The manga market in North America saw explosive growth during the COVID-19 pandemic, growing sales, with year-to-year sales climbing steeply in 2020 and 2021, and in the latter year manga became the dominant category in the US comics market with manga sales accounting for nearly 55% of all comic sales for the year. The growth in sales between 2021 and 2022 was much more modest, less than 10%, and seemed to indicate the market had hit its peak and was starting to stabilize, with sales showing a decline as things slowly creeped its way to more level numbers. Even so, the new normal for the manga industry is still much higher than it had been in 2019, and market trends look favorable to sustainable manga sales going forward. However, while the manga market in the U.S. is bigger than before, publishing professionals and industry insiders have differing opinions and perspectives on whether the current state of the industry is stable for the long-term, or whether they’re in a bubble about to burst.
At New York Comic Con 2023, manga journalist and Mangasplaining podcast host Deb Aoki brought together a dynamic duo of experts from two of the leading manga publishers to discuss their thoughts on the history of the manga market in North America, the current state of the market and how it’s changed over the last few years, and what they foresee the future of the manga publishing industry will be like. The panelists were Alvin Lu (CEO and President of Kodansha USA Publishing) and Kurt Hassler (Publisher, Yen Press), both of whom having over 20+ years of experience in manga publishing, seeing the industry go through many phases and changes during their time in the industry.
The beginning of the conversation focused on the first manga boom in North America in the early 2000s, when manga started to be more regularly published in its native left-to-right format and be stocked in brick-and-mortar bookstores. Manga being stocked in bookstores widened its availability to consumers, and made big box bookstores destinations for audiences who didn’t typically visit comic book shops. This latter development was especially important to expanding the market to be more accessible to and inclusive of female readers, who were often made to feel unwelcome in traditional comic shops and spaces. The importance of shojo manga, manga written specifically for young female readers, was essential to manga’s success and growth in popularity in this period, opening up comics readership to a long underserved and ignored audience. Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura were highlighted in particular as game-changing titles that paved the way for even more licensing of shojo titles, many of whom like Fruits Basket and Nana would also prove to be immensely popular and some of the best-selling titles in the market during their heyday, and even now. The explosive popularity of shojo manga during this time period was a watershed change for who manga publishers focused on providing content for.
Alvin reflected on the change in scale of manga publishing during this time. Viz used to do, at best, a 5000 print run for volumes, even Ranma ½, their best-selling title in the early 1990s and arguably the title that put them on the map before the company struck gold with the license for Pokemon. The growing popularity of anime on tv in the late 90s and early 2000s, propelled by titles airing on Kids WB, Toonami, and Adult Swim, expanded the audience and reach of manga considerably. For example, Naruto at its height averaged a 300K print run per volume. That scale is rarely seen even now by the biggest manga titles.
Complimenting the points made about Shojo, Alvin expanded upon Viz’s early efforts to market manga to adult readers. He highlighted Pulp, Viz’s short-lived Seinen manga magazine, which published largely ignored titles, including the English debut of Junji Ito with Uzumaki. Kevin noted that you can track the history of manga publishing in the US through Junji Ito’s work alone, and how it has grown tremendously in popularity over the years, to the point where Ito is now a multiple-time guest at San Diego Comic Con and multiple-time Eisner winner, and anime adaptations of his works have been produced for global audiences by entities like Netflix and Adult Swim.
But Pulp wasn’t just a manga magazine. Viz’s goal with Pulp was to make connections between manga and broader Japanese pop culture, going beyond the manga and anime. This is how Gen Z engages with Japanese media now, but Pulp was 25 years ahead of its time. While Pulp was short-lived, its team went on to seed the market and become some of its most stalwart editors and critics in the space, including Carl Horn (Neon Genesis Evangelion, Excel Saga), Shaenon Garrity (Knights of the Zodiac, Case Closed), and Jason Thompson (Manga: The Complete Guide, House of 1000 Manga), as well as Patrick Macias, who later became the CEO of Otaku USA and the runner of Crunchyroll news. Sadly, Pulp lost a ton of money for Viz and had bleeding sales, though Pokemon’s success helped recouped the costs. Even so, Deb notes that Mangasplanning is hoping to do what Pulp did in terms of bringing over indie, underrated manga, like Okinawa, Search and Destroy, and Giga Town.
Going further into the history of manga magazines in North America, Kurt discussed Yen Press’s Yen Plus, one of the last gasps of print manga magazines in North America in the late aughts. Mark remarked how for Yen Plus, it made sense to replicate the format of Japanese manga magazines, but the business of publishing a manga magazine here sucks because the margins are low and dealing with distributors is hard. Ultimately, publishing Yen Plus was not sustainable, especially in the face of the piracy/aggregators movements and content mining from IRC channels. The late aughts, following the great recession, was a difficult time for both the anime and manga industry. Anime started to be scaled back on American tv, to the point it was only airing on a scant few channels. The publishing and bookselling market bust, and the collapse of Borders and other bookstores dramatically impacted the manga industry in North America. Manga magazines had no chance to survive after that point. Kurt lamented that Yen Plus was a good idea impacted by the realities of the business that were going on beyond their control.
