Lets talk american comics

[Otakumegane]

Ail said:

Otakumegane said:

You know what's funny though, you walk into a library, Borders, Barnes and Nobles etc. And the manga section is still always bigger than the comics section. Hell my high school and middle school libraries had more Manga than comics. (They are placed side by side and just labeled comics though)

Now the question is, why did the American comics industry crash while the Manga industry is still thriving?

Yes I live in the U.S.

No seriously though why did it crash.

The American comics industry crashed in the 90s because of speculation, collectors and flooding of the market by bad quality titles...

It's actually doing a lot better these days.

In 2012 the comics industry was a 715 million$ business ( best numbers in 19 years) and revenue has been growing very nicely for the last 2 years.( both print and digital which is quite a surprise, you would think digital would grow while print drop but both have been growing nicely.)

The manga industry is actually however shrinking ( down 43% since 2007). One Piece is doing crazy good, the rest of the Mangas not so much......

 

You won't notice this much though if you only walk into bookstores because around 2/3rd of comics sales in the US are done in Comics stores...

 

One of the main reason comics have been growing again is the following :

- successfull relaunch by DC of its main line of comics

- Walking Dead phenomenum...( walking dead graphic novels are selling like hot cakes). heck Walking dead number 100 single issues sold over 300k copies..

- Graphic novels. 20 years ago it was a small market for comics and now it's becoming very big as pretty much every single issue comic gets reprinted in a graphic novel compendium...

Comic stores eh. That makes sense then.