The “Human Algorithm” Behind Manga’s Success

(Or, Building a Global Empire with the Pen Instead of the Sword)

In 1983, manga were such an unknown presence in the English-speaking world that Frederik Schodt had to write the (amazing) Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics to explain them to us. Manga fandom wasn’t even a subculture in the English-speaking world at this time, because there was next to nothing in translation.

In 2023, we saw not one but two manga charting on the April edition of the Top 10 Overall bestseller list on Publisher’s Weekly. These weren't bestsellers in the category of graphic novels. No, they were among the bestselling books of any kind in the United States. The espionage-comedy “Spy x Family vol. 9” came in at number one, and the supernatural adventure “Jujutsu Kaisen vol 19” landed at number five.

Even though these rankings are updated weekly, charting so high is still quite the accomplishment. When you look at graphic novel lists, the results are even starker: a full third of the NYT’s top fifteen bestsellers are from Japan, too. And in no way is manga’s “cultural gravity” limited to the USA. When the French government introduced a “Culture Pass” giving 300 euros to every 18 year old in the country, they proceeded to spend the lion’s share on Japanese comics. Oh là là! 

In fact manga sales have quadrupled in the US since 2019. They’re growing at 27 times the speed of the book market as a whole, according to NPD. So what brought about this sea change, that manga became one of the most popular forms of entertainment around the world? I have spent a lot of time around Japanese comics, first as a reader, later a translator, then working with artists as a content creator, and more recently as a researcher (the second chapter of Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World focuses on how illustrated content from Japan transformed the global fantasyscape.) Here are some potential answers to that question.

The first is history: Japan has a very long tradition of illustrated craftsmanship, dating back centuries. Mass-produced woodblock prints were among its top cultural exports in the Victorian era. But its comics industry has also benefited from a great deal of artistic freedom in the postwar era. Compare Japan to the United States, where the publication of an anti-comics screed called Seduction of the Innocent in 1954 touched off a moral panic. Legislators eager to score political points in this early “culture war” threatened to regulate comic book publishers. In the end, the industry acquiesced to a voluntary Comics Code Authority that forbade “lurid, unsavory, [or] gruesome illustrations'' and insisted “in every instance good shall triumph over evil.” Not exactly the stuff of excitement, there. Admittedly, wily artists and writers still managed to launch iconic series during this dark time, such as “Spider-Man” or “The X-Men.” But Japan went through nothing like this creative pogrom. Its artists were free to get as lurid and unsavory as they wanted. Kids and young adults loved them for it.

This helped fuel variety. Manga is a medium, not a genre. A long history of illustrated entertainment allowed it to expand into nooks and crannies of society unthinkable in the West. In Japan, there are manga for tots and grade schoolers (“Anpanman,” “Doraemon”), teens and young adults (“Naruto,” etc., etc.), and more mature audiences (“In This Corner of the World,” to name but one). There are educational manga read in schools, and erotic manga read, hopefully, in private. The existence of everything from classics to smut can shock outside observers used to comics-as-kiddie-stuff, but this huge range of possibility helps foster an anything-goes spirit among Japan’s comics creators, even if they never dip a toe into the darker corners of the medium.

Then there’s novelty, key to the medium’s popularity globally. Manga employ familiar comic conventions borrowed from abroad, such as panels, speech bubbles, “speed lines,” and such, allowing them to be widely understood even by foreign readers. But manga are drawn and scripted from a set of cultural assumptions that differ from Western offerings. This gives them a one-two punch of familiarity and novelty at the same time. Raymond Loewy, titan of mid-century industrial design, called this sort of thing MAYA: most advanced, yet acceptable. We crave new things – so long as they aren’t too different from what came before. Formula sells, particularly when craftily disguised so as to appear fresh and new. Manga absolutely excels at this.

Also key is authenticity. Japanese creators and content producers are notoriously bad at “putting themselves out there.” Many manga artists do everything they can to remain anonymous or play down their public identities. Take the global smash “Demon Slayer.” The animated theatrical adaptation of the manga series was the planet’s top-grossing film in 2020; the franchise reportedly made close to a trillion yen in 2021. The writers of the movie weren’t credited by name on film. The manga artist who created the series works under a pen name and is so reclusive that we’ve never seen so much as a photo. We don’t even know their gender. In an era where hustle and self-promotion is practically a religion, this sounds downright heretical. But this same reticence, whether on a personal level or industry-wide, obliges fans to seek out favorite creators, series, and characters, driving them to share info and network to build fandoms organically. In this way manga becomes more than a product to consume: it becomes an identity to assume. Put another way, cool factor can’t really be cultivated. It has to be earned.

It’s a pretty amazing trick. How to pull it off? By systematizing it. For all of manga’s wild variety, the majority that land on foreign bestseller lists are shonen manga — comics for boys (though, like young adult fiction, widely read by people of all ages and genders.) And when it comes to shonen manga, one magazine rules them all: Weekly Shonen Jump. Six out of the ten best-selling manga of all time originated in its pages, and those in turn formed the bases for major anime series and merchandising empires. If you’re American, you may associate comics with “floppies” of a few dozen pages, but that isn’t how they’re sold in Japan. Every issue of Jump runs four to five hundred pages, filled with many different manga series parceled out in weekly installments. Once a title hits a certain number of episodes, they are compiled into standalone paperback book-sized collections called tankobon. These can go on to become national bestsellers in their own rights.

How does this happen? Through a dialogue with the people consuming the content. Jump’s strict editorial system, which harnesses decades of sales data and know-how, shapes concepts before they even hit the page. But equally important is feedback from the end users. Every week, readers in Japan are asked to rank their favorite stories. Titles that underperform are cut without mercy. If this sounds brutal for artists, it is: there are actual manga about the drama of making manga! But it’s absolutely necessary, because the editors and artists are only part of what makes Weekly Shonen Jump a hit-making machine. Without the readers, they’d be nowhere. In essence Jump’s Japan-based readership functions as sort of a human algorithm, providing “big data” of the sort that dictates how content is made and consumed in the streaming age: fans binging on favorites, while platforms ruthlessly cull their offerings based on the viewership data. (For a deeper dive on this, check out my New Yorker piece on “Demon Slayer” from 2021.)

So to recap, manga’s success is due to a system with a lot of history, the currencies of which are novelty and authenticity, and that is powered by the choices of millions of consumers. Another way to put it: the rise of manga is a revolution in entertainment. The revolutionaries are its fans, all over the globe. And the creators and companies that flourish are the ones smart enough to listen to them. This mindset isn’t even limited to the world of print. Whatever it is, whatever you make, there is much to learn from the way Japan’s manga have prospered all over the world.