Pub Res Q(2009)25:101–117
DOI10.1007/s12109-009-9114-2
Books,Not Comics:Publishing Fields,Globalization,
and Japane Manga in the United States
Cay E.Brienza
Published online:14April2009
©Springer Science+Business Media,LLC2009
Abstract:The market for Japane comics,called manga,in the United States grew rapidly at the beginning of the twentyfirst century at a rate unprecedented in the publishing industry.Sales grew a remarkable350%from$60million in2002to $210million in2007and did not begin to decline until the beginning of the recent economic downturn beginning in late2008.No published rearch is yet able to account for this phenomenon in a manner that is both socially-situated and medium-specific.In this paper,I provide such a sociological account of the ri of manga in the United States and its implication
s for the globalization of culture.Adapting Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical formulation of the culturalfield,I argue that manga migrated from the comicsfield to the bookfield and that the ways in which industry practices,distribution networks,and target demographics differ between the two fields are directly responsible for the medium’s newfound visibility.Furthermore,I argue that,despite the now-common transparency of the Japane origin of Japane titles,the American publishing industry’s creation of manga as a category of books distinct from other comics is an ineluctable naturalizing process that ultimately eras from American consciousness the Japane,the foreign,the other. Keywords Manga·Comics·Graphic novels·Globalization·
American publishing·Field theory·Japan
In July of2008,the Borders bookstore at the Watchung Square Mall in central New Jery moved its“Manga”ction—and only its“Manga”ction—from one end of the store to the other.Since mangafirst acquired a category label of its own in the early2000s,“Manga”had been presd up against sciencefiction/fantasy,which C.E.Brienza(&)
Department of Media,Culture,and Communication,New York University,
239Greene Street,7th Floor,New York,NY10003,USA
借调申请
e-mail:cay.brienza@nyu.edu
includes novels by the likes of William Gibson and Terry Pratchett,and two other categories associated specifically with American comics,“Superheroes”and“Other Graphic Novels.”Now the ample aisles of“Manga”sit adjacent to young adult fiction.“Superheroes”and“Other Graphic Novels,”meanwhile,were left to languish on the fringes of sciencefiction/fantasy,a lonely,squarish block of sparly populated,ill-tended bookcas surrounded by an incongruous moat of emptyfloor space.
Other Borders stores in the region also moved their manga ctions away from the genrefiction shelves and clor to young adultfiction that summer,as their various store layouts permitted,but in tho cas“Superheroes”and“Other Graphic Novels”accompanied the move immediately.The odd tup at the Watchung Borders was provisional,and by mid-October,“Superheroes”and“Other Graphic Novels”had at last caught up to“Manga”in its new location by the young adultfiction.However,the mere fact that manga and the other categories of comics in the United States had become so neatly divisible,remaining that way for four-odd-months,is of no small import.It ranks as both visual metaphor and undeniable evidence on the ground of how much they have diverged from each other.虎背熊腰
Manga and other comics were not always so readily divisible.Manga ud to be only nominally distinct from superhero comics and other graphic novels;all were sold in the same stores and to the same people,their quential art content packaged in similar formats.Yet,manga is now on both the proverbial and the literal move, and it is leaving comics behind.The symbolism of the Watchung Borders ad hoc summer shelf reorganization is profound:Manga’s migration away from comics over the past decade—and all of the social practices and symbolic meanings entailed in that process—strikes to the heart of the story of manga in America. Why Manga?Why Now?
So,what is“manga”anyway?This question does not,as will be shown,have a straightforward answer,but for now,unless otherwi indicated,I wish to bracket any controversies and work with the provisional definition of manga as comics originating from Japan.The Japane word manga,written with two Chine characters[漫画]roughly translated as“irresponsible pictures,”is said to have been first coined by woodblock print master Hokusai Katsushika to denote his humorous, illustrated narratives of thefloating world.Under the influence of American culture, particularly after World War II,manga matured into a pervasive,mainstream form of graphic narrative combining picture and text in word balloons,roughly equivalent to what Americans would call comic books.Manga is avidly consumed by all gments of Japane society[12,17,33]and at the height of the medium’s popularity in1996,reprented nearly40%of all books and magazines sold in Japan[34].
Yet,despite America’s longstanding,Orientalist fascination with all things [44]),manga has historically been quite slow to penetrate the United States.In this respect,it ems the exception rather than the rule;what was arguably Japan’s veryfirst animated television ries Tetsuwan Atom(also known as
Astro Boy),for example,was exported in1963and began airing the same year in the United States as it did in Japan[35].Subquent animated ries such as Speed Racer and videogames such as Super Mario Bros.of Japane origin debuting through the1980s have since become houhold names for entire generations of American children.Clearly,Japan’s postwar popular culture,whether or not it is recognized as Japane by its consumers,has been around for quite a long time.The first manga,by comparison,to be brought over to the United States was Keiji Nakazawa’s Gen of Hiroshima,rialized in the US from1980to1982,and it was not commercially successful[31,33,34].Viz Media,now the largest manga publisher in the United States,only began licensing Japane titles such as Mai the Psychic Girl for US relea in the late1980s[37].Moreover,the market for manga did not really take off until the beginning of the twentyfirst century;manga sales grew a remarkable350%from$60million in2002to$210million in2007,while the market for Japane animation,by comparison,was shrinking,according to ICv2Pres
信怎么写格式ident Milton Griepp.Notes Kurt Hassler,former national graphic novel buyer for Borders and Waldenbooks,1“Nothing in the bookstore market has en that sort of evolution in such a short time”(quoted in[37],p.225).
