DC Boss Admits Manga Is Better than American Comics (& What the Big Two Can Learn from It)

DC Comics has taken the top of the American superhero comics sales charts for the first time in years, but they are still far from being the topselling comic company. There’s a simple reason for that: manga. Manga has held the top spots on the sales charts for years now, with massive manga sections popping up in books stores across the nation. It’s been a massive success story since 2014, when manga sales started going up with no end in sight, and has become something of a pop culture phenomenon in the United States. Manga is everywhere and American superhero comics, despite the in-roads made into pop culture by the MCU, haven’t been able to compete.

The Big Two are cognizant of this fact, and DC Comics head honcho Jim Lee talked about it in an interview about his career and success with NikkeiXTrend, a Japanese publication. Lee has presided over the current successes DC is having, and spoke to the publication about the impact that manga has had on culture and what DC can learn from the example of the Japanese comic industry.

Lee Admits That American Comics Can Learn from Manga’s Example

Lee talked about the success of manga ( and Asian culture in general) in the West, and had a very interesting perceptive on the whole thing. In the interview, he said, “The stories told in Japanese manga and anime are incredibly powerful. I often find myself wondering, ‘What is missing in Western comics, and why aren’t they able to achieve the same flavor?’ Also, I think manga has an ‘advantage’ over American comics, which are mostly about superheroes, and that’s where the majority of sales and readers are concentrated. In Japan, it’s closer to ‘literature,’ and anyone can read it, and it’s not just hero stories. There’s a much wider range of genres, like stories about cooking and soccer. You can draw stories from that. So I’m very happy that the manga has been so successful, because it gives me a ‘goal’ to aim for. The manga market is bigger than our industry, so the question becomes, ‘What can we learn from this?’“

Lee gets to the root of the problem immediately and that’s the sheer variety of manga, combined with the way that the Japanese look at comics. There’s a manga for everything, from the well known shonen manga to sports, cooking, romance, and so many more, while American comics are some iteration of the superhero concept, limiting the market. Meanwhile, the fact that comics and an animation are looked down as children’s media in the West adds to this. Adults in Japan respect manga and anime as art forms and still consume them into adulthood. Lee also brought up the fact that youth trends often revolve around the young wanting something new that’s “uniquely their own”, and in the West, that’s manga. Superhero comics revolve around the same characters that generations have read; they can feel old fashioned to younger readers, while manga takes them to new places.

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Lee’s perspective on the whole situation is very interesting. Lee knows that manga is beating the pants off superheroes, so using them as a guide is the right way to go. One of the interesting things about DC Comics in the last few years is that the publisher has tried to do something beyond the same old superhero stuff. DC has always been the home of great horror and sci-fi, and recent years have seen readers get more “slice of life” comics, like the Fire and Ice minis, Trinity: Daughter of Wonder Woman, and Supergirl (Vol. 8). The publisher also been putting YA stories that use the superhero characters in decidedly non-superhero ways, trying to follow the example of manga, and we’re getting the return of Vertigo, adding even more variety to the industry.

DC Comics has always put out amazing books, but they still have a long way to go to get to the same level of sales manga is. Lee is cognizant of how far they still have to go, but the fact that he looks to manga as a guide is heartening. DC has always been the one that broke new ground in the comic industry, especially after the last few decades. If the company can start using manga-style storytelling, expanding their output a la the manga industry and taking American comics to new places, it will better for everyone. More variety means more stories for fans, and that’s the entire point of fiction.

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