Last week on Forbes, I spoke with Alvin Lu, President and CEO of Kodansha US, about some general trends in the manga market. While that piece covered a lot of ground, there was more to our conversation that gets into issues of greater interest to industry professionals here at ICv2.
American publishers tend to look at the rise of manga in North America as an unvarnished success story, with titles and publishers from Japan catching then passing American comics in dollar sales, led by huge growth in the trade book market. Manga titles have expanded the audience for graphic literature, built IP to rival the top U.S. characters, influenced at least two generations of artists, and managed to replicate the synergies between manga sales and anime viewership that fuels the industry in Japan.
While that is all true, the manga industry is struggling to adapt to its own challenges, both in its home markets and globally. Lu was candid about how Kodansha is addressing these issues as the company behind Attack on Titan and other big hits tries to maintain its foothold.
The aftermath of an “acceleration moment.” Lu describes the pandemic years, which saw a massive spike in manga readership, as “an acceleration moment that ushered in a whole new generation of fans, probably faster than we had anticipated.”
Like many publishers, Kodansha is now dealing with growth that has flattened out, amplified by the cycles of a business that depends heavily on the momentum of big breakout titles. “In our case, deceleration was compounded by being at the end of a life cycle, as Attack on Titan, our flagship property, wound down.”
Lu further observed an unusual dynamic in the post-pandemic manga market. “Historically, manga publishers tend to move in unison. When the market grows, publishers all seem to grow together. Right now, we’re in something new. Some people are up, some are down. There doesn’t seem to be that one big hit out there. If you look at the overall numbers, they look flat, maybe slightly down, but we’re actually having a great year.”
Lu pointed to the recent success of Kodansha titles like Blue Lock, Gachiakuta, and A Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity as indicative of readers seeking out new content, whether based on anime or not.
That said, Kodansha is also looking to move more actively into prose fiction in translation and repackaging of vintage favorites to appeal to the nostalgia of longtime readers.
Digital growth and competition. Japan’s transition to digital, accounting for close to 75% of the market there, according to recent estimates, is one of the biggest shakeups in comics publishing worldwide. Japan’s market is immense, and shifting from a well-established print-based publishing, distribution and retail model to a digital one has been both disruptive and lucrative. It is likely that a lot of the action we’ve seen in the digital space here in North America is based on companies (and their investors) banking on the fact that if it can happen there, it’s only a matter of time before it happens here.
Lu acknowledged that Kodansha and other publishers are following the “twists and turns” of the American digital publishing market, noting that few expected print sales and market share to remain so robust. “It speaks to a different relationship to books. Collectability is a big part of the North American experience, so that partly explains the difference.”
Lu, who headed up Kodansha’s digital unit before becoming CEO, said that strong initial growth gave way to some retrenchment. Now, the new flurry of activity is sparking some additional investments, as seen in the 2023 launch of Kodansha’s K Manga platform and recent partnerships with GlobalComix, Neon Ichiban, and the library-centric digital app Hoopla.
“We still see a lot of potential there,” he said, “but looking at the model of Japan and understanding that comics are read differently than, say, e-books, maybe it needs to be treated differently. That’s something we are looking at.”
Manga and webtoons. To North American eyes, manga and webtoons have some surface similarities. Both trade in a wider range of genres, styles and subject matter than traditional North American comics; both provide structured ways to use reader input as a gauge of popularity, promoting well-received material into featured titles; both feature a notorious “grind” culture that demands a lot from creators. But most significantly, both appeal to a younger, more female demographic that has accounted for their ability to grow their market so strongly.
Those similarities also imply competition, especially on the digital front, where webtoons enjoy a structural advantage because they are created in the first instance to be read on ubiquitous mobile devices with vertical, panel-by-panel scroll. In this respect, manga publishers like Kodansha appear to be experiencing some of the same issues of adaptation as comics publishers in the U.S.
“That format is obviously very popular in Japan as well,” said Lu, “so it has been something on our minds. It’s a little tricky in that the form factor is a bigger deal than you might think. There’s a question of whether you adapt existing content into that format or invest in generating completely new content for it. It’s not what our creative teams are designed to do.”
Lu said Kodansha is best at creating a “very sophisticated form of comics entertainment.” While the company has done experiments in original vertical-first content (which will, he says, continue), they see webtoon as a “different silo” despite areas of overlap.
Piracy and insatiable demand. Finally, our conversation touched on the related issues of North American demand for content that is only available in Japan, and the ongoing popularity of pirate scanlation sites.
Lu said Kodansha is stepping up its efforts to distribute localized English-language versions of more of its catalog, particularly via digital, but is not looking to take shortcuts. “A lot of our strong growth years of our digital publishing program was content that we were making available in digital for the first time in English. So yeah, that’s an area where a lot more content can be localized in terms of technologies. We remain committed to human translation for now. We’re always looking to optimize in terms of production speed, but we also remain committed to our standards of quality and accuracy.”
He acknowledged that piracy remains a complicated issue because it does help create new fans and expose readers to unseen content. “My answer on piracy is that before we confront it head on, there’s a lot of work we need to do to make it more available legitimately. Until we get to that point, and I think the industry has made a lot of strides, we just need to get people what they want, they way they want it, and the rest sorts itself out.”
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
Rob Salkowitz (Bluesky @robsalk) is the author of Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture, a two-time Eisner Award nominee, and a proud longtime contributor to Eisner-nominated ICv2.
Source: ICv2
