Eric Kleefeld from Page 2 of this thread - "The reason I often bring up manga distribution in this country as an example is that it's such a glaring example of how one crowd is getting it so perfectly right while the other crowd (the marginalized group we call "mainstream" comics) has no clue what it's doing and
obliviously celebrates sales of 40,000."

Okay, I'm not sure if anyone else brought this up earlier but there are a few caveats to the idea that manga is doing it "right".  Manga in the U.S. is mostly in book form.  Comics are still mostly in serialized mini-magazine form.  Most manga in the U.S. are reprints from Japan.  Most comics are original material.  Now there are obvious economic realities that flow from those differences.

But if we are to take 40,000 monthly sales as the mark of unqualified success in comics...how many manga volumes sell 40,000 copes a year?  From what I know of book sales figures, even at today's sales levels most comics sell better than many books.  There are a heck of a lot of authors who wish their books would sell as well as Spider-Girl.

Manga does have a greater bookstore prescence than comics and sales have grown from virtually nothing to fairly healthy, but whenever I've see manga and comic sales figures I see that they still don't sell as well as comics, even with the huge loss of sales comics have seen in the last 15 years.

Mike

"What's wrong is the fanboy turned writers and editors producing stories unpalatable to anyone but their own inbred circles. "

Unpalatable to anyone? Not true, there are the numbers. Why to speak generically? Why not to name titles? Perhaps due to the unpalatable (to you) titles being the first on sales list?

What are the numbers on 'palatable' stories (D.P, for instance)?

Ok, Hello everyone.

I realize that I'm coming into this discussion rather late, and perhaps what I'm going to say has been discussed already.

For me, one of the main reasons I was attracted to the world of comics in the first place as a kid was the fact that it was an immersive fantasy world.  It fed off of my imagination, and I felt like I was transported to another reality where not only was I making new discoveries all the time, but also where anything I could possibly imagine could happen.  At the time, it was a unique avenue for this kind of experience.  This was before the proliferation of VCRs and DVD players, just before Nintendo, so the only other place I could find the same thing was in books or at the movies.  Now I read and went to movies, but comics provided a continuously expanding world, where I could get weekly or monthly updates on either my favourite characters or some new, unexplored part of that world.

If I were a kid now, I'd probably, like most kids today, turn to video games, where I can now get the exact same thing: immersive, ever expanding fantasy worlds.  Simple as that.  Comics have been left behind.

To me at least.

Thanks, Matt. Some day, my broken english will become 'fixed' english.

By the way, Joe, good point about games. I agree.