Hokeyboy

And they wonder why manga is absolutely destroying the American comics industry in terms of sales.

Josh-da-man

To be brutally honest, I find most manga just as unreadable as American capeshit.

davidh777

After Comixology was ruined, most of my comics purchases have been from supporting kickstarters. That shit is REALLY expensive.

fujishig

We've talked about it elsewhere on this forum before but manga has somewhat of an unfair advantage in terms of pricing: we are basically only getting reprints after the core audience has already paid for their copies, it's expected to be in black and white, and probably most importantly most manga artists/creators are paid like crap/have terrible working conditions. That being said, because it is culturally more normalized and broad than just cape comics, it does have a reach exceeding what is traditionally thought of as the American comics market, and it is much easier to jump into than whatever the tangled continuity mess that superhero comics are. It is still amazing to me that Viz's releases of Deadpool Samurai outsell every single Marvel tpb, and handily.

But if you really want to see a dominant market domestically, check the pseudo comics/books like Captain Underpants and Dog Man and the stuff of Raina Telgemeier, that's what kids read.

slop101

Unlike single-issues, at least collections can be bought at a discount.

Like, I recently got the Immoral Hulk Omnibus (fantastic book, BTW) for $75, which is 50 issues, so it comes to $1.50 per issue.
Not to mention it's an over-sized hard-cover with good paper and no ads.

cultshock

Comic books are still huge sellers in Japan, they are sold everywhere, e.g. convenience stores, subway kiosks, etc. and are really cheap compared to here (or at least were the last time I went there), and have titles that appeal to almost anyone, so there is still a big market for them, unlike with our comics here.

PhantomStranger

I saw something like 20-30 million people in Japan consume manga on some level. Now that's spread over many niches and genres, whereas here in the States superhero comics basically only cater to one market.

When US comics lost the newsstand, they lost access to more casual readers who would pick up stuff like romance comics and Westerns. They also never really got over the stigma comics were made for kids.