Shrinkage

ICv2 picks up Comipress’ story on the declining manga market, and adds a few observations of its own including the state of the DVD sales as well.  (No linkback?  Howwude.)

One thing I’ve probably noted before, but not regarding that article specifically, is that manga is not the only pop culture medium seeing a decline.  Home console video games, which received a lot of the blame for taking readers away from manga, is itself losing ground in Japan.  There’s even a name for the phenomenon… “gamer drift.”  And where does the game industry point its finger at?  Internet, for one… and cell phones.

The audience, while experiencing growing pains, isn’t so much shrinking as the market is simply becoming diffused.  Not all companies were blindsided by this… years ago, when the two largest RPG makers in Japan merged to form Square-Enix (or as I prefer, “Squeenix”), one of their first announcements was increased commitment to development for handhelds, particularly cell phones.  Most Western journalists and fans were left scratching their heads, but Squeenix knew what they were doing.  The signs of market shift were already there even then.

So then, what’s left to do now for anime, manga, and video games… three cultural industries that are experience decline?  Why, they form partnerships to assure mutual survival… or destruction.

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PWCW has two articles on manga today, both dealing with yaoi… Iris Press’ growth this year, and in particular their prose line and the upcoming release of Only Words by Tina Anderson, and a piece on Media Blasters which delves deeper into their decision to drop shonen titles for more yaoi/BL originally uncovered by the Anime On DVD forum goers.

Still, no love for eromanga. ;_;

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I didn’t care enough about the hoopla over Captain America to have posted about it when it went down (heck, I’m actually quite annoyed by how much milkage Marvel is getting out of it at The Colbert Report…why not Tek Janson?), but this is just fun: Dirk Deppey presents a backhanded defense of Wizard’s behavior in the Cap-gate through some twisted moral relativism.  (If you don’t know what it’s about, you can catch up at Newsarama.)  Wizard was not evil enough to warrant the belly-aching?  Now you’re encouraging them.

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Wow, Harlequin Manga is still going?  And they’re still using pink ink? Eww.