Back in January, and yes it’s relevant, Jim Lee was interviewed by a Japanese website about what DC could learn from the successes of manga in the US. This prompted a further response from me as to what DC could and couldn’t learn from manga. Manga’s success came in part from continuing to do some things we don’t or stopped doing while also being uniquely Japanese, which many Japanese media fans in the West find interesting. At the time they were also losing to Marvel Comics, as it tends to go back and forth between the two.
Today DC is doing much better against Marvel in the comics, but still losing to manga last I heard. They made some changes, but they’re also still making many of the same mistakes I pointed out in my article, relying more on gimmicks and trades than doing what comics do best. They’ve also been getting a boost from the Absolute line, reaching readers who somehow thought current Batman wasn’t dark enough and thought Snyder’s Superman wasn’t Supermanless enough. I don’t follow the Absolute line so I don’t know what if anything has changed with the tone, but everything I did hear says it’s not for me and doesn’t feature what I loved about the DC Universe…more so than the regular DC titles currently. They’re also reprinting older comics and doing smaller, more affordable versions of some of their biggest storylines in trade form. So some good moves are being made.
It isn’t enough for YouTuber Comic Drake, often a good source of daily videos and recommended viewing, who recently posted a video about what he thinks is behind DC’s current success increase and what they could do still. While I agree with a couple of his points, this is a VS article so you know there’s enough disagreement to make this interesting. Like I said back in January, US and Japanese comics operate from different perspectives and that’s a good thing for both industries. Yes, there are things DC could learn or even relearn, but not everything Japan is doing is going to work for us because it still abandons what made comics so big in the first place. Watch the video and I’ll explain. Just dodge the occasional “S” bombs.
Keeping costs down is certainly one of DC’s smartest moves when it comes to their “compact editions”. I haven’t seen them because I don’t get out much, but to introduce new readers to the iconic stories, whether they’re canon or not with all the universe rebuilds, is a great idea. Even the reprints are on a modern version of newsprint, though for some reason still a typical comic price. Batman #9 and Action Comics #252 are also larger than a typical comic, because as “facsimile editions” they retain all the ads, gag strips, and complete stories of the original comic. Batman has more in it so it’s more expensive than the Action Comics, but with modern paper they wouldn’t have been affordable.
Remember what brought US comics to popularity. Kids could spend their allowance. Adults could grab one on the train or carry it with them to a foxhole in wartime. Waiting rooms could grab a few to put out for customers and patients. Some of my early comic reading came at the barber shop waiting for my turn to get a haircut. You can’t have diehard fans without casuals to turn into those fans. Now you have to go out of your way to a special shop to find early issues rather than getting one off a rack at the grocery or convenience store. Archie no longer has pocket sized digests at the checkout counter. You only get into comics now if someone else introduces you to them because the movies and shows are not the best advertising, since the studios, directors, and most screenwriters who aren’t already comic writers couldn’t care less about the “lesser” media.
This is why our big divide is one I seem to have with a lot of comic commentators like Drake and even Perch: ditching the monthly comics. In Drake’s case he wants to follow the Shonen Jump model of anthology magazines, like the old Golden Age comics. In the past they’ve tried translating those magazines and people still waited for the trade. Last time I saw one there was only a few pages of each story, and the ones I didn’t care about seemed to be taking space away from one I did, like with Golden Age anthologies. What works in manga doesn’t necessarily work in US comics. I’m exaggerating to be silly while making my point, but nobody’s asking to read the latest Justice League from right to left. It also seems odd to me that he’s referring to the “floppies” as “outdated” and wants to go back to the Golden Age anthology, which was itself outdated. There’s a reason we stopped doing that on a regular basis, and as someone who reads those old comics for review once a week (when I’m not doing Free Comic Book Day/Comics Giveaway Day deep reviews like I’m doing currently–we should be back to Golden Age Friday by next week) it’s a good thing.
Ooh, in this issue Goku powers up and makes his hands glow. I need to see that!
