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Almost every comic artist I know wants to write really, really long stories. Hundred-page stories. Thousand-page stories. Jeff Smith's
Bone at 1,300 pages, Dave Sim's
Cerebus at 6,000 pages. Long page counts are a comic creator's badge of honor, and they also speak to something fundamental about comics: they are a solitary art form (unless you share a studio) and they take a long time to draw. During those days hunched over the drawing board, with ideas transferring to paper at slow upload speeds, your thoughts wander, simple plots get more complicated, and soon you're plotting a life-consuming epic, like Philip Seymour Hoffmann's character in
Synecdoche, New York.
While not generally as introspective as a Charlie Kaufman movie, manga gives people even more role models for really long comics:
Dragon Ball,
One Piece,
Glass no Kamen,
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure,
Lone Wolf and Cub are just a few of the story manga to reach over 8,000 pages in length. What Warren Ellis once called "decompressed" storytelling, with pages upon pages to set the scene or show moment-by-moment action, is now accepted and welcomed by most comics readers (even ones who don't like the big eyes and other stereotypical signifiers of 'manga'), and a 200 page graphic novel, what would have been an epic in the 1980s, might even seem short.
But there's a problem; the American market does not necessarily bear long-running, creator-owned comics. Such lengthy works are a big risk on the part of publishers, and require a lot of work time on the part of artists, who don't necessarily have teams of assistants like Masashi Kishimoto, creator of
Naruto. In America, sales of multiple-volume manga generally drop with each new volume, making 10+ volume series a very risky publishing venture. Some publishing trends seem directly opposed to the nature of traditional manga; with paper prices rising, and gorgeous color printing of the
Flight and
Popgun style becoming ever cheaper and easier (not to mention that color is free online), there's less and less incentive to create lengthy stories in B&W print. Will the American market ever encourage truly epic, zillion-page stories in the style of manga?
In a word, no. In more words, even the manga market doesn't really encourage zillion-page stories as much as we think it does. The format of manga—the bones of manga beneath the flesh of art and story motifs—is created by publishing and economic factors, and out of the thousands of manga which debut in Japanese magazines each year, only a few dozen make it to a second or third graphic novel volume.
With a few exceptions, mostly from established artists who have proven themselves with shorter works (such as the novel-like works of Kazuo Umezu and Naoku Urasawa), even the longest running manga were not conceived from the beginning as bookshelf-destroying behemoths. Published in anthology magazines, the typical manga has the story structure of a TV pilot—the first chapter sells the "pitch," and only if it's successful does the manga keep going. If Eiichiro Oda's
One Piece had scored poorly in reader polls, instead of reaching 50+ volumes, the characters would never have gotten off the first island. (On the other hand, sometimes a manga intended as a one-shot, like Azusa Izumi's
The Lizard Prince, is picked for expansion into an ongoing series—never mind if all the loose plot threads have already been tied up, make some new ones!) Sustaining interest over the long haul is not easy; Dave Sim's
Cerebus is the longest Western comic book series written by a single creator, but as Sim himself has pointed out, he didn't set his grandiose goal until after he'd built a readership and cut his teeth on 25 self-contained, 20-page issues. Throughout his epic, Sim also kept trying to bring in new readers, usually by parodies of then-popular comics such as Moon Knight, Spawn and the Sandman—parodies which date the comic and make it harder to read today (though arguably less so than Sim's infamous conversion to right-wing religious fundamentalism, speaking of isolation and thoughts wandering).
In manga, as in all things, format and medium determine the structure of a story. Creating a long-running series is a balancing act of keeping the readers' interest with every individual installment while also keeping your eye on the "big plan" (assuming you have one). Within manga, there are several different publishing formats which steer towards several different types of stories—not all of them towards the super-long, decompressed mega-manga which Americans know from
Dragon Ball,
Fruits Basket and
Bleach.
(1) Weekly manga. There are scarcely more than a dozen weekly manga magazines, but among them number the highest-circulation manga magazines in Japan:
Shonen Jump,
Shonen Sunday,
Shonen Magazine, etc. With an average of 20 pages a week, 80 pages a month, weekly stories use more pages than almost any other manga. The drawn-out fight scenes of manga like
Dragon Ball,
Naruto and
Bleach are a product of weekly manga. Weekly manga also has the luxury of not having to tell a complete story in every chapter; when the reader is coming back in just a week, it's okay to end in the middle of a battle or on an outrageous cliffhanger. When collected in book form, the result is usually a very smooth, "cinematic" read, like flipbooks that go on for thousands and thousands of pages.
Weekly manga magazines were introduced around 1959 to compete with television shows, another traditionally weekly medium, which was just beginning to be introduced in postwar Japan. Weekly manga can also be compared to American newspaper comic strips in the first half of the 20th century—they're designed to be as cheap, B&W, disposable and widely read as possible. Until the 1960s, before the heyday of weekly manga, most manga was not unlike American and European comics; very short works of a few chapters or volumes at most. But with weekly manga, page counts grew and grew; the goal is to hook the readers in and keep 'em reading. Akira Toriyama, it's said, wanted to end
Dragon Ball long before volume 42, but was pressured into continuing by the sheer popularity of the series, like Douglas Adams cranking out yet another
Hitchhiker's Guide novel.
