International influences
International influences |
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Page 16 of 17  Fires This explosion also necessitated new publishing methods. To maximize profits, publishers produced manga in a number of forms. Stories appeared first as serials in large digest magazines, with perhaps a few dozen pages appearing per issue. These weekly and monthly publications were printed on low grade paper, were square bound, and often ran to over a thousand pages. With vast circulations, often with sales of individual titles in the millions, these manga could be priced very cheaply. If a particular story proved to be successful, it was reprinted in a higher quality version, possibly even in a hard cover, on better paper and without adverts. These volumes were usually around 200 pages long, and were designed to be kept on bookshelves rather than to be thrown away - the Japanese version of a graphic novel. It was only a matter of time before such incredible sales figures for manga in Japan would lead foreign companies to buy sub-licenses and attempt to reproduce those successes in their own markets. By the 1980s, those markets were ready for such a move: American comics aimed at an older age range were becoming the new mainstream in the fan shops, and the development of 'direct sales' meant that minority-interest titles could prosper. Realistically, manga would be 'minority interest', at least to begin with: publishers might hope in the long run to imitate the mainstream success that they achieved in their home country, but at first, it was sensible to be cautious. For one thing, there were factors to be considered beyond the obvious expense of translation. For instance, before manga could be sold into the home market, a number of technical problems had to be dealt with. In particular, the pages of artwork had to be reversed (or 'flopped' in publishing jargon), so that they read left-to-right, instead of right-to-left, as they would in Japan. Additionally, the original artwork needed to be touched-up, with Japanese sound effects replaced with more appropriate English onomatopaeia.  Fires  Pixy (Fantagraphics, 1993). Art/script: Mai Andersson. The creator is stylistically a sort of Danish Chester Brown, though the random surreal carnage of Pixy is purely his own. |