From the Princeton Unviersity Centre for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies comes an intriguing working paper from Takeshi Matsui, “The Diffusion of Foreign Cultural Products: The Case Analysis of Japanese Comics (Manga) Market in the US.”
Manga represents 56% of the US graphic novel market, a statistic that surprised me given the appeal of Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and the likes; further, as Matsui argues, manga even exerts an element of “soft power” as an influence on American college students taking up Japanese as a second language.
Altbough there are numerous accounts from industry players, fans, librarians and journalists, Matsui’s paper is apparently the first overtly academic treatment of the rise of manga in the US market. His paper stresses two broad themes: path dependency of market growth, and stigma management of the negative image of comics in the US market: Continue reading
