When manga went mainstream in America a few years ago, a good part of its appeal to young readers was that it looked entirely new. Japanese comics have their own visual grammar, and it's very different from the way American comics look. As a result, the same teenagers who are devouring translated manga want to learn how to draw it, even more than any previous generation of comics readers. The earliest American manga and anime fans even bought Japanese-language drawing guides. So manga drawing books have become a significant sideline for bookstores that do well with manga.
Christopher Hart's Manga Mania, published in April 2001, leads Watson-Guptill's very popular line of manga instruction books. "It's just been a runaway success. We saw that the media was just saturated with this stuff—film, TV, video," said Watson-Guptill executive editor Candace Raney. Raney noted that Manga Mania was #1 on Bookscan's art book sales charts for about six months, and has been on that list for more than 150 weeks. Following that success, she said, "We've published [Hart's] Anime Mania, Mecha Mania, Manga ManiaVillains, Manga Mania Fantasy Worlds... we've been tremendously successful, beyond our dreams." The titles have collectively sold several hundred thousand copies.
Japanime Publishing sells the Japanese publisher Graphic-Sha's How to Draw Manga and Manga University book series to Diamond for distribution to the book trade. The company's president and CEO, Glenn Kardy, is also the editor of several of the volumes, including How to Draw Manga: Getting Started, which is now in its eighth printing and has sold 60,000 copies since its November 2000 debut. Getting Started has already been used in courses at UCLA and at Waseda University in Japan.
This year, Japanime plans to publish three more manga instruction books, including the first of a new series on Super-Deformed Characters within the How to Draw Manga imprint. Digital Manga handled the Graphic-Sha series for several years; the company is now concentrating on its own series, Let's Draw Manga, designed specifically for a North American audience, which it distributes through Watson-Guptill. The line currently includes four volumes (Transforming Robots, Astro Boy, Ninja and Samurai and Sexy Gals), with sales of about 30,000 each. Digital Manga's senior sales administrator John Whalen reported that the company is working on many more. Next up is All About Fighting, to be followed by Tokyo Urban and Hip-Hop Culture.
So what comes next for manga instruction books? "For the first time in 50 years, girls have come back to the comic book market," Watson-Guptill's Raney explained. "This May, we're publishing Manga Mania Shojo, which is more about the cute and romantic characters," she said, adding that much of the work is by Japanese women artists. Whalen noted that Tokyopop's bookstore success really began with shojo books [or girl comics] and said "We're also looking into the shojo market."
And publishers are looking at other Asian cartooning styles. "There's another craze coming out of Korea called manhwa, which Watson-Guptill is thinking about, too," Raney said. "In fact, we have a Christopher Hart book on manhwa coming out in the fall."
