Not against the medium I consume it.

But it occurred to me that there seems to be a lot more exposure to anime and manga largely thanks to services like crunchyroll and manga reader services, this includes physical sales as well.

It’s just that you’d think say, Superman would be more stupidly popular since everyone knows who he is than someone such as Lelouch from Code Geass.

Is it because comics just doesn’t have the same spark with the younger generation? Or is it because there are a billion different issues of comics so it makes manga more streamlined?

I would like to know your thoughts as I am quite curious about this phenomenon, since even in the early 2000s I was into anime, and you could get your fix from non legit services via the Internet, but I’m sure as shit it didn’t hit this mainstream until the mid 2010s and now the roaring 2020s.

  • Lvxferre
    3·
    4 hours ago

    I don’t know. Instead I’ll focus on my subjective experience with comics and manga, as a nobody from LatAm who likes fantasy.

    Manga is something that I grew up with. As adulthood came by, I didn’t feel the need to ditch it - instead I found other manga series to enjoy. There’s stuff for young kids and adults; spicy and tame; comedic and serious; romance and no romance. No matter who you are and the stuff that you like, I feel like you could find at least one enjoyable manga series to read.

    In the meantime, what I’ve found from comics elsewhere:

    • Local (at least in Brazil) - either tailored for kids (see: Monica’s Gang) or newspaper 4-koma with social commentary (see: anything from Glauco). So only kids get actual stories? Based on Mafalda I feel like that’s how the cookie crumbles in Latin America as a whole.
    • European - wider in age demographic than the local ones, and some do have fantasy (Even erotica. Druuna, I’m looking at you. And your butt.), but I feel like they lack dynamic. Even adventure ones like Tintin. Still enjoyable to read, but sometimes my cup of tea might be yerba or coffee, you know?
    • United-Statian - Mary Sue protag got superpowers from Z’bh’thy, and now is fighting the Evil for the sake of their country. Skip past 20 years and they’re still in the same slop, never reaching the end, in a multiverse that makes my PC cabling look tidy in comparison.
    • manhua (China) - I actually found quite a few enjoyable series (like the Fairy Captivity, Yaoguai Mingdan, My Wife is the Demon Queen). Perhaps not surprisingly they’re similar in spirit to Japanese manga. I could see myself reading more of that stuff. (I’ll skip wuxia though.)
    • manhwa (S. Korea) - 90% of the stuff that I’ve seen boils down to either “adultery stories” (I’m not into that stuff) or what feels like ultra-shōnen: “level ZZ is not enough, MC needs to reach level ZZZ”. That said I did find a few enjoyable series, like FFF-Trashero or Carnivorous Princess Yegrinna.

    Are they always like this? Probably not; I bet that people can find exceptions to every single bullet point that I’ve listed.

    Something must be also said about the synergy between light novels, manga, and anime: if you want you get to enjoy the same story thrice, in three different media, and the pleasure associated with each will be different. And if the story is good enough it won’t tire you down. I simply don’t feel the same in non-Japanese series, even the ones that adapt the same universe across different media (like X-Men).