Pop Culture Commodity Warfare @ New York Comic Con

Summary

It Could Happen Here: "Pop Culture Commodity Warfare @ New York Comic Con"

Podcast: It Could Happen Here
Host(s): Garrison Davis (primary narrator), with contributions from other team members
Date: May 21, 2026

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Overview

This episode explores the transformation of the global pop culture marketplace, as observed at New York Comic Con 2025. Host Garrison Davis delves into the dramatic ascent of Japanese anime and manga, which have come to dominate both the physical space of Comic Con and the pop culture consciousness in the U.S. The discussion analyzes why American comics and media have stalled, their fixation on nostalgia and risk aversion, and contrasts this with the dynamic creativity and global expansion of Japanese and South Korean media industries. The episode also touches on how pop culture serves as a battleground for broader political conflicts and identity wars in the U.S., yet how anime/manga often feel like a "safe" escape from these issues — at least for American audiences.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Nostalgia, Pop Culture, and Personal Connections

• The episode opens with Garrison reflecting on the "2000s nostalgia cycle," emphasizing the return of trends and cultural markers from that era (01:53):

  "We are fully in the throes of 2000s nostalgia. ... Now that our cultural nostalgia cycle has caught up to when I was a kid, I'm starting to realize what kinds of things I'm nostalgic about."

  • Cites 2008's Lego Batman: The Video Game as a formative experience.

2. Comic Con as a Mirror to Culture Wars

• Comic Con is described as both a celebration and an escape for fans, but also a space where wider social anxieties leak through, especially issues around "wokeness" and representation:

  "[Comic Con is] like your parents are fighting and... you crawl into your closet and hide with your stuffed animals, video games and comic books, soothing yourself with the comfortable familiar." (07:56)

• Panels at NYCC directly reference real-world controversies:
  • Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail reflects on the show’s anti-capitalist roots and how tame its dystopia now seems (04:45–05:24):

    "The show we did was not nearly as fucked up as what it would be like today. I mean, it's like Pleasantville now."

  • Queer artists highlight censorship and double standards — e.g., DC canceled a trans-created comic after minor online controversy while overlooking violence depicted by others (06:00–07:10).

3. The Rise of Anime and the Shifting Convention Floor

• Japanese companies, especially anime and manga publishers, now dominate NYCC, outshining Western brands:

  "Come 2025, the exhibition booths for major Western pop culture companies were outnumbered and dwarfed in size by Japanese animation, manga and video game booths." (11:01)

  • Bandai Namco’s booth takes up more space than Marvel and DC combined.
  • Crunchyroll, Viz Media, and Webtoon (Korean digital comics) have major presences.
  • Banners for anime shows (My Hero Academia, Digimon, Gundam) eclipse classic superhero promotions.
• This is a huge shift from the 2010s, when anime was relegated to marginal spaces at the Con.

4. Anecdotes of Anime’s Pervasive Popularity

• Observations extend beyond conventions:

  "The most common thing I see people watching while riding the subway is anime." (15:48)

  • Examples include widespread anime cosplay at events in Brooklyn and Berlin, Olympic athletes publicly identifying as anime fans (U.S. figure skater Alyssa Liu).

5. Quantitative Triumph: Sales Data and Market Shifts

• Manga sales in the U.S. quadrupled from 2020–2023, now making up almost half of all graphic novel sales (17:17–20:31).
• Anime box office records: Demon Slayer and Chainsaw Man movies break U.S. records.
• Netflix reports explosive anime viewership — anime's growth outpaces all other genres on the platform (17:44–18:55).

6. Why Manga Outsells American Comics

• Cites Jim Lee (DC) on manga’s appeal (24:44):

  "The stories told in Japanese manga and anime are incredibly powerful. ...In Japan. It's closer to literature and anyone can read it. ...There's a much wider range of genres like stories about cooking and soccer..."

• Unique advantages:
  • Genres: Manga caters beyond superheroes — romance, sports, cooking, etc.
  • Newness: Emphasis on new stories, clear beginnings/endings, and fresh characters.
  • Affordability: Manga volumes are cheaper and more accessible.
• American comics struggle with continuity confusion, endless recycling of classic characters, and prohibitive entry points for new readers.

