Not against the medium I consume it.
But it occurred to me that there seems to be a lot more exposure to anime and manga largely thanks to services like crunchyroll and manga reader services, this includes physical sales as well.
It’s just that you’d think say, Superman would be more stupidly popular since everyone knows who he is than someone such as Lelouch from Code Geass.
Is it because comics just doesn’t have the same spark with the younger generation? Or is it because there are a billion different issues of comics so it makes manga more streamlined?
I would like to know your thoughts as I am quite curious about this phenomenon, since even in the early 2000s I was into anime, and you could get your fix from non legit services via the Internet, but I’m sure as shit it didn’t hit this mainstream until the mid 2010s and now the roaring 2020s.
I personally think that anime and manga having a ‘pipeline’ helps them.
A publisher like Weekly Shonen Jump shotguns a load of new series into their comic and sees if any stick.
If a series is popular, then their individual volumes sell well, encouraging WSJ to continue publishing.
After a while, the popular series will most likely be given an anime (which nowadays tend to be very manga accurate), which tend to export better.
If the anime is popular, volume sales increase worldwide, and you have a massive hit.
While this quite effectively creates new popular series, it leads to a massive manga graveyard.
Western comics don’t really have this kind of pipeline and I’m not aware of any WSJ-like publications for new Western projects.