Why I think manga is outselling American comics
Posted: 20 Jul 2021, 19:57
I can't speak for everyone, but the reason I think manga is outselling American comic books is because the individual stories don't get as stale. Sure, they have tropes. Every culture has tropes. But that's not what I mean by stale. To put this into perspective, I used to read Marvel comics heavily. But I got bored of them for rehashing the same stories and too many retcons in their mainline comics.
Take Spider-man. He started out as a nerdy high schooler, graduated and went to college, dated different women and lost one to death, finally got married, made friends with Flash, moved from being a photographer of the Bugle to a high school teacher, and eventually revealed his identity to Aunt May. Sadly, once the Civil War arc came into the Marvel Universe, they started retconning all of Spider-man's progress. Aunt May was brought back from the dead, Spider-man was no longer a high school science teacher, and it was like the 60s and 70s Spider-man all over again; old and cliche.
X-Men was another good case in point. Grant Morrison pushed the characters forwarded whereas Joss Whedon wrote an inferior version of Chris Claremount's X-Men with his Astonishing X-Men, in which character and story progress was retconned to make things more comfortable for the nostalgia crowd. The number of times X-Men, both heroes and villains, have died, only to always be resurrected cheapened the story and made the so-called 'dangerous world' they lived in appear vanilla and less dangerous.
I could go on and on. Of course, it's hared to keep stories fresh and relevant when they have been around for 50 years or more. You can only do so much with a character and a story before it becomes stale. You can only develop the character so much. It's an unfortunate reality of mainstream comics.
However, from what I understand, manga is owned by the creators. Am I correct? Because of it, the stories usually (with a few exceptions) have a beginning, a middle, and an end, full of good character development without needless retconning. I love my stories to have beginnings and ends. Most of these stories (again with a few exceptions) can go out on a high note. This is why I think manga is doing better than mainstream comics. What do you all think?
https://ultramunch.com/worldwide-manga- ... an-comics/
P.S. I forget, how do you get the link to show a thumbnail? It's so annoying that it doesn't automatically do that.
Take Spider-man. He started out as a nerdy high schooler, graduated and went to college, dated different women and lost one to death, finally got married, made friends with Flash, moved from being a photographer of the Bugle to a high school teacher, and eventually revealed his identity to Aunt May. Sadly, once the Civil War arc came into the Marvel Universe, they started retconning all of Spider-man's progress. Aunt May was brought back from the dead, Spider-man was no longer a high school science teacher, and it was like the 60s and 70s Spider-man all over again; old and cliche.
X-Men was another good case in point. Grant Morrison pushed the characters forwarded whereas Joss Whedon wrote an inferior version of Chris Claremount's X-Men with his Astonishing X-Men, in which character and story progress was retconned to make things more comfortable for the nostalgia crowd. The number of times X-Men, both heroes and villains, have died, only to always be resurrected cheapened the story and made the so-called 'dangerous world' they lived in appear vanilla and less dangerous.
I could go on and on. Of course, it's hared to keep stories fresh and relevant when they have been around for 50 years or more. You can only do so much with a character and a story before it becomes stale. You can only develop the character so much. It's an unfortunate reality of mainstream comics.
However, from what I understand, manga is owned by the creators. Am I correct? Because of it, the stories usually (with a few exceptions) have a beginning, a middle, and an end, full of good character development without needless retconning. I love my stories to have beginnings and ends. Most of these stories (again with a few exceptions) can go out on a high note. This is why I think manga is doing better than mainstream comics. What do you all think?
https://ultramunch.com/worldwide-manga- ... an-comics/
P.S. I forget, how do you get the link to show a thumbnail? It's so annoying that it doesn't automatically do that.