7. The Creative Crisis of Western Media

• U.S. pop culture is stuck in a cycle of “self-cannibalization” and fear of risk, propped up by nostalgia (28:16–31:19).
  • Cites the recycling of Batman stories and the tendency to hand projects to industry veterans rather than new creators.
• New risk-averse corporate strategies (e.g., DC Compact Comics) are “copying the form factor” of manga but not the creative vitality.

8. The Structure of Manga/Anime Production—A Sustainable Pipeline?

• Japan actively cultivates young creators via open submission and digital platforms.
• New stories constantly supplement and refresh long-running franchises (cf. Gundam's various iterations).
• This “living labor” allows for adaptability and quick market rotation, as opposed to Western “dead labor”—reliance on legacy icons.

9. Pop Culture as Commodity Warfare: East, West, and the New World Order

• "Commodity warfare" is less about Japan vs. the U.S., more about “old capital” (U.S., Europe) vs. “new capital” (East Asia):

  "Production and economic conditions determine which characters or franchises are seen as cool and culturally relevant." (34:55)

• Japan’s government is now investing in media as a diplomatic tool; creators (e.g., Hideaki Anno, Evangelion) insist on keeping anime culturally distinct rather than diluting for global markets (36:19).
• South Korea (Webtoon, K-pop) is already outcompeting both U.S. and Japan in some emerging sectors.

10. Broader Political and Economic Context

• U.S. pop culture is deeply entangled with partisan politics; studios avoid controversial topics and water down stories for mass appeal (e.g., Disney’s restrictions on discussing fascism or immigration in press for Andor and Superman).
• Japanese and Korean media, while political, are less likely to trigger the same polarized response in the U.S., and thus slip past culture-war scrutiny.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Sam Esmail on nostalgia for dystopia:

  "Honestly, I feel like the show we did was not nearly as fucked up as what it would be like today. I mean, it's like Pleasantville now."
  — Sam Esmail, Mr. Robot creator (05:24)

• Garrison Davis on Comic Con's escapism:

  "Rather than leaving the house or trying to intervene, you crawl into your closet and hide with your stuffed animals, video games and comic books, soothing yourself with the comfortable familiar." (07:56)

• On the anime takeover at Comic Con:

  "Come 2025, the exhibition booths for major Western pop culture companies were outnumbered and dwarfed ... by Japanese animation, manga and video game booths." (11:01)

• Jim Lee on manga's advantages:

  "The manga market is bigger than our industry, so the question becomes, what can we learn from this?" (24:56)

• On risk aversion and nostalgia:

  "Moves like DC Compact Comics is an attempt to manage the crisis while still not taking risks and investing in living labor. They don't want to invest because superhero comics aren't growing, which just further compounds the problem." (37:10)

• Japan's prime minister and global media strategy:

  "The government of Japan has recently announced that they are boosting state investment in the creation of Japanese media like manga, anime and music and strengthening its global distribution networks." (36:10)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:53 — Reflection on 2000s nostalgia and personal ties to Lego Batman.
• 04:45–05:24 — Mr. Robot panel at Comic Con; Sam Esmail discusses show's political underpinnings and how reality has overtaken fiction.
• 07:30–08:30 — Discussion of Comic Con as escapism amidst culture wars and nostalgia.
• 11:01–14:00 — Detailed breakdown of the changing NYCC show floor, with anime/manga overtaking Western media companies.
• 15:48–17:45 — Reports of anime's pervasive popularity outside conventions (NYC, Berlin, Olympics).
• 17:17–20:53 — Market data on manga/anime sales and viewership; quote from Barnes & Noble book buyer about demand.
• 24:44–25:30 — Jim Lee (DC) discusses why manga outpaces Western comics in popularity.
• 28:16–31:19 — Analysis of creative stagnation, nostalgia recycling, and the absence of new blood in Western comics.
• 36:10–37:00 — Japan’s national policy to expand its media market abroad and improve global influence.

