American Comic Companies battle for readers

Date: 2011 August 22 04:47

Posted by Joe

BBC News are running an interesting story about Marvel and DC's current strategy of expansion into Asia.

"With sales in decline at home, US comic-book giants Marvel and its old rival DC Comics have been looking towards foreign markets to grow their businesses."

CB Cebulski at Marvel declares that "Sales are down and we've been losing market share to things like video games, social media, to film, to piracy."

The article highlights the difficulties DC and Marvel will have with manga and it's culture strong established in the Asian market. It also mentions that sales of manga are falling in Japan as well. The Japanese government are trying to fix this.
"The Japanese government has recently announced a new plan to aggressively further promote its pop culture and content, including manga, to international markets"

We've already seen this at events like the JETRO talk at Hyper Japan.

The article concludes with Marvel's current strategy of hiring local talent in Asia to draw comics and that they are given more creative control. It ends with an table of percentages of market share of Japanese manga versus American comics in Asia.