Adult Japanese Comic Gets Relaunched

The comic magazine called Manga Attack gets another shot and promises to deal with adult level stories in its new form. One of the first ones is a comic version of the true story of a Japanese hostage's return from capture in North Korea.

It sounds promising, and the article had two things that showed how the Japanese market is quite different from ours in the US.

Whether Manga Action proves a commercial success is another story, amid the prolonged slump in the market stemming in part from a shrinking youth population. But Minoura said the magazine will not make the same mistake of kowtowing to "popular tastes" like it did a few years ago, when it served up obscene material in an effort to attract male readers.

Gasp, appealing to male adult readers, by adding obscene material didn't work? That is a very different response that the American market, where sexing things up is a proven way to get horny fanboys in.

This tactic failed to revive sales, and eventually Manga Action's circulation fell to some 70,000 -- a fraction of its 1972 peak of 1 million copies -- by the time its publisher suspended publication.

70,000 got the previous series publication suspended? Here in the US 70K would get any American comic publisher doing cartwheels, hyping its success. Just proving that it is a completely different world!