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Conclusion

"Pop Culture Commodity Warfare @ New York Comic Con" delivers a trenchant critique of the American pop culture status quo, documenting manga and anime’s rise not simply as a trend, but as a fundamental reshaping of the marketplace and its institutions. The stagnation of U.S. comics is laid bare alongside the vibrancy and originality of Japanese and Korean media industries, with clear implications for the future: nostalgia and risk aversion cannot compete with innovation and sustained investment in new voices. As Western IP cannibalizes itself, the episode suggests, the real "war" is not between East and West, but between a living, creative economy and one stuck replaying its greatest hits.

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For more details or to hear the full nuanced discussion, listen to the full episode on your preferred podcast platform.

Transcript

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[A]

Media. Nostalgia is a relatively new feeling for I'm in my mid-20s and for the first time I'm seeing stuff from when I was a kid come back in style. We are fully in the throes of 2000s nostalgia. I'm talking emo, indie sleaze, denim, Y2K, standard definition digital video, and one of my favorites, the bubbly frutiger aero design style that partially inspired Apple's new liquid glass. But now that our cultural nostalgia cycle has caught up to when I was a kid, I'm starting to realize what kinds of things I'm nostalgic about. One of the biggest is 2008's Lego the video Game. This game is great. No dialogue, Danny Elfman music, simple classic designs. This game is what introduced me to the gothic art deco world of Gotham City and the dark carnival of Batman characters. Growing up around the prairies of Saskatchewan, Canada, this game was my window into the big city with its cathedrals and skyscrapers and likely planted the desire to one day move to New York City. After a 12 year hiatus, the fourth game in the LEGO Batman series comes out today. Lego Legacy of the Dark Knight. A new installment that blends stories from across the Batman films, shows and comics, featuring classic Lego puzzle gameplay with the movement and combat of the Rocksteady Arkham Games. I actually got to play a demo version of this new Lego Batman game last October when I attended New York Comic Con, the largest pop culture convention on the east coast and the most attended in North America. New York Comic Con is a four day fan fest for everything superheroes, comics, sci fi and fantasy. Held once a year at the Javits Convention center in Manhattan. This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. Part of my intention in attending New York Comic Con was to gauge how the big media companies and pop culture in general was reacting to the movement against Wokeness, which was a large force throughout 2024. 5 One of the first panels I attended was the 10th anniversary panel for the TV show Mr. Robot with creator Sam Esmil and stars Ray Malik and Christian Slater. Most of the panel was spent reminiscing on the show's production, which was probably what most fans want out of a panel, but Mr. Robot is a relatively political show. To his credit. Ismail discussed the show's origins as an anti capitalist and anti corporate hacker story Inspired by the 2008 recession and the Arab Spring.

[B]

What I took away from that is that the world felt in crisis. How naive was I back then that that that was what crisis was like. But and and that these young people in not just Egypt but in the entire Middle east was using technology to organize and start a revolution. And that really inspired a lot of what of what the story of Mr. Robot and specifically the character of Elliot

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Esmail went on to call the show's imagined dystopia a quote unquote Pleasantville compared to our current political situation.

[B]

Honestly, I feel like the show we did was not nearly as fucked up as what it would be like today. I mean, It's like Pleasantville now. I mean.

[A]

