For those new to manga, Joanna Draper Carlson of Comics Worth Reading offers her recommendations, which include “Hikaru no Go,” “Hot Gimmick,” and a favorite of mine, “The Kindaichi Case Files.”
This story is a sidebar to a longer article on why kids like manga. One interesting point, from marketer and writer Robert Boyd:
Boyd believes manga’s popularity goes beyond that of Japanese cartoons (anime). “Manga have grown in popularity (based on sales) over the past year, while anime DVD sales have been flat. So, obviously there is a connection, but it would be wrong to suggest that manga is merely a coattail rider,” he said.
Interesting because the anime community seems much larger to me than the manga community. Of course, quotes like that can be misleading—manga sales could be smaller overall than anime sales.
The third piece of what is a really nice package on this topic is a manga timeline.
UPDATE: I just wandered over to Love Manga to see what was new and they have posted the same article—and the same quote. Great minds think alike!
Oh wow.. that is just spooky!
Great minds indeed! *Grins*
Manga and anime communities are quickly becoming one and the same. Anime drives manga; manga drives anime. With so many manga in English, the fans here are finally becoming just like the fans in Japan: 90% of all anime are just adaptations of manga titles. When Bleach anime first start airing recently, the FIRST thing the anime fans here do is to taking about manga comparison. Some like anime, some manga, but most importantly almost all fans will enjoy BOTH. All good manga discussion boards are part of anime boards, if you’ve noticed. The trend will only continue. I can’t imagine anyone enjoying the anime Furuba would refuse to read the manga to see how it really ended.
Tivome,
I have noticed that all good manga discussion boards are part of anime boards. That’s one reason why I started this blog—to provide an all-manga site. But I agree there’s a lot of crossover. Since I started doing the mother site, http://www.manga4kids.com, I have noticed that there seem to be a lot of manga titles that don’t have anime associated with them, maybe because they’re too new. I wanted to have a forum to discuss those as well, and to discuss manga-specific issues, like reading kana.
Brigid
The article makes it look like I was saying the readership of manga was bigger than the viewership of anime. What I meant was that while they had huge overlapping fanbases, they weren’t identical. This can be inferred from the fact that anime sales are stagnant while manga sales continue to grow (at least for 2004), and by the fact that surveys show the readership for manga to be more female than the viewers of anime.
I think there is little value at looking at the internet fan sites and discussion boards to see who is reading or watching some kind of media because I think these sites tend to attract ultra-fans—a non-representative subset of all consumers of a given kind of entertainment. In other words, both manga fans AND anime fans are far more diverse and have very different concerns than the fans one might find on Anime on DVD or ANN. Publishers do themselves a real disservice if they use those sites for market research (although they are useful for other things—viral marketing, for example).