Let’s remember this, okay? It’s important. The publisher’s customer is not the reader. Follow? The publisher’s customer is the retailer. Once the retailer orders the book, from the publisher’s standpoint, THAT IS THE SALE.
Those sales figures you see on icv2 or whatever? Those do not indicate the number of readers who pick up a book, they indicate the number of copies ordered by stores.
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Kelly Sue Deconnick, comics writer, explains why there are so few female-led superhero titles. (And pretty much every other problem with comics today.)
Later in the same passage, she goes further:
Think about the manga boom for a minute. The American notion had always been that women would not buy comics in significant numbers. There was even a commonly bandied about notion that “women are not visual.” Who bought manga in the US? Largely women and girls. At ten bucks a pop, no less. Women spent literally millions of dollars on what? On comics.Now, some people will argue that that had as much to do with the diversity of genre in manga as anything else–and that is a fair point. But I would argue that there is nothing inherently masculine about the science fiction aesthetic, nothing inherently masculine about power fantasies or aspirations to heroism.
So what else was it about manga that got women to buy in in huge numbers?
Well, for one thing, they didn’t have to venture into comic book stores to get it. No risks of unfriendly clerks or clientele, authenticity tests or the porn basement atmosphere that even if it’s not the reality of most stores, is certainly the broad perception. They could buy manga at the mall. What’s more, they didn’t need a guide. All they had to do was find the manga section, flip the books over and read the description (just like they’d done with any book they’d ever bought in their lives) and then, once they found one that interested them, find the volume with the giant number 1 on it and head to the check out.
Contrast that with an American comic books store experience for a new reader.
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