At a panel for the Tina Romero queer zombie movie Queens of the Dead, trans actor Jack Haven referenced then recent and somewhat misleading reporting that the FBI was declaring trans people as terrorists. In another panel, a trans comic artist also mentioned that trans people were being designated as violent extremists. This artist also discussed queer censorship in comics. She had drawn a cover for the DC Comics series of a character called Red Hood, but this cover was never released because the comic series was cancelled by DC after the writer, also a trans woman, made two posts joking about the death of Charlie Kirk. Meanwhile, one of the CIS guy artists for the hit series Absolute Batman drew art of Absolute Batman snapping the neck of an ice agent literally at New York Comic Con, and this artist continues to draw covers for the series. Speaking of Batman, I also attended an industry panel on Batman animation hosted by directors, character designers and showrunners. James Tucker, creator of Batman the Brave and the Bold and a producer for the show Batman Caped Crusader mentioned having to ignore the anti woke backlash some recent shows received for depicting certain characters as black or gender swapped. Nerd culture has been dealing with this stuff for a while. Gamergate was a contributing factor to the rise of the alt right, and since then pop culture fandom has been one of the main battlegrounds in which the culture war is waged. At New York Comic Con, while hints of the domestic political climate did slip through in brief moments during panels, the prevailing mode of the convention was falling back on comic fantasy as an escape inwards, but not really an escape out. It's like your parents are fighting and rather than leaving the house or trying to intervene, you crawl into your closet and hide with your stuffed animals, video games and comic books, soothing yourself with the comfortable familiar. While walking around the convention floor, I felt like I was a Ghost Trapped in 2019, this particular form of nerdy superhero fandom culture was stuck in stasis, living in the undead husk of the mcu. The main thing differentiating New York Comic Con from a pure pre pandemic Avengers Endgame era time capsule was how much it felt like an anime convention. I attended my fair share of comic cons in the 2000 teens, but the volume of anime stuff at New York Comic Con really surprised me. New York Comic Con itself has had a troubled history with anime. Shortly after New York Comic Con was created in 2006, the same company behind the convention also started an Anime Con called New York Anime Festival. But as New York Comic Con rose in popularity, it started to eat away at New York Anime Festival. The two conventions merged in 2010, but that meant that superheroes in anime had to compete for time and space at the convention, and around 2010, superheroes were winning that battle. To quote Anime News Network, the New York Anime Festival was, quote, slowly and quite literally shoved into the basement at the Javit center over the years by New York Comic Con management until it ceased to exist altogether. Unquote. Come 2012, the New York Anime festival component was phased out altogether. At the time, anime and manga were not doing so well in the United States, having just suffered a market crash due to a combination of factors related to the Great Recession. The pivot from DVD to digital, the bankruptcy of the Borders bookstore, the shutdown of the US distributor Bandai Entertainment and manga publisher Tokyo Pop, followed by the 2011 Tokahu earthquake, which disrupted manga and anime production. So it wasn't at all surprising that Western media and the then ascendant superhero genre dominated the New York Comic Con show floor. But now, oh, how the tables have turned. Come 2025, the exhibition booths for major Western pop culture companies were outnumbered and dwarfed in size by Japanese animation, manga and video game booths. This humiliation wasn't isolated to the show floor. Even before entering the exhibition space, huge banners hung in front of the main entrance for anime like My Hero, Academia, Digimon Gundam and the new Manga Love Bullet. Banner ads for Crunchyroll's new manga reading platform covered the glass walls of the Javits Convention Center. The only banner that rivaled the anime ones in size was for the Anne Rice Gay Vampire show on amc. Once you got to the show floor, the company with the biggest single presence was Japanese entertainment company Bandai Namco. This was by a large margin, the Bandai Namco presence was significantly bigger than the Marvel and DC booths combined. Most, but not all of the Japanese and South Korean companies were concentrated in the middle of the exhibition floor next to the main entrance on the north side. Toei Animation of Dragon Ball and One Piece Fame had their booth right at the show floor entrance, and it was bigger than the Nickelodeon, Avatar and Paramount Star Trek booths combined. The Adult Swim and HBO Max booths were even smaller. Combined, they took up significantly less floor space and were less busy than the exhibition booth for the Japanese animation company behind Chainsaw Man, Jujutsu Kaisen and the Attack on Titan Finale. Studio Mappa, who had a booth at New York Comic Con for the very first time, anime and manga distributor Crunchyroll had a larger presence on the show floor than the combined presence of publishing giants Scholastic and Penguin Random House. The Crunchyroll booth was also bigger than the one for DC Comics. Manga publisher Viz Media has maintained a large presence on the show floor for the past decade. Viz Media is the largest physical publisher of graphic novels in the United States with 25% of the market share, and is owned by the same company that publishes Shonen Jump, which is the largest physical comic publisher in the world. The biggest global publisher of comics in general is the South Korean digital comic platform Webtoon, who also had a comparatively large exhibition booth, as did Japanese video game companies Konami and Capcom. The video game Ninja Gaiden 4 had a boost to itself and collectible card game company Bushiroad had a booth rivaling that of card game titan Wizards of the Coast. Even the sort of third party merch slop that you find at these types of conventions was selling more and more anime stuff than I'd seen in previous years. Looking back at the New York Comic Con 2018 show floor map, Bandai Namco had a much smaller booth, about the same size as Dark Horse Comics. This was less than one quarter of the size of Bandai's show floor presence in 2025. Besides Bandai, the other anime or manga related booths in 2018 were for Dragon Ball, Square Enix and Viz Media. Looking back at the other large booths from 2018 feels like a snapshot from a bygone age. Comedy Central, Rooster Teeth, she Ra, Funko Pop, and the Syfy TV channel. Of these, only Funko still had a booth in 2025, and a much smaller one at that, as the company has suffered a massive drop in sales and what was once a pop culture giant is now in severe financial distress. It could happen here.

