Ghouls Assassins And Socially Anxious Students How Manga Took Over The World Manga

Toddler favorite… Tokyo Ghoul. Photo: TOKYO GHOUL © 2011 by Sui Ishida. Courtesy of VIZ Media Manga, broadly defined as comics originating from Japan, has been huge in its home country for decades. But over the past five years, sales have exploded around the world. The UK figures for the graphic medium, which spans many genres and is usually printed in black and white, are staggering. According to Nielsen BookScan, 434,633 copies of manga titles were sold in 2012, worth £3.17 million. By 2019 this had more than doubled, to 983,822 copies, for £9.1 million. So far this year, 1.8 million manga have been sold – nearly double the full year’s sales three years ago. In the US, the figures are equally impressive. In 2020, 9.68 million copies of manga titles were sold, NPD BookScan says, and the following year sales rose 160% to 25.2 million. In 2021, manga was the top growing category in the overall US print book market, outpacing the next highest growing category (romance) by three times. English-language distributor Viz Media says it has seen “phenomenal” increases over the past 18 months in all its territories – Canada, Australia and New Zealand, as well as the US and UK. “It really started to take off and build during the first lockdown when online sales tripled, month over month. Then when the stores reopened, it really took off there too. There’s a lot more demand for it,” says Bea Carvalho at Waterstones. Manga – which is generally published in volumes here, unlike in Japan, where it was published in weekly magazines – was already selling faster than shops could get their hands on it, and then lockdowns meant printers they could not print any more copies. , says Stephen L Holland, owner of Nottingham comics shop Page 45 and current UK Comics Laureate. “So you have a double whammy here with huge interest and also rare availability, and of course that heightens everyone’s interest. Everyone wanted them.” It was the same story in the US – where there was even talk of “the big manga shortage of 2021”. “We’ve been out of the box since the second month of the lockdown,” says Kevin Hamric, senior vice president of publishing sales at Viz Media. Manga (derived from the kanji characters “man” (漫), meaning “whimsical” and “ga” (画), meaning “pictures”) in its familiar form dates back to the late 19th century. By the 1980s and 1990s, a “golden age” of manga had arrived in Japan, according to a history of manga by Ryōko Matsuba and Alfred Haft. The world’s most successful manga, One Piece has sold more than 500 million copies since 1997. Created by Eiichiro Oda, it tells the story of Monkey D Luffy, who travels the world in search of a legendary treasure and can stretched like rubber after eating the Gum-Gum Devil Fruit. With the latest feature film based on Luffy’s adventures, One Piece Film: Red, already breaking box office records in Japan and hitting UK cinemas from November 4th, that staggering number is set to increase. Komi cannot communicate Photo: COMI-SAN WA, COMYUSHO DESU By Tomohito ODA © 2016 Tomohito ODA “Our digital sales also rose astronomically during Covid and are going up again this year,” says Hamric. “But there really is no comparison. People want printed books. They collect them. They post photos on social media.” At sci-fi and fantasy retailer Forbidden Planet, the new popularity of manga has changed customer demographics. “It’s really made a difference to the people that come into our shops,” says the shop’s comics buyer, Jamie Beeching. “A few years ago, it would have been a lot of boys or men in their late 30s and 40s. And now I come in and see a bunch of students. They’ll have just gotten out of school and come down to the store and they’ll all be really excited about it. They are incredibly engaged and incredibly knowledgeable. A lot of them are also younger teenagers, and at that age, when you’re into something, you’re really into something.” Manga is also, Beeching adds, “a lot cheaper than traditional graphic novels because it’s black and white and often printed on low-quality paper, which means you can get a lot of pages for a relatively small amount of money. So if you’re young and spend your pocket money, you can get a lot of manga.” Nia Ewington, 17, from Stockport, says anime was her route into manga, starting with Attack on Titan. “It was very popular and it was all over social media,” he says. (On TikTok, the #mangatok hashtag has 523 million views, and teenagers are recommending titles to each other and showing off their shelves.) “It has a very interesting story and every character has a compelling story. It’s not too similar to other manga, so it stands out a lot.” Now he’s into Jujutsu Kaisen, in which a boy tries to save the world from demons, but he hasn’t read all the manga yet “since the anime hasn’t caught up and I don’t like reading ahead.” Isabella Garside, 13, says she was looking for something new when she stumbled upon the manga. Her favorite series right now is Death Note, in which a high school student finds a notebook that gives him the power to kill anyone who writes his name on it. “It tugs at your emotions,” she says. And “it’s really easy to read.” Manga includes genre to genre: classic superhero stories like My Hero Academia; Horror, like Jujutsu Kaisen. Action – try Chainsaw Man. More literary stories, like Ping Pong. LGBTQ+ stories like Boys Run the Riot or My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness. Cooking: Viz has a series called Food Wars!, which it bills as a “pure food comedy.” There is shoujo manga, aimed at young girls, with romance and high school drama. “That’s not really represented in many places, except in YA novels,” says Beeching. “And there are areas that really only Japan serves, like isekai (roughly translated as ‘different world’), which is about being reborn in a computer game or fantasy world, like a guy being reborn as a slime creature, or he who is reborn as a spider.” It’s partly this variety of genres that’s driving the boom, says Yu Saito, deputy editor at Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine. “We now have countless manga genres that evolved organically, without marketing, to target people of all ages and tastes, beyond what other media can offer, so readers can find what speaks to them. I think that’s why the manga was able to cross borders and find readers all over the world.” ATOM: The beginning. Photo: Titan Comics Sci-fi and fantasy publisher Titan has just launched its own manga imprint, Titan Manga, starting with the October release of Atom: The Beginning, an original manga based on the late manga legend Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy series. A science fiction series, following two robotics engineering students and their final project. Titan also recently found success with a manga adaptation of Sherlock Holmes and Eldo Yoshimizu’s Ryuko, about a female yakuza. “Stepping into manga is like opening up an entire Aladdin’s cave,” says Andrew Sumner, executive vice president of Titan Entertainment. “It’s a really deep universe that you can dive into and explore and share with friends and recommend different titles – it’s a very deep artistic world that new readers didn’t know existed.” Sumner sees the explosion of westerns in manga as a generational thing, with younger people moving away from mainstream superhero comics to find a new graphic medium where series will often be written and drawn by the same creator and obey “a different set of rules to the very mainstream universe of DC and Marvel Comics.” “I’m a huge Batman fan, but the reality is that Batman is owned by a company and there are many, many different versions of Batman that you can find,” he says. “But with manga, you’re…