was at its peak in america was a really fucked time in comics publishing, especially among (but not limited to) the big 2, where they were simultaneously dismissive as hell of manga but desperately wanted all these readers who were coming out of nowhere. and they just… didn’t understand it! refused to understand it! did no research, didn’t talk to anyone. everyone’s reading CLAMP and inu-yasha and bad yaoi manga and all these other things they never could’ve gotten on the american print market and marvel and dc and a whole buncha indies were going “huh? what? what’s the appeal?”

and like you get marvel’s level of engagement with it, where they made the fucking “marvel mangaverse” and hired ben dunn, the guy behind goddamn oldass Ninja High School, to spearhead the whole thing, and of course that didn’t pay off, because it was all rooted in 80s anime shit while everyone else was moving onto new stuff (not to mention, ben dunn’s stuff kinda sucks to begin with, but). they didn’t even keep up with shit getting hot like Gundam Wing dropping on toonami in 2000, going from what’d been a fandom mostly cultivated through bootleg fansubs to something much, much wider in appeal. it was this incredibly cynical thing where they wanted to cash grab but refused to even learn a damn thing about the readership they were trying to get. people buying and reading shojo volumes by the thousands and they kinda didn’t even know what that was? kinda didn’t want to. again, they didn’t wanna learn about the readership, the market.

and once tokyopop fucked everything up and the manga bubble popped, that dismissiveness really kicked into high gear, and you can hear horror stories everywhere of everyone from big ol’ publishers down to the smallest editor or artist in the industry dismissing anything that looked “manga inspired”. mia schwartz had a whole convo on twitter about this, and how a lot of that dismissal specifically happened to women doing art, in or out of the industry, or even just as early as friggin middle or high school art classes, this vast dismissal of manga influences. since manga weren’t flying off the shelves anymore once the market had been flooded, the industry, from marvel to dc to just about everywhere (with rare exceptions, like at dark horse and such – lord knows a lot of the indie comic biz still would have that dismissiveness, to outside voices in general) felt more assured in just going “none of that, none of that, that won’t work”. you’d hear and see artists and writers dismissing manga and manga influences wholesale, in terms of readership, sales, and even artistic value. lots of “everything is the same there”, probably done through a cursory glance of shonen or whatever, but the mind just springs to “let’s see you motherfuckers try and make and sell a comic about football”.

and the real motherfucker of it is how with that kind of dismissal, they keep pushing out not only vast potential readership, but also creators themselves, people who now grew up on oldass scanlations of just about everything and go “no, no, that’ll never work”. so it goes straight to webcomics and self-publishing instead, where they can garner their own fanbases and stories which frequently outshine the industry publishing.

i’m no fan of attack on titan, but there was a string of articles pointing out how just about every major comic site was not reporting on and generally ignoring how that thing, once published in the US, was already selling millions of volumes, dwarfing anything the major comics publishers were putting out. and that’s while everyone already could, and probably did, read it for free online! that’s incredible!

and so you get this lumbering dinosaur that 15 years later is still looking at manga and people reading it and going “huh? what? what’s the appeal?” and is still playing catch up to that 2000 bubble in terms of content and genre and just appealing to broader demographics. you get marvel, who, after scoring big wins with diversifying both their character variety and their story styles (Ms. Marvel winning big on a slower, more slice-of-life superheroics tone and pacing), come back to post-Secret Wars announcements that look more and more homogenized. and you still hear the horror stories of people with “manga” influences in their work, mostly women, getting their stuff dismissed out of hand by publishers and creators. and it all ties back together in these really interesting but incredibly frustrating ways. a lot of things that seem minor in their connections to each other having bigger bonds in the mess than you’d think.

you got this big industry, this field, that looks at this massive readership, even after the initial manga bubble pop, and it just goes “i don’t get it” or “it’s all the same” or “they don’t matter” and where you’d think they’d chase endlessly after where the money is, they pretend it doesn’t exist.

the american comic industry/field is really fucked up, and really fucking slow to adjust to a damn thing!

I was there in college before and during and after the bubble burst.  This is the truth and real.