For those of you who read my “Yesterday’s” Comic reviews on weekdays, think about how many times I’ve said “this story didn’t have enough pages to really make the story work”. When your comic comes out monthly, or even weekly, six pages isn’t even enough for a good serial. The action or drama newspaper strips came out 3 or 4 panels tops each day or a few lines of the page each week (sometimes both depending on where Sunday comics fit into the story of the weekday comics) along with other comics on the same page. Shonen Jump is weekly but it’s also only a few pages each week. There’s a reason the collected manga takes so long to come out, and it’s the same reason as the graphic novel series someone like Rippaverse Comics puts out: time to make them. Now pick up numerous anthologies a week from different publishers and there’s actually a higher chance someone will disappear even if they’re potentially interesting. Characters like Superman and Captain Marvel got lucky in gaining a strong audience while The Flame never had a chance to be interesting. Could all of those Golden Age characters have been successful? Probably not. Aman wasn’t that interesting and I stopped reading a number of titles because the characters were uninteresting. They would have had a better chance if the stories had more time to cook (no pun intended, Flame). Plastic Man is successful while Dollman is a trivia subject.
I’m not against anthologies altogether, but not as the replacement for the monthly periodicals. Instead I’d rather see something running parallel, giving lesser known characters a chance to have a shining moment if only to have them available later on or to give creators a bit of practice or new creators an introduction without dropping them face first into Batman. Give them chance to hone their skills a bit and maybe bring some attention to Silencer or B’Wanna Beast. Rippaverse does a monthly magazine that includes tryouts of new characters that could either have their own book or be used as sort of “consultants” to heroes in the larger graphic novels. Or they’ll just have a new story in a later Rippaverse Magazine issue because they work in small doses rather than a full graphic novel. It might also be good for casuals to have a Detective Comics to introduce readers to a wider Gotham City, or would if it wasn’t for so many multiple title crossovers meant to pad out a trade where every story has to have nothing less than EVERYTHINGEVERISDOOMED!!!!!!! at stake. Just make sure they’re affordable and easily accessible without hunting down a comic or book store.
As I’ve stated in numerous posts, it’s the monthly issues that introduced most of us to Western comics and where the casual reader used to come from. It was working. It’s just with the abandonment of magazines due to environmental concerns or going digital (or both) that the magazine racks started disappearing. Meanwhile the floppies were coming off as chapter X of the trade, like the manga magazines Drake wants us to switch to. They may be publishing the monthly comics, but if you get what I mean they aren’t making monthly comic stories. The occasional multiparter is okay but done-in-one stories for the casuals in a running universe via subplots for the diehards to follow is a better model. They don’t do that anymore. Maybe they should just make graphic novels, but not because the monthlies wouldn’t sell. Because that’s not what the writers want to make while the suits don’t understand why a trade collection of Batman’s “Hush” storyline did so well at any size.
Even the blatant ad comic knows how to make their cover exciting!
Ads don’t bother me. It’s a good spot to reflect on what you read, put the comic down to go do something, ad breaks in comics and TV gave me a point to fill the story in myself and is part of why I wanted to be a storyteller, or with a comic I can just turn the page without breaking the flow that much. Just think of them as cliffhanger spots if everyone works together for a good ad break. Used to work on TV. Compare proper ad breaks to streaming services that just drop them in at the same time frame down to the second despite when the show uses them. It’s a shorter serial that you get back to in five minutes instead of next week.
We do agree on one major issue: treating comics as collectibles rather than storytelling. Instead of poster covers, which predate the variant overload, the comic cover should sell the story inside and make you want to read it…which wouldn’t work for an anthology unless you want to focus on one story and hope that’s the one that draws a reader in, which again comes from Golden Age anthologies. Some of my favorite covers are the ones that make me want to read the story. Comics have stories in them. Shocker, I know. You don’t buy DVDs and video games for the box art. You buy them to watch the movie and play the game. Even then the best home video, video game, and novel covers make the product inside look like something you want to watch, play, or read. Treat comics like a story and not like a poster or trading card. I put my comics in boarded bags to protect them but I also take them out and read them. Graded slabs don’t allow you to do that. I also don’t leave my Transformers in the box or on the card because that defeats the purpose of having something with more than one form, numerous accessories, and high articulation, but that’s for my other site to get into.
So, lower the paper on the regular comics, save the high quality paper for higher quality trades or comic store edition for the diehard fans (like the they did in the 1990s but there might be a reason we don’t have “direct market vs newsstand editions” anymore) while making an affordable trade for collectors who just want to read the comic and still have supper that night or just want something to read on the bus besides their phone. Just throw out the stuff that isn’t working and bring back the stuff that did. Make the comics worth reading and worth picking up each month plus a way to find them, and you should come out ahead. I didn’t even go to business school for that. I’m just the customer who knows what he wants and the critic who remembers when comics were a bigger part of the culture.
