Hmmm.. good response. A couple of comments...
First, while manga is certainly coming out in the TPB format that it is in Japan, those are just collections in Japan too. Most comics in Japan come out like Shonen Jump in magazine anthologies. There is a range of frequencies, but a lot of the popular ones actually come out weekly. A lot of people complain about how "slow" the story in manga is, but when you consider you had four installments a month, I think it makes more sense. Any of the stories associated with Shonen Jump like Dragonball Z, One Piece, YuYu Hakusho, Kenshin, Yu-Gi-Oh, Naruto etc. all come out weekly originally.
Most creators do tend to have assistants to help with things like inking backgrounds (even though some insist on doing everything themselves), but having a totally different artist/writer come on in the middle of a story is pretty much unheard-of. It is hard to tell exactly how much control editors have, but generally one person both writes and draws for a manga..
As far as adopting manga art-style, I do think that tends to be a bad idea unless that is just the style the artist prefers. However, I do think that there are many titles (especially from some indy creators) that would appeal more to manga readers than most regular superheros would. I think this is a good place to start since it can act as a bit of a bridge to things...
Even common sense things like not having ladies drawn with balloon breasts in cheesecake poses for a title that could appeal to girls is sometimes lost on the big companies..heh. Also the fact that manga readers are willing to read stuff in B&W I think is an interesting issue. I don't think the gloss of a lot of current titles is as needed as lot of people think..
As far as cost, things get a bit tricky. Japan has such a huge market that it can keep prices down. Weekly Shonen Jump in Japan is 500 pages at costs US$2. Most TPBs are $4-5. Jump's readership has probably dropped by half in the last 10 years, but it still has around 3-4 million readers each week.
But this is also I think why the american companies need to get their acts together a bit. Manga in the US is getting a lot cheaper itself lately. 90% of titles released in the last year or two are about $10, and Viz's newest stuff is $7.95. The fact that they can afford to release Jump at $5 for 350 pages, cheap newsprint or not, shows a lot about the current state of things I think...
As far as what is driving sales, obviously cartoon and game sales have helped, especially in the beginning. I think has changed quite a bit lately, though. Left and right, stuff that "will NEVER be licensed" has been coming out. Quite a lot of the titles for girls, for instance, have never been animated. Also, more genres keep coming. There are now several mystery and horror titles. Even shounen ai "boys love" titles have been coming out (with attractive boys/men falling in love with each other, written by and for ladies).
For c
For curiosity, do you remember which manga you tried reading but didn't care for? There's obviously a lot of bad stuff out there too...
Some good titles to try.. Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind by Hayao Miyazaki with some very strong female characters, man versus nature underlying theme, etc.
Adolf from Osamu Tezuka, about three men named Adolf during WWII, a Jew, a soldier in Hitler's army, and Hitler himself...
Paradise Kiss is a fun romance/comedy about a girl that gets roped into being a model for a bunch of misfit clothing designers at a local art school.
GTO is a comedy/drama about a former bike gang / judo team member who becomes a teacher for all the wrong reasons (to pick up girls), but ends up connecting with kids with his unique brand of methods.
Eagle is about the first asian american candidate for president and a Japanese reporter that comes to cover him but gets a bit too personally involved with things.
Even A Monkey Can Draw Manga is a pretty hilarious skewering of those How to Draw Manga books, making fun of all kinds of things.
Iron Wok Jan is a fun story involving competitive cooking (like Iron Chef mixed with drama). Uzumaki is pretty freaky horror stuff. Please Save My Earth is good drama/romance about a group of teens who have recurring dreams suggesting they are reincarnations of alien scientists that were posted to the moon to study earth. Lots of different themes...
Anyway.. just some thoughts. And if you haven't looked at the shelves for a little while, there's more variety of manga out than there was even a year ago, so may be worth trying to find some stuff again.
Shawn
Wow, thanks for the recommendations! And you make a lot of good points.
As far as manga I've read, I must admit that I don't remember a lot of it...I seem to remember reading parts of Akira and Ghost in the Shell, but it was years ago and I may be confusing it with the anime I know I've seen. I've read an issue or two of Mai the Psychic Girl, Astro Boy(a childhood fave from the anime) and Battle Angel Alita, and I recall a couple I ad in my original collection dealing with Hiroshima and the survivors which got a lot of hype back in the 80s. There have been several times (more recently) when intrigued by a cover or having read a positive review of a book that I'd read a few pages standing in front of the rack but I didn't buy. I've seen a lot more anime, I suppose, mostly thanks to the fine folks at Cartoon Network...I kinda got interested in Cowboy Bebop for a while but it didn't last long. My son was a big Dragonball Z fan for a long time (he even has a tattoo of Goku on his arm!), and I watched several episodes of that in an unsuccessful effort to understand why...I understand that a lot of what we see over here kinda loses something in the translation, so I suppose I take any anime I see with a grain of salt.
