Books, Not Comics: Publishing Fields, Globalization, and Japanese Manga in the United States (original) (raw)

Abstract:

The market for Japanese comics, called manga, in the United States grew rapidly at the beginning of the twenty first century at a rate unprecedented in the publishing industry. Sales grew a remarkable 350% from 60millionin2002to60 million in 2002 to 60millionin2002to210 million in 2007 and did not begin to decline until the beginning of the recent economic downturn beginning in late 2008. No published research 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 rise of manga in the United States and its implications for the globalization of culture. Adapting Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical formulation of the cultural field, I argue that manga migrated from the comics field to the book field 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 Japanese origin of Japanese 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 erases from American consciousness the Japanese, the foreign, the other.

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Notes

  1. “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.
  2. Actually, the very first 5 × 7.5 inch, $9.99 book available from Tokyopop predates the “100% Authentic Manga” campaign by a few months. This book is Island Vol. 1 by In-Wan Youn and Kyung-Il Kang, a comic of Korean origin. Incidentally (or perhaps not), the Korean edition of Island is B6 size (~5 × 7 inches), nearly equivalent to the American edition.
  3. Del Rey Manga began modestly with four series: Negima!, Gundam Seed, Tsubasa, and xxxHOLiC. All of these books are 5 × 7.5 inches and priced at $10.95.
  4. Early CMX titles include Madara, Land of the Blindfolded, and From Eroica with Love. All of these books are 5 × 7.5 inches and priced at $9.99.

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Acknowledgment

If this article is the fruit of my research, then I owe the following people a profound debt of gratitude: John B. Thompson, for leading me to the field; Ruoyun Bai, for the intellectual space to grow; and Aram Sinnreich, for seeing me all the way to the final harvest.

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  1. Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University, 239 Greene Street, 7th Floor, New York, NY, 10003, USA
    Casey E. Brienza

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Brienza, C.E. Books, Not Comics: Publishing Fields, Globalization, and Japanese Manga in the United States.Pub Res Q 25, 101–117 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-009-9114-2

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