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Outside the Comic Con environment, I have seen anecdotal evidence of anime's growing popularity. Besides random Instagram reels or Tick tock videos, the most common thing I see people watching while riding the subway is anime. When I was in Berlin last October covering a convention, on my way back to the Airbnb, I came across a group of about 50 people cosplaying chainsaw Man. Because that night, the Chainsaw man movie released in German theaters. Most of the costumes worn at a weekend Halloween party at the Mood Ring nightclub in Brooklyn were from anime. Also, fun fact, mayoral candidate Zoran Mamdani made an appearance at this party ahead of the upcoming election. U.S. olympic figure skater and gold medalist Alyssa Liu talked about anime during interviews at the Olympics and was seen carrying around a Chainsaw man plushie. Your top five anime.

[C]

Okay, I'm not gonna rank these, like, in their exact places, but Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw man, for sure. A new chapter dropped today, actually, so today's big day. Big day.

[A]

You're a manga reader.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

Sweet. Okay. Attack on Titan. Yeah, that one's really good.

[A]

Was Aaron Justified?

[C]

Yeah. Madoka Magica. And I think, honestly, I could be forgetting some, but Soul Eater. Okay, that's a good one. All right.

[A]

I appreciate you, but does this perceived rise in popularity actually reflect in sales? Well, in September, the Demon Slayer movie Infinity Castle won the US box office with a $70 million opening weekend, eventually earning almost $800 million worldwide, becoming the seventh highest grossing film of 2025 and the highest grossing international film in the United states, surpassing the 25 year record held by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In October, the Chainsaw man movie opened number one at the US Box office, beating the Bruce Springsteen biopic starring Jeremy Allen White, which no one really saw. The Chainsaw man movie grossed almost $200 million worldwide. For the past eight years, Netflix has been heavily investing in anime. Last summer, Netflix claimed that anime is watched by half its global users. In 2025, Netflix users watched almost 9 billion hours of anime, a 10.5% increase from from 2024. In fact, the rate of viewership growth for anime on Netflix is 10 times that of all other content on the platform. In January of 2026, Netflix announced a new deal with anime studio MAPA to exclusively stream a slate of original MAPA shows. Polygon and Vox Media pulled over 4,000 people in 2024, and 42% of Gen Z participants in the US said that they watched anime every week. But it's not just anime. Manga exploded in international popularity over the pandemic and continues to outsell American comics domestically. Manga sales have quadrupled in the US since 2020, reaching a yearly market value of about $1.3 billion by 2023. Of the 44.7 million graphic novels sold by American bookstore chains and online sellers, 21.8 million were manga. That's almost 50% of sales. Coming in second place was comics for kids, which made up about 38% of sales. Approximately 17 million copies in 2023, which is the year we have the most complete data on 7 out of the 10 top selling comic book authors were Japanese. And this is in the United states. Of the 750 top selling comic books in the US almost 400 were manga. Here's a clip of a PBS News piece from 2024.

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Over the last few years, Japanese animation and comic books have seen an explosion of popularity in the United States. We couldn't fill the stores fast enough.