All things considered, I suppose I should investigate further, and if my income permits someday I will do so. Your suggestions, especially Adolf, Nausiica, GTO and Eagle sound interesting.
Thanks again for the insightful comments!
Glad to help. The choices out there can be kind of overwhelming when you aren't "in the loop". It is hard enough for me to keep up.. =)
As far as DBZ goes, here's a couple of things to keep in mind. It started off as a fairly lighthearted adventure story, with Goku being a little boy with a tail that grew up in the jungle with his grandfather. His grandfather has since died, and even though he taught Goku to be strong and good at fighting, he hasn't exactly been exposed to the world. He ends up meeting up with Bulma (the first girl he's ever seen) who is wordly and good with technology and is in search of dragonballs, which are scattered throughout the world. When brought together they will grant a wish. She created a special detector, which brought her to Goku (who had one).
So they go off on an adventure to find them, find all kinds of different people, and there is lots of funny stuff in it. Eventually it got a bit more focused on fighting, with Goku entering some martial arts tournaments (and popularity of the comic increased). This was still pretty lighthearted with goofy villians and creative fights.
Eventually, a point comes where a bunch of time passes and Goku is grown up and has a son. This was still the same comic, but when it was animated, they decided to add a Z to the end to show it was different from the original animated arc.
In that, it is discovered that Goku is of an alien race, and there are some really bad guys on the way. In general it is more serious and focused more on the fighting. Eventually Toriyama backed himself into a corner of a bad guy that Goku could not possibly defeat, so he came up with the Super Saiyajin thing where they power up and get the spikey blond hair. Eventually there was also time travel and androids and other stuff going on. Toriyama fully admits that it went on way too long due to pressure from fans and the editor, and he wasn't as happy with his later work...
When it was animated, it was made at the same time as the manga was being released (and anime tends to come out faster), filler had to be introduced into the anime to keep it from getting far ahead. This contributed to having a single fight scene sometimes go on for many episodes.
For the american version of the anime, there is the added troubles of different music, dubbing which wasn't very good at first, cuts that changed killing someone into "sending them to another dimension", etc.
Trying to just watch a couple of episodes of DBZ is probably as bad as someone trying to jump into the middle of some superhero comics (ones that rely on history of characters and fans willing to overlook some flaws because you're so familiar with the characters and want more even if it isn't so good).
Check out the very first Dragonball GN(the american release has the later arc marked as DBZ, so make sure it is normal DB) some time. I haven't read all the manga, but that first volume I found very cute and charming. It was r
I haven't read all the manga, but that first volume I found very cute and charming. It was recently re-released at only $8, making it less of a risk...
The hiroshima comic was probably Barefoot Gen. I haven't read it, but there is a good exerpt in one of Schodt's books (Manga! Manga!). Actually, if you want to get up to speed on manga, the two Frederik L. Schodt books are great. The original is Manga! Manga!, which has a good introduction, a history, stuff about genres and the industry and good exerpts in the back. It is from 1983 and covered a lot of classics. Then in 1996, he released Dreamland Japan, which talks about the current industry, individual creators and comic magazines (and even sales figures), and a ton of info. in general. They should both still be in print, and may actually be at your local library (I've seen them here).
It is funny about DBZ actually. In a lot of circles, mentioning you like it is a way to get ridiculed and flamed to death. In the same way that a lot of comic people have a backlash against superheros, there was a definite backlash against superpopular anime like DBZ, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, etc. Even I found myself occationally badmouthing Akira (a movie I generally like), just because it turned so many people off to anime due to its graphic violence and super-compressed plot. Thankfully more variety is coming out and things are settling down. Even if you don't like Cowboy Bebop or Inuyasha or whatever, I think those are much better representations of anime. You don't have to feel ashamed of saying you like Bebop.. 
Actually, I was one that didn't like Bebop at first. It only really grew on me after I saw the whole series, and then I came to really like it after seeing it a couple of times through. A lot of the episodes take different tones, so it is easy to find stuff to both like and dislike in it. Most of my favorites are at the middle/end of the series...
Anyway.. enough ranting from me. My hands are getting tired.
Shawn
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