Wednesday, February 15, 2006

 

Hooked On Trends

The cover of today's RedEye is pretty eye-catching. It features a comic book character drawn in a distinct way — an improvement over the drab wire photos that often dominate the cover. Too bad the trend Red choose to write about — manga comics — isn't that new. There's nothing terribly offensive about running a cover story on this, but I'm not sure readers will get the sense of what makes manga fans different from other comic book fans, other than the fact that manga readers tend to be more interested in Japanese culture. The cover story justifies itself by quoting statistics about sales of manga reaching $125 million. But comic books haven't always been just for "Spider-Man fans or teenage boys," as the lead suggests. One can also point to graphic novels to see some interesting comic book trends, not to mention countless other random incarnations of comics, from R. Crumb to Chris Ware.

The story does illustrate a growing sales trend, but it doesn't demonstrate how this trend is different from any other. If a trend is not all that remarkable in its growth and/or doesn't have much effect beyond the business/entertainment realm, then doesn't it really boil down to a novelty?

Andy also caught Red trying to stretch a novelty story into a trend story last month.

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