[A]

Barnes and Noble Senior Director of Books

[C]

Shannon DeVito the Readers in the space are so voracious. It's a good thing that the series are so long and so beautifully drawn, because not only do they look for 10 other series to read once they finish one, they go back and reread.

[A]

Manga sales in the US quadrupled from 2019 to 2022, with a peak of 28.4 million copies sold. It is now the fourth largest fiction category overall in the United States, behind romance, thrillers and fantasy.

[C]

It's one of our top 10 subjects any day during the pandemic. It was in our top five pretty consistently.

[A]

Meanwhile, shelf space for superhero graphic novels has been reduced at Barnes and Noble the past few years, sometimes to a single shelf to make way for an expanding collection of manga. Manga sales are also rising in the superhero holy of holies, direct market comic book stores, where Manga was up 33% in 2025. The main driver of sales for US comic publisher Dark Horse Comics is through licensing manga like Berserk. So what might be causing this? As pop culture has become one of the main battlegrounds of the culture war, maybe anime and manga serve as a safe refuge from the divisive, all consuming politics of the United States. A few months ago, we got behind the scenes news about the Andor press tour. Creator Tony Gilroy admitted in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter that Disney requested Gilroy and the cast refrain from using the words fascism and genocide in early promotion of the show to avoid political outrage. When James Gunn described Superman as a quote unquote immigrant, right wing news pundits manufactured a backlash with a Fox News graphic reading Super Woke and Jesse Waters is saying you know what it says on his cape. Ms. 13 Former Superman actor Dean Kane also complained about Superman becoming too WOKE a month before he joined ICE as a part of a publicity stunt. American culture war issues do affect the way our entertainment industry operates, from what projects get greenlit to casting and even corporate mergers. The Trump aligned Ellison family bought Paramount in 2025 and now seek to acquire Warner Brothers. All that considered, it would seem that anime and manga may not get nearly as caught up in our American culture war debate and be relatively safe from both WOKE and anti Woke influence. Though this idea demonstrates the limits of WOKE as an understanding of politics, because of course Japanese media is in fact very political. Take Gundam, Godzilla, Attack on Titan, films like Love and Pop, Gin Rao or Kyoshi Kurosawa's new movie Cloud. A lot of Japanese media wrestles with their extremely punitive judicial system and the country's relationship with nationalism and the military, not to mention the growing popularity of media that plays with gender and sexuality like Yaoi and Boys Love or the common presence of gender non conforming characters in works like Jujutsu, Kaisen and Chainsaw Man. And yet there aren't as many angry YouTube videos decrying woke Chainsaw man for having a beautiful non binary twink. America is just largely insulated from Japanese political issues. Last February, Japan's Conservative party swept a parliamentary snap election, gaining over two thirds control of the lower house, the largest majority since World War II. But both chuds and WOKE alike can enjoy anime because it feels outside American politics. And it is true that Japanese creators aren't trying to navigate around a potentially hostile American audience, which means they can do certain things that American companies might find too risky. The vitriolic reactions to the Last Jedi definitely affected Disney's plans for Star wars, which soon prioritized the comparatively safe and sanitized Mandalorian TV show, which has a movie version coming out this week. Most of the non andor Star wars shows are primarily trying to capitalize on nostalgia, whether for the original trilogy, the prequels, or even The Clone Wars TV show from the 2000s Andor was championed and protected by Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, but now she's transitioning out of that role. In an exit interview with Deadline, Kathleen Kennedy alluded that going forward, Lucasfilm may not pursue risky projects that break the mold. Quote, you have to be bold and you have to be willing to take risks with people and ideas. Otherwise you are just doing the same thing right now. We're in an era where companies are so risk averse and I get it. I hear all the conversations, they've got Wall street to please, and I get it. But I also believe that that's what contributes to things disappearing ultimately, unquote. This reliance on nostalgia and this extreme risk aversion has landed us in a pop cultural recession and Japan is ready, willing and able to fill the gap. This is not simply a matter of thing Japan, but rather this points to real differences in the production and distribution process. A lot of manga is read in Japan. As popular as it's getting here, we are nowhere close to how much manga is read in Japan. Despite their smaller population, Japan still is the primary producer and consumer of manga, with a market value of almost $4.5 billion a year. Manga that sells