cmx and the great manga disappearing act of 2010
there's been a lot of discussion, in the english-speaking sections of the web that care about manga, about the abrupt close-down of cmx, dc's manga line. some things seem obvious - people couldn't find the books in bookshops and comics shops got stung several years back and have been warier of carrying cmx books since (here in wellington, borders carried some but the two comics shops were unable to import them), and dc's marketing was ineffective to invisible. some fans hated them because they censored tenjho tenge (and i must admit i quite like that kind of thing and i've stayed well away from that title for that reason). their production qualities weren't always the best and i got so irritated by the errors in fact-checking in emma that i went looking for an email address so I could point them out, and couldn't find one on the site. but one thing that struck me when i looked through the series they've published (on their website, which has apparently vanished, even though the official end date is 1 July, so no linkage) was just how many books - series and physical volumes - there were. and how many i'd never heard of that sounded intriguing.
hence i thought this post from simon jones [post itself is fine but site nsfw] was interesting since it asks the simple question of whether a mid-list manga company can actually make money without a big property (naruto, fruits basket) subsidising its other books. i've recently read almost the entire backlist of go!comi, and there's barely a stinker in there - kanna and bogle would be my least favourite. but they didn't have anything that generated enormous sales, and while i'm sure publishing so many first volumes in 2008 was, in retrospect, a mistake, that lack may well have been the reason for their demise. after all, there's a lot of manga out there with more being published all the time, and how's a purchaser to choose? especially if you're addicted to long-form series (i have several that are 20 or 30+ - god knows how long berserk will end up being). i spend far more than i should on manga to begin with, and my list of series i want to purchase is frighteningly long. so to go back to an earlier point, in a very perverse way the good thing about companies like cmx biting the dust is that purchasers like me have less choice about where to distribute my dollars, which might be healthier for the long-term survival of manga in the west generally.
there's also something in there about shojo. go!comi's titles were pretty much all shojo. (i qualify this - kamisama kazoku is fanservice seinen and kanna is apparently ecchi shonen, though i just found it confused and squicky. 07 ghost is categorised as josei because of the magazine it was serialised in but for all intents and purposes it's shojo.) cmx's were largely shojo, and fantasy shojo at that, which narrows it down even more. sure, there was more variation - they had shonen-ai trending titles like seimaden and some seinen - again, mostly fantasy/horror - but they also published a hell of a lot more. and the thing about the shojo audience is that it may be large and enthusiastic, but i suspect it's less moneyed than other audiences - like dark horse's, for instance, or the yaoi buyers - and it's spoilt for choice because there's so much of the damn stuff out there. it also doesn't last forever. statistics from japan show the drop-off in manga readers through the age-brackets - from memory over-65s who still read manga was about 2% in the survey i saw. i'm pretty sure i'll still be reading the stuff, but the bulk of teenage girls won't be. that's no reason the market can't continue to grow, as more readers turn on to manga, but it's necessarily limited, and we'll never have the saturation of the japanese domestic market, which is having considerable issues of its own anyway.
i think what i'm saying here is publish more josei, dammit! manga fans with jobs and decent incomes will buy it, promise! and while you're at it, please don't flood us with dire, crappy yaoi. just because we like a bit of 2-d smut doesn't mean we don't have taste and discernment.
hence i thought this post from simon jones [post itself is fine but site nsfw] was interesting since it asks the simple question of whether a mid-list manga company can actually make money without a big property (naruto, fruits basket) subsidising its other books. i've recently read almost the entire backlist of go!comi, and there's barely a stinker in there - kanna and bogle would be my least favourite. but they didn't have anything that generated enormous sales, and while i'm sure publishing so many first volumes in 2008 was, in retrospect, a mistake, that lack may well have been the reason for their demise. after all, there's a lot of manga out there with more being published all the time, and how's a purchaser to choose? especially if you're addicted to long-form series (i have several that are 20 or 30+ - god knows how long berserk will end up being). i spend far more than i should on manga to begin with, and my list of series i want to purchase is frighteningly long. so to go back to an earlier point, in a very perverse way the good thing about companies like cmx biting the dust is that purchasers like me have less choice about where to distribute my dollars, which might be healthier for the long-term survival of manga in the west generally.
there's also something in there about shojo. go!comi's titles were pretty much all shojo. (i qualify this - kamisama kazoku is fanservice seinen and kanna is apparently ecchi shonen, though i just found it confused and squicky. 07 ghost is categorised as josei because of the magazine it was serialised in but for all intents and purposes it's shojo.) cmx's were largely shojo, and fantasy shojo at that, which narrows it down even more. sure, there was more variation - they had shonen-ai trending titles like seimaden and some seinen - again, mostly fantasy/horror - but they also published a hell of a lot more. and the thing about the shojo audience is that it may be large and enthusiastic, but i suspect it's less moneyed than other audiences - like dark horse's, for instance, or the yaoi buyers - and it's spoilt for choice because there's so much of the damn stuff out there. it also doesn't last forever. statistics from japan show the drop-off in manga readers through the age-brackets - from memory over-65s who still read manga was about 2% in the survey i saw. i'm pretty sure i'll still be reading the stuff, but the bulk of teenage girls won't be. that's no reason the market can't continue to grow, as more readers turn on to manga, but it's necessarily limited, and we'll never have the saturation of the japanese domestic market, which is having considerable issues of its own anyway.
i think what i'm saying here is publish more josei, dammit! manga fans with jobs and decent incomes will buy it, promise! and while you're at it, please don't flood us with dire, crappy yaoi. just because we like a bit of 2-d smut doesn't mean we don't have taste and discernment.