BW Media Spotlight

Remember this from yesterday? This was the part of the interview with Jim Lee, conducted by Japanese entertainment site Nikke X Trend about his work in DC Comics and it being adapted by James Gunn. All anybody who I saw post about this or in podcasts focused on one section in particular (translation by Google Chrome):

–Japanese comics are now gaining popularity overseas. For example, “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba” and “Chainsaw Man” have been made into movies and are hits in the US. As a legend in the American comic book world, how do you view Japanese comics? How do you analyze the reasons for their popularity?

Lee: I’m quite old (laughs), so I remember the late 1980s, when Japanese manga and anime first came to the US. I read Katsuhiro Otomo’s “AKIRA.” It was translated and published by Marvel. I read it and then bought the laser disc. Then I also read Masamune Shirow’s “Appleseed.” It hadn’t been translated, so I didn’t really understand the story, but I loved the illustrations.

But speaking of “this moment,” I think Asian culture and pop culture as a whole is booming. This is true for K-POP, Korean dramas, and Japanese anime. Young people want to discover something that is uniquely their own. The stories told in Japanese manga and anime are incredibly powerful. I often find myself wondering, “What is missing in Western comics, and why aren’t they able to achieve the same flavor?”

Also, I think manga has an advantage over American comics, which are mostly about superheroes, and that’s where the majority of sales and readers are concentrated. In Japan, it’s closer to “literature,” and anyone can read it, and it’s not just hero stories. There’s a much wider range of genres, like stories about cooking and soccer. You can draw stories from that. So I’m very happy that the manga has been so successful, because it gives me a goal to aim for.

The manga market is bigger than our industry, so the question becomes, “What can we learn from this?”

The question is, “How do we access that?” It’s not just a matter of art style, but a “sensibility” that’s involved. The stories that are successful in Japan are very different from the stories that are successful in the West. What can we learn from that? I think this is a debate that will continue forever. I don’t have the exact answer either, because if we did, we would already be getting the same sales and readership (laughs).

Long quote, I know, and I both combined paragraphs and emphasised the parts that people were commenting on. The rest is for context and the answer to his question is actually in the interview, including this part. Learning what manga is doing that DC isn’t and why it’s working is easy. People have been doing it. However, the problem isn’t just the things manga is doing right but what DC Comics stopped doing right. The US market and how average people connected to comics is different than how fans are connecting with Japanese comic stories. So while there are some things that they should totally be learning from the success of Japanese manga, there’s also some ideas that they shouldn’t because they need to go back to what was working.

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