really well often gets adapted into an anime, and when that anime airs in the U.S. the show then helps drive sales of the original manga. The top selling manga in the US Usually follow whatever is the most successful currently airing anime adaptation. In recent years, that's been Chainsaw Man, Spy X Family, Demon Slayer, Berserk and Jujutsu Kaisen. This model doesn't really exist in the U.S. we don't have regularly airing 22 episode seasons of comic book shows anymore, especially any that appeal to a wide age range. The closest comparison is what Amazon prime has done with miniseries like the Boys and Invincible. But even the juggernaut that was the MCU did not meaningfully boost sales of the original Marvel comics. It Could Happen Here. We'll return after these messages. We now return to It Could Happen Here. In an interview last January, Jim Lee, chief Creative officer and president of DC Comics, talked about why manga is beating Western comics. Quote, 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? 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 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? Jim Lee is right. But this is only getting at one part of the equation. It's not just that manga has a wide range of genres, but also a constantly growing collection of original characters and new series within familiar genres like Shonen or Boys Action comics. Japan is actually generating new culture, not just recycling the same four IPs over and over again. Something like Chainsaw man has its fair share of Japanese and American inspirations, but importantly, it's not a simple spin off of one of those franchises, but an evolution of the genre. Most manga series have a defined beginning and end, usually written by a single author, as opposed to the perpetual continuity of most western comics, where opening up an issue feels like jumping into the middle of a story that's been going on for years, passed on from one author to another. This certainly has its own appeal, but it can be challenging for new readers. When people first get into manga or anime and finish a series, there's then this massive backlog of different series, all with unique characters. A collected manga volume is also much cheaper than a DC or Marvel trade paperback, about $10 compared to $20. Part of DC Comics strategy of trying to learn from manga has included the creation of a new line of paperbacks called DC Compact Comics. Regular western comics are significantly taller and wider than manga, printed on glossy full color paper, about 67 by 11 inches, whereas manga has cheaper paper, usually in black and white. In a more Compact package, usually 5 by 7 and a half inches, DC Compact Comics offers quote unquote new reader friendly stories in a manga sized package at a cheaper price point. But this is only copying the form factor of manga. In 2023, three of the top five selling DC Comics titles were old classics from the late 80s. Watchmen, Sandman and Batman year one. These are the type of comics that DC Combat Comics is reprinting. It's all of these old comics retrofitted into manga size for 10 bucks. And this is helping D.C. with sales. But it's still a self cannibalizing process. These things can't run forever on a nostalgia alone, and if they keep trying to, they're gonna lose to whoever can make new stuff en masse, which right now is Japan and South Korea, with China right around the Corner. Even when D.C. is promoting new stories, they're still relying on the same handful of characters. And this has forced them to do a series of confusing continuity resets to attract new readers. Though this often has the backfire effect of alienating existing readers and making the whole ordeal seem too complicated to bother investing time and money into. Japan does have their own version of IP recycling like Pokemon, Dragon Ball and Gundam. But in a long running series like Gundam, new installments are often completely separate from one another, remixing key concepts in a new canon or premise. Gundam Wing introduced Gundam to most Americans when it aired on Toonami, and that show is entirely distinct from the original Gundam series from 1979. This continuity separation is continued with new installments like Iron Blooded Orphans and Witch from Mercury. Something similar is attempted in the Marvel ultimate universe or DC's Elseworlds, or more comparably, in something like the critically acclaimed Absolute Batman or Absolute Martian Manhunter series. But historically these concepts get roped into multiverse slop and crossover events that feed into the same nostalgia loops and franchise self cannibalization. The risk aversion among US media companies not only restricts what types of stories can be told, but also who is telling them. Even the new darling of DC Comics, Absolute Batman, the groundbreaking series that's redefining the character, is written by a guy who has been writing Batman since Obama's first term. the New York Comic Con Batman Animation panel, I recognized animators and directors that I've known of since I was a little kid because I watched the bonus features on all of my Batman DVDs. The big announcement at that panel was that they were adapting Nightfall, a comic book run from the 