Originally Posted by
Habis
Most manga sales are from a few titles, the cream of the crop.
As for why the most popular manga sell better than the most popular American comics... You can buy a manga and have the complete series, from the first issue to the last, in nice tomes; that encourage collectors to buy rather than to pirate...
X-Men comics, on the other hand, started in 1963 and there are hundreds of issues printed, not to mention that you have to buy like another dozen titles (X-Force, X-Factor, Excalibur...etc.) in order to have the complete story, and it keeps going on.
There is no way a kid will try to have everything, and having just a part feels like having the middle chapters of a novel but not the beginning... that discourages collectors... so they just read whatever they want to read from internet.
There is also de fact that Marvel Comics aren't newbie-friendly. They basically run on nostalgia... most stories and characters don't make much sense unless you are familiar with the X-Men and their history, and very often is hard to like the characters and their choices unless you already know and love them... Like, imagine start reading Captain America during Secret Empire, or Avengers during Time Runs Out, or X-Men during Age of Apocalypse... how are you supposed to know that lots of the characters are subversions of established characters? how can you feel the emotional impact of these stories if you don't know who Steve Rogers, Reed Richards, Magneto...etc., are?
You are forced to go to the pirating sites and read a ton of comics in order to catch up, and once you have done that... why start buying?