Wired November Cover: Manga Conquers America

November 3, 2007 in Manga by Tom Langston (calaggie) | 1 comment

Remember a couple weeks ago when I posted about the decline in manga sales in Japan? Well, this month’s issue of Wired Magazine has a feature story about Japan’s manga industry as well as a 10-page manga-style history of Japanese comics in the United States. The main article begins at a dojinshi market called Comic Ichi, shifts to providing the reader a sense of the art format’s influence within Japan, and returns to the topic of dojinshi artists while suggesting that the pool of enthusiastic artists could hold hope for solving the industry’s issue of homogeneity.

The author Daniel Pink is quick to remind his readers that almost all the works – his estimate is about 90 percent – at this and similar markets blatantly violate copyright. It’s so prevalent that Pink suggests that:

…an American intellectual property lawyer probably would not have lasted more than 15 minutes. After cruising just one or two aisles, he would have thudded to the floor in a dead faint.

Pink pointed out that most of these dojinshi are putting the borrowed characters into new situations and bringing to the forefront themes, relationships, and plotlines that lay under the surface in the official stories. He gives an example of a 24-year-old bank employee who is bored with her job and draws an alternate universe comic of Chibi Maruko-chan where the characters have aged properly and face teenage issues.

The reason why Japanese publishers are not suing the fan artists is there is an “unspoken, implicit agreement” (anmoku no ryokai) between the two groups. One of the doujinshi gathering organizers is quoted as saying:

The dojinshi are creating a market base, and that market base is naturally drawn to the original work….[The convention floor] is where we’re finding the next generation of authors. The publishers understand the value of not destroying that.

Pink states that that particular business model “helps rescue the manga industrial complex in at least three ways” – taking care of their customers, allowing them to find new and potentially rising talent, and providing them with cheap effective market research of what is popular among the core audience. He then brings up Lawrence Lessig’s concept of a conflict between the “read only” and the “read/write” cultures in relation to his proposal that the Japanese intellectual property laws could be adjusted to allow for dojinshi writers to be properly protected and not viewed in the eyes of the law as no different than photocopies – what Pink calls “a misalignment between the emerging imperatives of smart business and the lagging sensibilities of old laws”.

Overall, I thought the article was interesting to read for the opinions of those involved. The manga history also gave me some new information and there were some funny panels in it like a giant Pikachu being milked and Astro Boy wondering what Spiderman has that he doesn’t.