90s, into a multi part animated film series. I also attended panels for Gundam and the Chainsaw man movie, and the Japanese directors on the panels were considerably younger. The Chainsaw man movie director is in his 30s. Likewise Gundam Iron Blooded Orphan was written and directed by people in their 30s and we used to let young people make cool superhero stuff. The animated series was made by kids in the 90s. The problem is those kids now in their mid-60s are still the only people allowed to make Batman stuff. The manga industry has pipelines for young writers and artists to submit their work and get published because publishers are always looking for new stories. And the huge popularity of digital comics in Japan and South Korea also provides easier opportunities for young creators to get their comics in front of a lot of eyes. Keeping this balance of new stories and old IP is working out pretty well for Japanese capital on a global scale, they are much better at producing cheap, widely available branded merchandise. Pokemon and hello Kitty are the top two highest grossing media franchises in the entire world. Most of that is merchandising revenue. Out of the top 10 highest grossing media franchises, five are Japanese. The others are Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse, Star Wars, Disney Princesses, and the MCU You American audiences suddenly deciding that Goku rules and Batman drools doesn't cause this state of affairs. Rather the opposite. Production and economic conditions determine which characters or franchises are seen as cool and culturally relevant. As the anime and manga industry has seen rapid growth the past few years, there's been discussions within the industry about whether anime should continue to cater to a Japanese audience or try to appeal to the growing international market. In December, the Japanese Prime Minister met with entertainment industry figures to discuss how Japan's media market could expand overseas to enhance their diplomatic power. Neon Genesis Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno has argued that anime should not adapt to a growing overseas audience, but that the audience should adapt to uniquely Japanese aspects of anime. The government of Japan has recently announced that they are boosting state investment in the creation of Japanese media like manga, anime and music and strengthening its global distribution networks. While speaking on a government panel of experts, Hideaki Anno pointed to labor shortages negatively affecting production studios. But some of the new government efforts may actually do more harm than good for the international market. Like AI driven translation tools and assistance in combating online manga piracy. Capital goes through periods of growth and recession while retracting capital pushes living labor out and increasingly relies on dead labor like DC Compact comics. Reprinting the past over and over again. This is the part of the cycle that Western companies have been stuck in the past few years. But the rise of anime itself grew out of the Great Recession. It was the collapse of the DVD market and the rise of Internet piracy that laid the groundwork for early streaming platforms like Crunchyroll, which would play a significant part in pushing anime and manga into the mainstream come the 2020s. According to the Japan Times, overseas sales of Japanese content reached $37.6 billion in 2023, surpassing Japan's semiconductor exports. And if you look at the revenue for Pokemon and hello Kitty compared to Star wars, the MCU and Batman, it makes sense that Japan wants to keep growing their international market. But this commodity warfare is not a matter of east versus west, but a battle between old and new capital. Old capital in Europe and America had early global dominance. Europe fell off, but then came Japan. And now South Korea is growing and is gearing up to steal Japan's lunch money. Last September, Disney announced a new partnership with the South Korean company Webtoon to create a new digital comic platform using the Marvel and Star wars catalog. But Marvel and DC aren't going to overcome the dominance of Japanese media by just reprinting old comics as webtoons or manga sized packages. That doesn't fix the core issue, which is caused by Western companies not investing in new labor. They are increasingly relying on the dead labor of their ubiquitous iconography. Even my beloved LEGO Batman is an instance of this. The game is primarily pulling from plots of old Batman movies with combat ripped from the Arkham Games. In the marketing for the game, the different Batman skins literally have a nostalgia meter. Moves like DC Compact Comics is an attempt to manage the crisis while still not taking risks and investing in living labor. They don't want to invest because superhero comics aren't growing, which just further compounds the problem. Meanwhile, anime and manga are rapidly growing in the United States, which is why Japanese companies are buying almost half the show floor at New York comic con, whereas 10 years ago they were in a tiny corner of the basement. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media,

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