Just sayin’.

Spider-Man can’t be considered a mainstream character until mainstream media learn to spell his name with the hyphen, let alone professional comics bloggers.

Nor, I think, is it safe to assume anymore that the direct market exclusively serves typical comics fans.

-B

And there’s a Batman cartoon on TV right now, isn’t there?

-B

Well, maybe not Naruto so much.

To put it bluntly….Stephen King, Naruto and Heroes are all mainstream…and there’s not a thing we can do about it!

EDIT: I’ve just read all of your analysis in the post referenced above, and using my metaphor of a horse race, you have just uncovered the biggest pile of road apples I have yet seen in this derby. BONE is artcommix? Really? I guess E. Nesbit is Jean Rhys, too. I would like to see both you AND Dirk try to define what the terms of mainstream and literary/art are.

People are using these numbers to bolster whatever they want to prove. And it’s ludicrous.

That doesn’t follow at all. There are plenty of cult, niche and specialist publications in mainstream bookstores. You’re ignoring the possibility that manga also has a niche audience, but happens to sell through a more conventional distribution route.

It gets much better ratings than Lost.

Here at least.

And yeah, there is a local manga group in my town. Filled with kids in their mid-late teens for the most part. If you even say the word “comics” to them they immediately tell you they don’t read comic books. They are very much into the Manga/Anime “style” and don’t read much else.

Although a couple of them knew who Neil Gaiman was and read Sandman and Stardust which surprised me but probably shouldn’t have.

well, this is the $640,000 question. As it stands now, publishers who support more challenging, adult manga material get very low returns. Dark Horse couldn’t sell Umezu. Gaijin went tits up immediately, Tezuka sells steadily but not in vast amounts, and most of the stuff in the Viz Signature line sells at the lower end of the Viz spectrum. I’ve talked about this with many manga publishers and everyone hopes it will happen, but we’ll see.

As for the average Naruto reader suddenly glomming onto Love & Rockets…I think that’s about as likely as the average Hulk reader doing so.

I think the manga market will mature, as the readership gets older and a wider variety of age-appropriate material becomes more saleable. Manga fans aren’t wedded to One True Genre, and therefore the publishers catering to them won’t have to step around the sort of Tiny Nerd Culture War that has hamstrung the North American model. Likewise, I think there’s already plenty of evidence that the same will probably be true of homegrown comics — but only because prose publishers, not encumbered by the podunk, goofy provinciality of said Tiny Nerd Culture War, will be doing most of the heavy lifting. In the end, Jeff Smith and Scholastic will bury us all, and they’ll have God on their side when it happens.

This has got “completely unproductive argument” written all over it, so I’ll make a few final comments and (hopefully) leave it there.

I think it’s reasonably clear from the links above what school of thought I had in mind. You can decide for yourself whether I was caricaturing it unfairly. And I fully agree that the rise of manga has pretty much stamped on the debate by steamrolling both sides.

Otherwise, I basically agree with Heidi’s reply to Dirk. Besides, if Chris Ware is “inarguably mainstream” because he’s achieved a six-figure audience, why not Mark Millar?

All posts with more than two links (including the one I just posted) go into automatic moderation. I’ve relaxed that a bit just for today.

BTW, CRUMB did not, sad to say, win an Oscar. It was not even NOMINATED for an Oscar, which is even sadder to say. It did win a lot of awards, however, including mainstream arbiters of taste like the New York Film Society awards. Oh and it won an award at Sundance, which, as I’m sure you’re aware, is vaunted every year as the number one showcase of mainstream American films.

GHOST WORLD was nominated for an Oscar but didn’t win.

Okay let me turn off the sarcasm. Look, I don’t think superheroes are necessarily mainstream, and I don’t think art/indie/alt comix are necessarily mainstream. I would say that SPIDERMAN and BATMAN are mainstream characters given the fact you can buy sheets and towels with their pictures on them. PBS, film documentaries that are given theatrical release and the Spirit Awards are more “mainstream” in the larger cultural sense than SLAVE LABOR GRAPHICS and ADHOUSE BOOKS, that is for sure, but the average American is blissfully unbothered by thoughts of them, and good old GWB is trying to defund PBS again, as he has for 8 years because it isn’t unbiased enough.

PERSEPOLIS has broken through to a huge audience but it is not mainstream in exactly the same way. Likewise, GHOST WORLD and the others works of Terry Zwigoff. Or even Michel Gondry.

Comics really have never developed the “new mainstream” that I predicted many years ago. Unless it’s manga, much of which, truth to tell, is no more accessible to the “mainstream” than the average issue of CIVIL WAR.

I would much rather live in a world of PERSEPOLIS and GHOST WORLD than GREEN LANTERN and AVENGERS INITIATIVE, for sure, but they both pale besides Terry Brooks and George R. R. Martin.

Incidentally, I realize that I was insufficiently dismissive of Paul O’Brien in an above post. In the link he cites, Doane claims that Crumb, Ware, Clowes and the Hernandez Bros are mainstream, and while I suppose that a case could be made against the Hernandez Brothers — I’m not sure enough of their sales to say one way or the other — the other three artists named are inarguably mainstream artists. All have seen work sold in six-figure numbers (in the case of some of Crumb’s comics, seven-figure numbers). A documentary based upon Crumb’s life won an Oscar. Clowes’ Ghost World was made into a well-received feature film that remains a staple in grocery-store rental kiosks, to say nothing of your local Blockbuster. If you know what This American Life is, you likely know who Chris Ware is, as well. (Going outside the lit set, I’d also include Jeff Smith, Frank Miller, Fred Gallagher and perhaps Stan Sakai as mainstream artists in the larger American sense.)

What doesn’t Doane say in the above-linked piece? That “literary/arthouse/indie comics are ‘the real mainstream’” per se. Just as your average British drawing-room comedy broadcast on PBS is not going to pull down the same kind of ratings as Lost, so to is your average literary-comics offering going to appeal to a smaller audience as well. If Doane seriously argues otherwise, he’s wrong — but I don’t recall offhand ever hearing him make such an argument.

As for the first part of the strawman argument that O’Brien places in Doane’s mouth, that one does strike me as true. As evidence, allow me to cite a source already linked on this page: Brian Hibbs.

“It might also be worth noting that the combined volume of publishers #3-9 doesn’t even come close to matching the volume of Tokyopop alone. Viz and Tokyopop combined represent 486 of the 575 (85%) of all manga titles listed — that’s up from 84% last year, and 83% from the year before. And if you look at it in terms of pieces it is even worse: 2 publishers represent 6.2 million pieces of 6.6 million for the category — that’s 95%! And people say the Direct Market is lopsided!! Seriously folks, Marvel & DC have nothing on Viz and Tokyopop!”

Finally, Marc-Oliver Frisch’s point is well taken.
Which is to say: Superhero comics sell in regular bookstores the way that art comics sell in the Direct Market. Mainstream? I don’t think so.