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This above-noted temporal disjuncture between the appearance of anime and manga,despite the latter’s more venerable pedigree in Japan,suggests that globalization does not occur symmetrically across different media or always through the same networks.A clear analytical distinction between anime and manga is therefore crucial.But if manga in America is not merely a function of broad,non-specific process of the globalization of culture and media content,then,what accounts for this unprecedented,explosive growth over the past decade?Although explanatory narratives from American industry insiders explaining what they view to be the reasons for their own success have begun to [10,37]),there is very little scholarly rearch available about Japane manga in a specifically US context.What has been published pursues answers relying extensively upon nebulous notions of textual exceptionalism and/or emphasizing Japan’s unique talent for the creation of escapist fantasies with cross-cultural appeal[16,23,27]. While viscerally compelling in their own right,such text-driven explanations are not empirically satisfying on their own,and I am furthermore of the belief that,to best answer questions about the existence of manga in the United States,one must
奶茶利润assiduously pursue tho answers among tho individuals and organizations most directly instrumental in the realization of said prence.My approach operates under the assumption that it is not individuals but rather social groups that produce art,literature,music,etc.The media,in short,are“symbolic structures produced by human beings who work in and are shaped by social organizations”[25,p.29]. Fruitful and in many ways similar broad,practical applications of this framework include[5]“art worlds”and[38]application of Pierre Bourdieu’s“field of cultural production”to academic publishing.I appropriate the latter,albeit with a measure of tweaking,for this paper.
新年gif1“Buyers”decide what books a bookstore will stock.There are store-level buyers responsible for the stock of a single store and national buyers who decide what stock is to be carried nationwide.
In the ca of manga,the social groups in question would be broadly associated with the publishing industries.But which nation’s publishing industries?Tho of Japan,tho of the United States,or both?Wendy Siuyi Wong[43]notes that Japane manga publishers began actively pursuing the American market in the mid-1990s as domestic sales started to stagnate,but to do so they had to attain access to the United States’powerful domestic media distribution networks.Historically, this has proven notoriously difficult,and the Japane culture industries as a whole remain highly dependent upon their American counterparts to compete in the United States[13,
40].Indeed,of the approximately ten press large and small publishing manga in the United States as of the end of2008,only two—Viz Media(co-owned by corporate giants Shuueisha and Shougakukan)and Aurora Publishing(owned by Ohzora Shuppan)—are direct subsidiaries of Japane publishers.Given the basic facts,it is logical to conclude that any investigation into the phenomenon of manga in the United States must be pursued primarily in the context of conditions within the publishing industries of the United States,not Japan.
To summarize:Any understanding of manga in the United States must,in my view,happen within the contexts of the specificities of print and the localized conditions of the production,distribution,as well as reception of books and comics in the United States.The story of manga isfirst and foremost one of geographical, cultural,and historical specificities.Through exploration of the changing social and organizational contexts and practices associated with the US manga publishing industry,I argue in this paper that manga’s phenomenal growth in the United States is a direct outcome of its recent categorical—and locally specific—migration from the comicsfield into the bookfield,and that it is therefore an excellent ca study in which to consider process of globalization.
Fields of Cultural Production
My usage of“field,”for the purpos of this rearch,is analogous to that theorized by Pierre Bourdieu in The Field of Cultural Production[6].A“field”is,broadly speaking,a structured social space in which individuals and organizations occupying different positions relative to each other compete for desirable resources. Thefield of cultural production,or culturalfield,is the social space in which the so-called culture industries operate;comics and books are both parate subts of this field.Like John B.Thompson[38],who also draws upon Bourdieu in his rearch on US and UK academic and higher education book publishing,I u Bourdieu only lectively;I reject,for example,his distinction between autonomous and heteronomousfields,and attend more to the structural transformation offields. Unlike either Bourdieu or Thompson,however,I conceptualize the culturalfield as consisting of all actors in any manner involved in the production,distribution,or consumption of cultural objects.My justification for this move is as follows:There is widespread agreement among anthropologists and sociologists that“culture”in this context must be understood not as material commodities per but rather as the social interactions and practices which give tho objects meaning,and numerous media ethnographies have shown conclusively that consumers are not the passive
dupes theorized by the Frankfurt [1])but rather are in themlves active producers of mea
ning[3,14,24,29].Cultural production,therefore,is not merely a function of the behaviors of individual artists or media organizations—it is a social interaction that implicates all people involved with media.Besides,there is significant practical slippage between categories of producer and consumer[15,36]. Within the bookfield,for example,editors and bookllers are among the most avid readers,and ordinary readers can become de facto advertirs“lling”books they like to their friends.Anyone with Internet access can,for that matter,become a critic upon which publishers depend for visibility.And without a formulation of thefield that includes critics and readers,even people who wield awesome influence in the bookfield,such as Oprah Winfrey,would be formally excluded.Thus,to define the culturalfield as broadly as possible is both intuitive and methodologically expedient.