Even so, transitioning and adapting to the shift to digital was a multi-year challenge of negotiating with Japanese publishers, as Japan for years would not talk to them about getting digital rights. It took years and years of discussions and lobbying on the part of English publishers to Japanese publishers. They wouldn’t even meet about it. They wouldn’t grant US publishers’s permission to do something they wouldn’t do themselves. World English rights and territorial rights were also a point of contention because publishers only have rights in certain territories, but Japanese publishers were still hesitant to bestow broad international rights.
Alvin commented on how Viz adapted to changes following the Lehman Bros. Crisis in 2009 and entering a downturn period. He noted that despite the volatility of the market during this time, it actually pushed Viz to create more curated publishing labels and expand the diversity of their offerings, starting Haikasourou, a light novel publisher that had major success with All You Need is Kill, and SuBLime, which initially started out as a side project and ended up becoming the most stable BL imprint and brand in the market. On the anime side, to find different ways to get their titles in front of the eyeballs of fans and viewers after Cartoon Network changed strategic direction and dropped most anime from their schedule, Viz talked to Hulu and Crunchryoll and learned more about embedding videos on their own site, while also distributing Naruto to those platforms.
The downturn forced Viz to look at things in new ways and opened up things on the digital rights front, with the digital Shonen Jump magazine being a major revolution in the accessibility of manga made available digitally the same day and date they’re available in Japan. Viz also developed their own digital platform internally after ComiXology launched. It was a significant effort in 2010, as there were not many examples of comics platforms for them to reference. But their early results worked pretty good, and a lot of Viz’s digital infrastructure that exists today was built upon the same platform.
Alvin had studied a little engineering in college, and that experience helped when he joined Kodansha and spearheaded their push to digital. Once they had digital rights secured, that was a game changer, allowing them to offer digital-first titles for series they were unsure of committing to print, as well as their own simulpubs for popular ongoing titles. He noted that manga sales have quadrupled in part thanks to digital availability, and while they’re now plateauing, it’s still the #3 book category.
Deb asked Alvin and Kurt for recommendations of breakout titles from their companies they feel reflect the diversity of stories now available in the market. Alvin recommended the Darwin Incident. The author, Umezawa, has never been to America, but thanks to social media observations has done a great job of interpreting and depicting American culture, and is a great x-ray of American culture. Alvin described it as a narrative freight truck, and thinks it would make a great tv series. Kurt spotlighted The Summer Hikaru Died, a melancholy horror BL that began life being posted on Twitter before the author, Momokuren, was approached to serialize it in Young Ace Up, as an example of a title propelled by its digital availability and word-of-mouth online, and the growth in popularity in both horror and BL manga in the North American market.
Regarding manga retail trends, Alvin has observed that the Glendale Barnes & Noble now has massive manga section, which points towards a broader recognition of manga in pop culture, as well as audiences moving through different mediums of consumption. Meanwhile, Kurt has seen more stocking at stores, and that mass merchants are now stocking books, including the big boxes like Walmart and Target. When massive retailers like those go after manga, it’s incredibly impactful to all of their sales. Walmart and Target has 10 times more reach than B&N and other bookstore chains, which really widens accessibility. Kurt notes that the recent downturn is happening because those retailers have a sell thru expectation, and if products reach the end of their life cycle and don’t meet expectations, they pull it. However, Yen Press now has their own retail outlets. Yen and Kadokawa have opened their own store called Manga Spot, and aims to improve selection over time while looking to service areas in the country that don’t have dedicated bookstores. Kurt comes from retail background, so he gets to flex his expertise with this project, as publishers’s biggest challenge is making manga as accessible as possible. Kurt notes Yen may expand beyond current venture. James Killan, the former manga buyer at B&N, is leading project, which Kurt muses as ironic as he was his former rival when he was working at Borders.
Alvin reflected on how he used to fly to Walmart headquarters trying to negotiate with their buyers to pick up Naruto at its heights in the aughts, but they wouldn’t go for it back then. Now, Target’s best-selling Kodansha title is Blue Lock, a soccer manga, which would’ve been unthinkable a decade ago, much less twenty, and really shows how much the market has changed and grown to accommodate such a diverse variety of titles, where the genre or demographic is no longer a serious barrier to a title becoming a massive success in North America. While the conventional wisdom is against doing something interesting in the market, both Kurt and Alvin have found greater success when pushing the industry into new territory.
To close out the panel, Deb asked them where they think manga publishing will be in a few years. Kurt says that the market is double what it is now, but still a fraction of the penetration seen in other markets. European markets have more availability per market cap, room to grow, enthusiasm, new readers and new fans all the time. So the growth potential is there, and they’e come along way from trying to kill this category 20 years ago in bookstores.
Meanwhile, Alvin thinks the Japan side will change their traditional models. As manga becomes more global, since global business is the business of the rights market, there will be a greater importance placed on the secondary income from international territories. He believes North American publishers will be working with the Japan side to build a global business together, and that will be a big change that will bear results in next five to ten years. Kodansha is reworking their website for free content, tweaking their SEOs, and serializing debut content on the site. Blood Blade, a manga take on classic monsters reimagining classic monsters as teenage girls, is their first English-first debut title, with free chapters serialized and available to read until collected. There is a global marketplace for this content, with Kodansha’s original english-first manga, like Blood Blade, being one of these early experiments in rethinking the Japan-first model of manga publishing. It is a forward-looking approach toward a future where manga is no longer primarily thought of as comics made by Japanese creators for Japanese audiences with global markets treated secondarily, but by creators and for audiences from all over the world.
