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Posted on 04/04/2003 6:26:13 AM PST by SlickWillard
Bookscan covers sales at major retailers, including Barnes & Noble, Target, Barnes & Noble.com, Costco, Hastings, Borders, Musicland, Amazon.com, and independent bookstores. It doesn’t track sales of trades through food and drug stores, book clubs, airports, or specialty retailers. Bookscan data is available to publishers on a subscription basis.The thing to notice here is that the people who read manga are not your typical comics fans; they're Ordinary Joes and Janes who have little to no interest in costume-clas superhero stories. The manga titles in the Bookscan Top 20 above feature stories of high school sci-fi romance (Chobits), teen soap-opera romance (Mars), gun-slinging futuristic gangster drama (Cowboy Bebop), college love stories (Love Hina), teen drama (GTO), medieval sword-and-sorcery fantasy (Inu Yasha), and slapstick comedy crime/caper tales (Lupin The 3rd). Of the manga listed above, only one (Dragon Ball) features kiddie superheroic action -- and it's clearly marketed to children.Bookscan numbers themselves have been contested here and there, but reports from book trade distributors express confidence in the Bookscan numbers, with several distributors pointing out that Bookscan’s numbers map very closely to what their numbers suggest.
Most recently, [American manga importer/publisher] Tokypop made reported Bookscan numbers, showing that, according to the service, they held 18 of the top 20 slots of graphic novels sales during a one-week period, the increment in which Bookscan reports. As part of the report, Bookscan reports on (estimated) current week sales, last week’s sales, and the year to date sales.
As a result of measuring sales on a weekly basis, the Bookscan charts are relatively more volatile in regards to any given title’s position. For example, for the week which ended 12/15, Bookscan reported the following:
Rank, Title, Current Week Sales, Year to Date Sales, Weeks on Sale
1. Marvel Encyclopedia, 1017, 4991, 8 2. Origin, 932, 4579, 6
3. Chobits V3, 793, 13609, 12 [Japanese]
4. Mars #7, 785, 2190, 3 [Japanese]
5. Wish #3, 766, 2190, 4 [Japanese]
6. Cowboy Bebop #1, 660, 23332, 20 [Japanese]
7. Love Hina V1, 650, 21426, 20 [Japanese]
8. Love Hina #7, 633, 6699, 7 [Japanese]
9. Cowboy Bebop #3, 587, 8939, 18 [Japanese]
10. GTO V8, 562, 1607, 3 [Japanese]
11. Chobits V2, 552, 18545, 20 [Japanese]
12. Wish #1, 550, 8479, 13 [Japanese]
13. Inu Yasha, 517, 10569, 15 [Japanese]
14. Chobits V1, 511, 25523, 20 [Japanese]
15. Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again, 502, 1718, 2
16. Love Hina V6, 494, 8272, 12 [Japanese]
17. Ragnarok #1, 483, 11283, 28
18. Planet Ladder V4, 479, 1311, 3 [Japanese]
19. Ultimate Spider-Man V1: Power and Responsibility, 459, 23845, 81 20. Love Hina V4, 457, 11917, 19 (tie) [Japanese]
20. Inu Yasha V2, 457, 7808, 15 (tie) [Japanese]
21. Dragon Ball V1, 425, 12513, 102 [Japanese]
22. Dragon Ball Z V1, 423, 10594, 8 [Japanese]
23. Love Hina V5, 415, 9528, 15 [Japanese]
24. Lupin The 3rd V1, 413, 955, 2 [Japanese]
25. Love Hina V3, 409, 13845, 20 [Japanese]If nothing else, Bookscan data clearly demonstrates the evergreen nature of trades, again, confirming claims by publishers that the volumes can act as steady revenue streams. While some superhero titles seem to be benefiting from this, such as Ultimate Spider-Man V1, which can still land in the top 20 for a given week’s worth of sales after 81 weeks in release, manga titles seem to benefit from this phenomenon as well, with titles such as Cowboy Bebop, Love Hina and Chobits all showing up in the top 20 for the week, after 20 weeks on the market. Compared to monthly comics, whose sales peak after usually one week, and rarely show strong sales after four weeks, given their periodical, monthly nature, it’s clear to see how publishers recoup the costs of a trade that has long-term appeal.
Additionally, manga’s dominance of the top-selling titles for the week ending December 15th (23 of the top 25 sellers for the week, and 38 of the top 50) continues throughout the top 50-selling titles, with the next superhero title showing up at #34, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, for which Bookscan reported 344 units sold, and 1065 sold year to date, after two weeks in release...
[W]hen viewing the top 50 selling trades for the week ending December 15th, non-manga titles only accounted for 12 of the top 50 selling trades, DC and Marvel were the only non-manga publishers represented.
American comics are over. Marvel and DC make far more money licensing their classic characters than they could dream of by selling their thin, crappy comic "books"; take away the movie deals, TV rights, and Underoos and both Marvel and DC are bankrupt -- because only the hardcores read that stuff now. Manga has saved the American comics industry by providing readers with comics that ordinary people want to read, not just Technicolor teen power fantasies for the mom's-basement set.
I have read and enjoyed both Japanese and American comics since I was a child. Superman is one of my fictional father-figures (along with James T. Kirk!) and I love American strip cartooning (in the classic Milton Caniff sense -- not the stuff that gets in the papers today). I have also been a professional comics artist for ten years, and I currently have more work than time in which to do it -- and all of it is retouching and redrawing Japanese comics for American sales.
The American comics publishers have no one to blame but themselves for the death of their genre. By catering exclusively to the tastes of comics fanboys (and by allowing fanboys to run the comics companies), they have niche-marketed themselves right into the grave, forcing them to pull of sensationalistic stunts (death of Superman, Captain PC America, etc.) to try and grab for a bigger slice of the ever-shrinking fanboy market pie.
Let them die, I say. Good riddance. If you haven't read a Japanese comic, try one. You can buy them at the bookstore -- the clean, well-ventilated, well-lit bookstore -- down the street.
Hahaha. How true that is. Leftist-Geek Adults at that. =)
The X-Men 1-10, when Kirby still drew them, was the most phenomenal run of any comic, ever.
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He's been heavily exposed to the classic Marvel comic characters I loved as a boy, mostly Spider-Man and X-Men from the 60's and 70's and early 80's. He's also been heavily influenced by kid's anime - Digimon, mostly - and sword and sorcery fantasy, like Tolkien and CS Lewis. There's a great, classic-style super hero PC game called Freedom Force that is a perfect example of what a conservative alternative to today's PC garbage can look like.
Look forward to seeing the heroic fantasy genre recaptured by conservatives at some point in my life. Maybe the veterans of the War on Terror will have the same impact on the field 10 years from now as the WW2 veterans did in the 50's.
Where was medved when the Scarlet Witch married the Synthozoid Vision? Or that they dare have a comic book about a pagan god of thunder!!!
Side discussion: I don't get Medved's take on this--he wants Cap to work for the Pentagon? Republican? Captain America was created for comics in the early 40s to fight Nazis months before Pear Harbor. Since the creators were of many comic book idols were American Jews from Eastern Europe, you would expect that kind of story line (Example: Superman-Moses).
Since Roosevelt in the Comic and in the character's history was responsible for the Super Soldier program, and Captain America-being in civilian mode a crippled young man of Irish-immigrant parents from the slums of New Yorl City working for a Roosevelt era public artists program - would that not make him a New Deal Democrat????
See what happens when adults collect comic books!
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