American Newspapers to Begin Carrying Manga

jonerik writes to tell us The Associated press is running an article stating that several American newspapers are going to start carrying manga with their normal arsenal of comics. The papers feel that this will help boost their readership amongst a younger audience. The two strips that made the cut are Van Von Hunter, and Peach Fuzz which are both created by American writer/illustrators and are being distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.

Re:How do we know this is manga?

[Fallingcow]

Style.

The Japanis comic art style is distinctly different from traditional (pre-Japanese-influence) American-style comic art.

I prefer American comic art, myself. I can't recall ever seeing any manga that looks like something I'd want framed and hanging on my wall, but there's tons of American comic art that'd look great up there. Anything by Alex Ross, for example.

The "Manga-ized" American comics are awful. It's like they took the worst elements from both and stuck them together. Ugly as hell.

Re:I only read comics made in the USA

[kaleposhobios]

C'mon, you didn't even read the summary. Both the manga are created by Americans.

Re:To Boost Readership?

[InsideTheAsylum]

There are 3 or 4 things that I read in the paper (in order), the comics, the editorial page, the police reports, and maybe, maybe, the front page. Comics /do/ sell the paper and thankfully my paper publisher listened to the complaints of many and cut the likes of Cathy (UGH!) out and put Dilbert (finally!) in. Were there no comics, I'd probably not ever read their newspaper.

Re:How do we know this is manga?

[burrows]

For what it's worth, Piro, the artist behind the online comic MegaTokyo [megatokyo.com], wrote an extensive rant [megatokyo.com] on the problem of what to call this type of art. I don't think it really answers the question, but it certainly adds some food for thought. If not manga, what is it?

Re:Not news

[Liam Slider]

It's "Manga" ever since the English language adopted the term to mean that particular style of comics.

Re:The newspaper?

[geekoid]

"Also there are more trees in the US now than back in 1940."

which is still a tiny number of trees compared to 200 yearsa go. Also, natural forests have a different eco system then a bunch of tree carefull planted in a line.

If the paper companies didn't need those trees, then those areas could be used to grow the correct kind of timber for houses.

Of course, once reality sets in, one quickly relizes that the current situation is the best for are current culture.

Manga means younger readers?

[Lunis Neko]

I don't know about you but I've read quite a few manga... Though I've never read this "Peach Fuzz" or "Von Von Whatever" I have to say that manga is hardly anything that is for kids. I would say that the normal comics you see in newspapers today actually appeal more to "kids" than manga ever would. In Asia mangas may be read by 10-14 year old kids alongside the older readers, but that is only because Asians are more... For lack of a better word... "Mature," and are exposed to more "mature" content (not as in pornography, but as in complex and hard-for-kids-to-understand) at a younger age. If anything, adding manga to the Sunday Funnies will likely draw more adults.

Tokyopop, Shoujo, Contracts, 4-koma, and AmeComi

[echocharlie]

Just wanted to clarify a few things:

Tokyopop [animenext.org] is one of the companies that started the whole manga boom. They weren't the first, but they definitely contributed to the market. They started out being called Mixx, and originally published the Sailor Moon manga in english. They started releasing other Shoujo manga (manga for girls) and did well initially.

Eventually, they saturated the market with a lot of titles and started seeing diminishing returns on their profits. Naturally, they looked at other markets to expand into. One of the things they did was to run a regular "Rising Stars of Manga" contest where they encouraged artists to submit material to them in the manga style, with the winner being offered a publishing deal.

I've been told that terms of the contract heavily favor the company, and that they own the rights to all the material that gets published. They've been calling this product OEL manga, or "original english language manga" and are trying to differentiate it from the so-called "ameri-manga" that is published in the comics industry.

There's really no difference between OEL manga and Amerimanga, and it's basically a marketing tactic. Make no mistake, this is OEL manga, not the stuff published in Japan. But like manga, it's very free in it's layout of the various panels. Moving to the standard 4-panel (or 4-koma in Japan, which is published vertically as opposed to horizontally) format will be difficult. It'll be interesting to see how they accomplish this.

Even though they refer to it as manga, Japanese people make a distinction between the stuff published domestically and abroad. American Comics are usually referred to as AmeComi, and OEL manga probably falls under that umbrella. So while it's nice for the marketing folks to say that manga is being published in newspapers now, it really shouldn't be considered manga.