Ah, we're talking about comics yet again?
American comic books begin to collapse in the 90s due to genrefication. Comics became about capeshit, and they were all soap operas following the same heroes regurgitated over and over again for the past half century. Thus, comics go from being mainstream to being niche.
X-Men was cancelled for low sales in 1969, but it was still selling almost 250,000 copies per issue, and X-men was on the newstand at Wallgreens. Compare that today's comic sales, where Marvel and DC are struggling to sell even 5,000 copies a month, sold in a comicbook store that is a 40 minute drive away from your house run by a fat smelly guy who knows way too much about them, and the comics are made by unlikeable narcissists.
Anime overtook over American comics and cartoons because Americans renounced their ability to tell good stories about 40 years ago. It took anime and manga a long time of building up a word of mouth reputation before Americans realized that they had a choice to consume stuff that wasn't garbage.
The manga industry also puts out high quality art in a timely manner. Meanwhile, American comics don't even look good, and you barely get 40 pages every 2 months, and the plot moves at a snails pace. *Snooooore*
Japanese Manga is extremely popular because it serves multiple markets. You have highschool slice of life. You have fetish manga. You have epic shounen adventure stories. You have sword and sorcery manga like Berserk. You have romantic comedies. You certainly don't see any romance comics coming out in America. Marvel is stuck in a genre that died 30 years ago. This is why American indie kickstarters that promise YET ANOTHER SUPERHERO COMIC struggle so much, and indie kickstarters that don't fill that hole are so successful.
The hate for manga in the West comes from the West's jealously. The West is upset that their comics haven't been mainstream since the 90's. Eastern European comics also exist, but they didn't have the decades of word of mouth built up like manga did.
You can't have stakes in American comics when the story is going to be rebooted in a couple years or so. The stories aren't as interesting when they are variations of the same story (Batman protecting Gotham from the Joker, interacts with Gordon, etc etc). Notice how in Japanese manga, you don't have stories that go on for forever. You don't really have sequel mangas or spinoff mangas or alternate continuity reboots. You have the one story, with a beginning, middle, and end, and that's it. That's the manga.
This does not account for inflation. Sure, the American comics business might be making more money today than it was 10 years ago, but it is still dwarfed by comics industry of eld.
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Yup. When Jim Shooter was fired and Marvel started turning into soap opera crap, that was the death knell.
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In addition to the abysmal quality of Marvel comics, awful distribution practices also killed the business. Customers buying a comic does not result in that comic being renewed to continue/prevent it from being cancelled. The fate of the line is decided before it even goes on sale. Readers don't know what's coming out until it's already out and that pre-release period is when the business decides whether or not to axe a line.