The Clutter Reports (my other site)
BW Media Spotlight 
Back in January, and yes it’s relevant, Jim Lee was interviewed by a Japanese website about what DC could learn from the successes of manga in the US. This prompted a further response from me as to what DC could and couldn’t learn from manga. Manga’s success came in part from continuing to do some things we don’t or stopped doing while also being uniquely Japanese, which many Japanese media fans in the West find interesting. At the time they were also losing to Marvel Comics, as it tends to go back and forth between the two.
Today DC is doing much better against Marvel in the comics, but still losing to manga last I heard. They made some changes, but they’re also still making many of the same mistakes I pointed out in my article, relying more on gimmicks and trades than doing what comics do best. They’ve also been getting a boost from the Absolute line, reaching readers who somehow thought current Batman wasn’t dark enough and thought Snyder’s Superman wasn’t Supermanless enough. I don’t follow the Absolute line so I don’t know what if anything has changed with the tone, but everything I did hear says it’s not for me and doesn’t feature what I loved about the DC Universe…more so than the regular DC titles currently. They’re also reprinting older comics and doing smaller, more affordable versions of some of their biggest storylines in trade form. So some good moves are being made.
It isn’t enough for YouTuber Comic Drake, often a good source of daily videos and recommended viewing, who recently posted a video about what he thinks is behind DC’s current success increase and what they could do still. While I agree with a couple of his points, this is a VS article so you know there’s enough disagreement to make this interesting. Like I said back in January, US and Japanese comics operate from different perspectives and that’s a good thing for both industries. Yes, there are things DC could learn or even relearn, but not everything Japan is doing is going to work for us because it still abandons what made comics so big in the first place. Watch the video and I’ll explain. Just dodge the occasional “S” bombs.
Keeping costs down is certainly one of DC’s smartest moves when it comes to their “compact editions”. I haven’t seen them because I don’t get out much, but to introduce new readers to the iconic stories, whether they’re canon or not with all the universe rebuilds, is a great idea. Even the reprints are on a modern version of newsprint, though for some reason still a typical comic price. Batman #9 and Action Comics #252 are also larger than a typical comic, because as “facsimile editions” they retain all the ads, gag strips, and complete stories of the original comic. Batman has more in it so it’s more expensive than the Action Comics, but with modern paper they wouldn’t have been affordable.
Remember what brought US comics to popularity. Kids could spend their allowance. Adults could grab one on the train or carry it with them to a foxhole in wartime. Waiting rooms could grab a few to put out for customers and patients. Some of my early comic reading came at the barber shop waiting for my turn to get a haircut. You can’t have diehard fans without casuals to turn into those fans. Now you have to go out of your way to a special shop to find early issues rather than getting one off a rack at the grocery or convenience store. Archie no longer has pocket sized digests at the checkout counter. You only get into comics now if someone else introduces you to them because the movies and shows are not the best advertising, since the studios, directors, and most screenwriters who aren’t already comic writers couldn’t care less about the “lesser” media.
This is why our big divide is one I seem to have with a lot of comic commentators like Drake and even Perch: ditching the monthly comics. In Drake’s case he wants to follow the Shonen Jump model of anthology magazines, like the old Golden Age comics. In the past they’ve tried translating those magazines and people still waited for the trade. Last time I saw one there was only a few pages of each story, and the ones I didn’t care about seemed to be taking space away from one I did, like with Golden Age anthologies. What works in manga doesn’t necessarily work in US comics. I’m exaggerating to be silly while making my point, but nobody’s asking to read the latest Justice League from right to left. It also seems odd to me that he’s referring to the “floppies” as “outdated” and wants to go back to the Golden Age anthology, which was itself outdated. There’s a reason we stopped doing that on a regular basis, and as someone who reads those old comics for review once a week (when I’m not doing Free Comic Book Day/Comics Giveaway Day deep reviews like I’m doing currently–we should be back to Golden Age Friday by next week) it’s a good thing.
Ooh, in this issue Goku powers up and makes his hands glow. I need to see that!
For those of you who read my “Yesterday’s” Comic reviews on weekdays, think about how many times I’ve said “this story didn’t have enough pages to really make the story work”. When your comic comes out monthly, or even weekly, six pages isn’t even enough for a good serial. The action or drama newspaper strips came out 3 or 4 panels tops each day or a few lines of the page each week (sometimes both depending on where Sunday comics fit into the story of the weekday comics) along with other comics on the same page. Shonen Jump is weekly but it’s also only a few pages each week. There’s a reason the collected manga takes so long to come out, and it’s the same reason as the graphic novel series someone like Rippaverse Comics puts out: time to make them. Now pick up numerous anthologies a week from different publishers and there’s actually a higher chance someone will disappear even if they’re potentially interesting. Characters like Superman and Captain Marvel got lucky in gaining a strong audience while The Flame never had a chance to be interesting. Could all of those Golden Age characters have been successful? Probably not. Aman wasn’t that interesting and I stopped reading a number of titles because the characters were uninteresting. They would have had a better chance if the stories had more time to cook (no pun intended, Flame). Plastic Man is successful while Dollman is a trivia subject.
