Ask John: Why Doesn’t Anyone Translate Weekly Jump or Shonen Sunday?

Question:
I wonder why no company has picked up the rights tho translate Weekly Jump or various other manga of that type. This the place where such series as Dragon Ball and Urusei Yatsura began. In addition to that, it showcases future successful series. I think if they were produced, anime and manga might truly transcend becoming another fad and become as widespread as any X-men or Spiderman comic.

Answer:
The main reason why we haven’t and likely won’t ever see full translated manga along the lines of Weekly Jump in America is based in the difference between Japanese and American culture. In Japan, manga is an exceptionally prolific and popular medium and industry. Weekly, bi-weekly and monthly manga anthology magazines like Shonen Sunday, Ribbon and Weekly Jump usually range in the neighborhood of 500 pages and retail for under $5 an issue. Japanese publishing companies are able to publish these massive tomes on a regular basis because of a number of combined factors. Individual manga artists work on their own stories and submit them for publication, so the number of people responsible for working on an individual chapter is minimal. Furthermore, these manga magazines are largely supported by advertising, and sell literally millions of copies each week. In fact, manga is said to make up 40% of total annual Japanese book sales. For manga of this volume to be published regularly in the US, we’d have to have people translating literally hundreds of pages of story all the time, in addition to touch-up artists, editors and publishers. I’m sure you can imagine that it’s much faster for Japanese manga artists to simply write and draw their own stories than it is for American producers to translate and reprint manga. But that’s a relatively small factor compared to sales figures. According to Fred Schodt’s Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics, it’s not uncommon for 500+ page weekly manga magazines to sell over 1 million copies a week, and popular titles like Shonen Jump have been known to sell over 4 million copies in a single week! No contemporary American comic book can claim that sort of popular success. Japanese sales figures like these allow publishers to keep the price of these manga magazines very low. 600 page manga magazines retail in Japan for about $5 American. In the US, in order to just stay afloat, manga magazines like Animerica Extra, Super Manga Blast and Pulp have to charge $5-$6 for under 150 pages of manga. With that, you can imagine what a monthly volume of 600 pages of manga would have to retail for- $20 a copy. If these publications actually came out on a weekly or bi-weekly schedule in the US, at $20 a copy… Well, you can imagine for yourself.

Comic books have been around in America for over 50 years, and in that half-century iconic titles like Batman and Superman have never sold in quantities that even approach the Japanese market for manga. And import comic books are still a minority in the American comic book industry. Until the US market can economically support massive comic book publications, we’ll doubt see Japanese style manga magazines in the US.