Manga A Draw for Kids and Women

Carol Azizian reports for THE FLINT JOURNAL on manga's rising popularity with kids and women.

Such as with Clyde Houston Kelley a 16 year old who identified with the Japanese comic book character, Yugi. Who as a shy 10th-grader who's picked on by his classmates and spends time alone playing games took heart at the comic character who had similar problems.

At one point these type of stories were with fans identifying with American comic characters like Spider-Man or wishing they could be like Superman. Yet with today's move by DC and Marvel to make their characters and stories "more sophisticated" that level of relatability has been lost.

Female readers are also enjoying manga because of its diversity of genres. Suchas 27 year old Jocelyn Urmanic, who says in the article that she first got involved through the animation but then got into the books. "[She]admitted it was difficult to read them at first because of the unusual format. But she quickly "learned to go through the story and figure it out."

By 1995, she was buying both anime and manga at Comic Relief, where she later worked. She has a large collection of both as well as animation cels.

This line especially had to be most damning to DC and Marvel "American comics don't do a lot for me, I'm not too much of a superhero-type person. I love Batman. But I'm not interested in a lot of what Marvel or DC Comics puts out."

Can DC or Marvel ever recover from this? I'm not sure given that they continue to market books to the ever shrinking core audience in the Direct Market. Yet only time will tell.