I’m not against anthologies altogether, but not as the replacement for the monthly periodicals. Instead I’d rather see something running parallel, giving lesser known characters a chance to have a shining moment if only to have them available later on or to give creators a bit of practice or new creators an introduction without dropping them face first into Batman. Give them chance to hone their skills a bit and maybe bring some attention to Silencer or B’Wanna Beast. Rippaverse does a monthly magazine that includes tryouts of new characters that could either have their own book or be used as sort of “consultants” to heroes in the larger graphic novels. Or they’ll just have a new story in a later Rippaverse Magazine issue because they work in small doses rather than a full graphic novel. It might also be good for casuals to have a Detective Comics to introduce readers to a wider Gotham City, or would if it wasn’t for so many multiple title crossovers meant to pad out a trade where every story has to have nothing less than EVERYTHINGEVERISDOOMED!!!!!!! at stake. Just make sure they’re affordable and easily accessible without hunting down a comic or book store.
As I’ve stated in numerous posts, it’s the monthly issues that introduced most of us to Western comics and where the casual reader used to come from. It was working. It’s just with the abandonment of magazines due to environmental concerns or going digital (or both) that the magazine racks started disappearing. Meanwhile the floppies were coming off as chapter X of the trade, like the manga magazines Drake wants us to switch to. They may be publishing the monthly comics, but if you get what I mean they aren’t making monthly comic stories. The occasional multiparter is okay but done-in-one stories for the casuals in a running universe via subplots for the diehards to follow is a better model. They don’t do that anymore. Maybe they should just make graphic novels, but not because the monthlies wouldn’t sell. Because that’s not what the writers want to make while the suits don’t understand why a trade collection of Batman’s “Hush” storyline did so well at any size.
Even the blatant ad comic knows how to make their cover exciting!
Ads don’t bother me. It’s a good spot to reflect on what you read, put the comic down to go do something, ad breaks in comics and TV gave me a point to fill the story in myself and is part of why I wanted to be a storyteller, or with a comic I can just turn the page without breaking the flow that much. Just think of them as cliffhanger spots if everyone works together for a good ad break. Used to work on TV. Compare proper ad breaks to streaming services that just drop them in at the same time frame down to the second despite when the show uses them. It’s a shorter serial that you get back to in five minutes instead of next week.
We do agree on one major issue: treating comics as collectibles rather than storytelling. Instead of poster covers, which predate the variant overload, the comic cover should sell the story inside and make you want to read it…which wouldn’t work for an anthology unless you want to focus on one story and hope that’s the one that draws a reader in, which again comes from Golden Age anthologies. Some of my favorite covers are the ones that make me want to read the story. Comics have stories in them. Shocker, I know. You don’t buy DVDs and video games for the box art. You buy them to watch the movie and play the game. Even then the best home video, video game, and novel covers make the product inside look like something you want to watch, play, or read. Treat comics like a story and not like a poster or trading card. I put my comics in boarded bags to protect them but I also take them out and read them. Graded slabs don’t allow you to do that. I also don’t leave my Transformers in the box or on the card because that defeats the purpose of having something with more than one form, numerous accessories, and high articulation, but that’s for my other site to get into.
So, lower the paper on the regular comics, save the high quality paper for higher quality trades or comic store edition for the diehard fans (like the they did in the 1990s but there might be a reason we don’t have “direct market vs newsstand editions” anymore) while making an affordable trade for collectors who just want to read the comic and still have supper that night or just want something to read on the bus besides their phone. Just throw out the stuff that isn’t working and bring back the stuff that did. Make the comics worth reading and worth picking up each month plus a way to find them, and you should come out ahead. I didn’t even go to business school for that. I’m just the customer who knows what he wants and the critic who remembers when comics were a bigger part of the culture.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on May 19, 2026 in DC Spotlight and tagged BW versus, Comic Drake, comics vs manga, commentary, DC Comics.
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About ShadowWing Tronix
A would be comic writer looking to organize his living space as well as his thoughts. So I have a blog for each goal. :)