Manga is what American comics would have become if Seduction of the Innocent...

[mathew101281]

hadn’t happen. If you look at the history of comics leading up to the crackdown in the mid 50’s you can tell that genres were diversifying and anthologies in the romance horror and humor categories were beginning to proliferate. Given another 10 or fifteen years I think American comics would have looked more like a color version of what manga.

[Riv86672]

Guess we dodged a bullet on that one, then.

[Jim Kelly]

I don't know if I agree with this. In 1954, the publishers had a choice:

Most stuck with comics largely marketed to kids (with some exceptions) and for those colour comics to get distribution they had to have some kind of approval that pleased parents. Note that this didn't have to be the Comics Code since Dell and Gilberton didn't submit their comics to that authority. Dell published adaptations from other media which had their own gate keepers (all the Disney properties had already been sanitized for young readers), while Gilberton's CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED were promoted in schools by their distributor--the powerful Curtis Circulation--and were revised to meet educational standards.

But when Bill Gaines felt the heat from the Comics Code, he opted to publish MAD as a black and white magazine, which fell outside the boundaries of the Comics Code. So if publishers wanted to go without the Code, there were ways to do it. Financially, it seemed to make better sense for the big publishers to go after little kids--since these were the people who were buying most of the comics. But lots of publishers sprang up that published comics inside magazines. There were adult magazines for men with some comics content.

In the late 1950s, Jim Warren would start to publish his magazines and launched titles like EERIE and CREEPY.

These magazines cost more money--not ten cents but twenty-five cents or more--but since they weren't all aimed at little kids, one assumes that the fathers out there had enough cash in pocket to afford these magazines. Well maybe not my Dad, since we were always scraping to get by, but as a postman he had free access to magazines at work. And my pops loved the pin-up girls.

There was a certain book and magazine store that I sometimes would go in, back in the 1960s and 1970s, when I was hunting for comic books. And, behind the counter, they had SEX TO SEXTY, which adults could buy (but not kids like me). It was tantalizing to think what comics were inside that magazine with its provocative title.

And by the 1970s, there were other magazines like NATIONAL LAMPOON and HEAVY METAL.

It's not like adults were ever short of comics to read for their own tastes. Even among the Code comics, there were lots of war, western, mystery, science fiction, humour, romance comics for more mature consumers.

[kjn]

hadn’t happen. If you look at the history of comics leading up to the crackdown in the mid 50’s you can tell that genres were diversifying and anthologies in the romance horror and humor categories were beginning to proliferate. Given another 10 or fifteen years I think American comics would have looked more like a color version of what manga.

For all that there is a lot of criticism that can be made against the Comics Code, I think this not only oversimplifies but also uses incorrect assumptions.

First, comics were not beginning to diversify in the 50s, they were extremely diverse already in the 40s. Here I recommend Saladin Ahmed's How Censors Killed The Weird, Experimental, Progressive Golden Age Of Comics.

Second, romance continued to be a strong part of American comics up until the mid-70s, and from what I understand it they adapted successfully to the Comics Code. What they couldn't adapt to was the sexual revolution and other cultural changes in the late 60s and early 70s. The role that newspapers and syndication played in the development of American comics shouldn't be underestimated either.

Third, manga is not the only model for a successful and long-lasting culture of comics. French-speaking comics followed yet another path.

[Bruce Wayne]

Manga (and its links with Japan's animation industry) is a more viable corporate model (compared to Europes BDs) to project soft power. In that they are pretty much successful as we see with the proliferation of Japanese cultural products across the globe and success of comics like Demon Slayer.

[FFJamie94]

This also doesn't include many other factors. Manga is very different production wise, not just due to lax censorship rules (even through they do exist) but also because of cultural factors and publication factors.
Japan has a problem with its worth ethic, most notably, they have a problem of working People to death, and this is a problem you find in a lot of manga.
US comics have a very diverse load of comics, you can still buy horror, romance and weird comics, just a lot of them are hard to come by and Super hero fiction tends to dominate the market.
Manga tends to be more auterstic than US comics, so there's a lot more freedom for the writer to do their own thing. This isn't the case all the time. Akira Toriyama has said on many occasions how editors changed the direction of the book for him, there's the infamous example of the Android and Cell saga which is why that went on for so long.

By the way, I'm not a fan of the CCA either, it stopped creative works for being released due to its own conservative sensibilities. The best things comics did was drop it.

[Jim Kelly]

Manga started out as picture books and have a long history in Japan. But what we call Manga here--the comic book style--seems to have developed post-war with Allied soldiers bringing American comic books to Japan and then the Manga publishers copying that style.

The reason why these kinds of comics did so well in Japan--comics that appeal to different genders, different ages that have enough consumers to stay around--is probably because it's an island with a large population and an extensive railroad system. The train stations sold books and magazines; people used the train every day and read on the train between stops; every gender and age had to use the train all the time.

Where else in the world does this happen? Well in Britain. Another island, they had an extensive rail system, news agents in the stations and lots of commuters to read THE BEANO and other comics. Likewise in most of Europe, the train is more common and people spend more time in train stations. So there's a better chance of selling comics to a wider variety of readers.

The United States is too spread out. In most parts of the country, people only use the train on special occasions. Distribution costs more money, because it's such a big country and it's harder for small publishers to get into these markets.

Now on the island of Manhattan, if there were publications just for New Yorkers, sold at newsstands in subway stations and train stations--there was enough of a population to sustain those publishers and the distribution could be contained to a small area. So I wouldn't be surprised if there were some publications that did very well just in Manhattan and the surrounding area, back in the 1950s.

Of course, now it's different. Bored commuters have a lot of other things to do on the train--they don't need to buy newspapers, magazines and books.

[Mister Mets]

The bigger problem is how long it took graphic novels to take off.

You're not going to be able to have more complex narratives without the ability to start at the beginning.

We might have a different industry if Kurtzman's The Jungle Book had taken off in 1959.

Manga started out as picture books and have a long history in Japan. But what we call Manga here--the comic book style--seems to have developed post-war with Allied soldiers bringing American comic books to Japan and then the Manga publishers copying that style.

The reason why these kinds of comics did so well in Japan--comics that appeal to different genders, different ages that have enough consumers to stay around--is probably because it's an island with a large population and an extensive railroad system. The train stations sold books and magazines; people used the train every day and read on the train between stops; every gender and age had to use the train all the time.

Where else in the world does this happen? Well in Britain. Another island, they had an extensive rail system, news agents in the stations and lots of commuters to read THE BEANO and other comics. Likewise in most of Europe, the train is more common and people spend more time in train stations. So there's a better chance of selling comics to a wider variety of readers.

The United States is too spread out. In most parts of the country, people only use the train on special occasions. Distribution costs more money, because it's such a big country and it's harder for small publishers to get into these markets.

Now on the island of Manhattan, if there were publications just for New Yorkers, sold at newsstands in subway stations and train stations--there was enough of a population to sustain those publishers and the distribution could be contained to a small area. So I wouldn't be surprised if there were some publications that did very well just in Manhattan and the surrounding area, back in the 1950s.

Of course, now it's different. Bored commuters have a lot of other things to do on the train--they don't need to buy newspapers, magazines and books.

That's an interesting point about how one niche leads to big changes in a major artform. America's much more of a car culture, so there are more opportunities for reading, and more opportunities for talk radio.