Throughout this paper I will refer alternately to the“bookfield”(trade publishing),the“comicsfield”(comics publishing),and the“mangafield”(manga publishing).The book and comicsfields,though both subts of the larger cultural field,do not greatly overlap.They are each compod of different actors who occupy different social and even geographic spaces and compete for different sorts of resources.I will describe thefields in more detail later,but for now suffice it to say that the mangafield over the past decade has gone from being positioned entirely within the com
icsfield to being positioned predominantly in the bookfield —and that manga’s shifting location within the larger culturalfield has ultimately changed how the mangafield itlf—its actors,its organizational practices,and its associated symbolic meanings—is constituted.
Manga in the Comics Field
To understand the context in which manga wasfirst introduced to the United States,the comicsfield as a whole mustfirst be broadly mapped out.The American comicsfield today is dominated by Marvel and DC Comics,its two largest publishers,both owned by American corporations.Although together they claim80%of the direct market,the primary distribution system(monolithically controlled by Diamond Comic Distrib-utors,which does not allow returns)through which comics arrive at retail stores,they actually make the bulk of their money through franchising;comics proper are best understood as loss leaders through which prestige and visibility are accrued in thefield. The standard comics format is the32-page“floppy”or“pamphlet,”sold primarily through approximately2,000independent comic book shops nationwide.Actors in the field—writer,artist,editor,bookller,and reader alike—are predominantly adult, white,and male and are committed to storylines,for the most part falling within the superhero genre,that have continued non-stop for decades[30].Thus,becau considerable experti is required to operate even superficially fr中国抗战
om any position in the field,comics can be quite forbidding to newcomers.
Perhaps“forbidding”is an understatement.Commentators within thefield routinely lament its stagnation,and their criticism,particularly of demographic limitations,can assume downright lurid proportions.Former vice president of Marvel Shirrel Rhoades[30,p.17]writes,“One problem is that most comic book
shops aren’t very kid-friendly.There’s scant product for younger readers to be found there.And moms don’t go into comic book shops becau it’s like going into a pool hall—a bunch of geeky guys standing around arguing over whether Superman could beat up Thor.”Comics critic Douglas Wolk[42,p.64–5]takes Rhoades’line of thought even further and writes openly about“Why I Hate My Culture.”He paints a vivid,evocative picture,and I have chon to excerpt the relevant passages at length: Over the last half century,comics culture has developed as an insular,lf-feeding,lf-loathing,lf-defeatingflytrap.A lot of people who hit their local comics store every Wednesday think of comics readers as some kind of cret, embattled fellowship:a group with its own private codes that mark its members as belonging and everybody el as not belonging.(That’s why most comics stores are deeply unfriendly places:everything about them says,“You mean you don’t know?”In some of them,even new pamphlets and books are aled in plastic before they go out on the shelves;if you
don’t walk into the store knowing what you want,you’re not going tofind out.)
…That incestuous relationship between audience and medium has been encouraged by the big comics publishers…mainstream comics pamphlets that are incomprehensible to anyone not already immerd in their culture aren’t just the norm now;they’re the point.
Wolk[p.70]continues in an equally critical vein:
The world of comic book readers is an insular world,and it is also an annoyingly male world.The archetypal comics store employee—think of The Simpsons’Comic Book Guy—is a lonely,socially maladjusted man,and so are his archetypal customers.For a few decades,mainstream comics were so overwhelmingly male-dominated that the industry had not the faintest idea of how to connect with potential women customers…
Unsurprisingly,the maleness of comics culture has been lf-perpetuating:if reading(or collecting)comics is understood as“something that guys do,”then the woman in the comics store is an anomaly.If you’ll forgive a little grad-school speak,either she’s performing womanhood wrong,or she’s performing comics reading wrong.
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Whether or not Rhoades and Wolk exaggerate is debatable,but what the passages make vividly clear is that the habitus of the comicsfield makes it difficult terrain for new,aspiring actors of every sort,whether they be readers,llers,or publishing companies:publishers who have not already been long situated in the field have trouble attracting extant readers;potential new readers,especially women and children,find extant material confusing and shops unwelcoming;shops not run by longtime insiders who know how to appeal to other longtime insiders cannot keep their customer ba;and so forth.
Yet it is within this troublesome terrain of the comicsfield that the story of manga in America began.In addition to the myriad characteristics already described above,the comicsfield is also subject to wrenching,speculator-driven boom and bust cycles.During the periods,pursuit of economic capital becomes paramount,