But for all their cultural clout, weekly manga, like newspaper strips and network television, is a fading medium. Except for
Weekly Comic Bunch (which skews towards an aging readership anyway), all the existing weekly magazines in Japan are at least 20 years old; recent attempts like
Comic Gumbo have been failures. Publishing a weekly manga magazine requires tremendous resources, and with the fragmentation of media, perhaps the generalist audience required to sustain these massive magazines is dwindling. Oddly, there are no weekly
shojo manga magazines (although there are several biweekly ones), possibly a sign of
shojo's smaller economic footprint; a few weekly
shojo magazines were published in the 1960s but never caught on.
(2) Biweekly or monthly manga. The vast majority of manga magazines are monthly. Individual comics run approximately 30 pages a month, approximately the same as American comics. A monthly manga has to make tighter use of its pages than a weekly manga, and it's arguably due to this format that monthly manga—such as
Gunsmith Cats,
Blade of the Immortal,
Fullmetal Alchemist—have traditionally been some of the most popular manga in America, particularly in the 1990s before the massive page counts of weekly manga had been accepted by the American publishing marketplace.
Biweekly and monthly manga have tremendous variety, but the monthlies have one major difference from weekly manga: they're more likely to be the work of a single person. "Weekly manga requires at least 4-5 assistants," says Hideki Egami, the editor of Shogakukan's monthly magazine
Ikki. "Monthly is close to the maximum frequency that a manga came come out and be drawn entirely by one person." Although popular manga artists often have massive staffs of assistants, there's a sizeable number of manga artists who, either by choice or poverty (drawing a monthly manga series is not necessarily a get-rich-quick scheme), have no full-time assistants or just call in their friends for help when a deadline looms. Some artists, like Hitoshi Iwaaki (
Parasyte), draw everything themselves on principle; some artists, like Hiromu Arakawa (
Fullmetal Alchemist), employ large studios.
(3) Bimonthly, quarterly or irregular magazine manga. Magazines with such an infrequent publishing schedule tend to be subculture mags: the lesbian manga magazine
Yuri Hime, yaoi magazines such as
Be x Boy Gold, or spinoffs of more frequent magazines such as
Dengeki Teioh and
LaLa Dx. These magazines are often the easiest to break into, with yaoi in particular being an entry point for many female manga artists, much the way that male-oriented pornographic manga in the 1970s was a breeding ground for underground manga artists like Hideo Azuma (
Disappearance Diary). As long as you deliver the goods, you have a certain amount of freedom, and it was in this environment that artists like Fumi Yoshinaga and est em developed.
The general consensus in manga publishing seems to be that, if a magazine comes out this infrequently, the manga should be one-shots since it's almost impossible to keep readers' attention for an ongoing story. (Shhh…don't tell any American indy comics artists…) If bimonthly manga do have an ongoing story, such as
Natsume's Book of Friends,
Land of the Blindfolded, and
Palette of 12 Secret Colors, it's necessary to re-explain the basic story premise in each episode and make each episode as self-contained as possible. The result is handy for a reader randomly picking up the magazine, but makes for a repetitive experience when the manga is later collected in graphic novel format.
(4) Standalone mange. Although it's still rare in Japan, a growing number of manga are published in standalone books without magazine serialization, like most American graphic novels. One example is Taiyo Matsumoto's 448-page graphic novel
Go Go Monster. The real problem with standalone graphic novels in any country, of course, is how long they take to produce, during which time the artist has no reader feedback and, possibly, no source of income.
(5) Yonkoma (four-panel) mange. Four-panel manga, such as
Azumanga Daioh and a bunch of books recently published by Yen Press, are the equivalent of American newspaper/web comic strips. Aside from a focus on cute girls, they eerily parallel the dynamics of Western gag strips: they are character-driven, rather than story-driven, and they rarely have much ongoing plot.
Yonkoma manga is easy to make, easy to read, and—surprisingly considering its low profile in the U.S.—very successful. While other manga magazines' circulations dwindle,
yonkoma manga is the fastest growing area of the manga industry. Four-panel series such as
Lucky Star are increasingly being adapted into animation and merchandise. There are many magazines devoted solely to four-panel manga. Online and cellphone manga is overwhelmingly four-panel-oriented, as it's the easiest type of manga to read on mobile devices, and some
yonkoma webcomics, such as Hidekaz Himaruya's
Hetalia Axis Powers, have even become hits and made it into the big time.
The 8,000+ page manga mega-epics are the result of a very specific, monolithic publishing culture, and as circumstances change (for instance, into the casual culture of webcomics and cell phones) the nature of "manga" will change with it. On the other hand, the fragmentation of media means more opportunities for creators; there's no reason you
can't tell an epic, 1,000+ page story on the web. The trick is not to do it blindly, thinking that by mimicking the traditional print-derived structure of manga (or to give another example followed by way too many young artists, by drawing your manga right to left), you'll have the same success as mega-manga which arose in Japan's magazine boom years of the 1980s and early 1990s. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but creating a manga
cargo cult won't necessarily cause riches to fall from the sky.
Jason Thompson is one of the best-known manga critics in the US. He currently writes for Otaku USA and is the author of Manga: The Complete Guide. His website is www.mockman.com.
Manga Salad is © Jason Thompson, 2010
