Manga might be mainstream right now but it had to struggle to find a market and so we go down memory lane to remember when Manga came in comic book form. And while some may laugh at the way it came out I’d say for the most part they did a pretty good job despite all their shortcomings. In a way comic book format fits manga stories very well even if it’s not the best format for manga to come in.
As a kid walking to a dedicated comic book store already felt like a really cool thing, you’d find all the recent releases on the wall and on the bottom corner you always seemed to find the manga. As if no one wanted it and yet it stood out from all the other DC, Marvel, Image superhero comics or tie in comics like Xena. These looked different. You’d pick them up and they felt different too from other comics, not to mention they smelled different. Imagine living in a market where they couldn’t wait to publish the later Dragon Ball Manga markets so you’d have 2 separate Dragon Ball manga, one that starts from the DBZ Anime arc and one that starts from the actual beginning. I also liked the improvized “Z” they randomly put behind the logo.
Some of the benefits included that you’d get more covers that depicted the stories since each comic held less manga chapters, it actually needed more covers. It’s always interesting to see what they ended up choosing, a lot of times it meant it had nothing to do with the actual issue, on the other hand it gave us amazing art work. to look at. Having less chapters per comic was a bit of a let down since they came out monthly for the most part so it made longer sagas take forever to finish, and that’s if they ever did finish publishing it.
Sometimes the manga art was flipped so the issue could be read like normal comics from left to right. While it’s weird seeing the art the wrong way it was a moderately ok way of representing it. It was of course even better when you had the pages that told you how to read the manga correctly as it felt a more pure experience. You still see this in more modern manga releases. I liked it when they were themed to fit the manga style, like having Ryoga on the Ranma 1/2 manga’s telling you, you’re going the wrong way. One other big feature of manga in comic book format is that it meant the artwork is so much larger at least when compared to the tankōbon editions. You can also easily see page spreads almost perfectly.
This wasn’t only a Viz Comics thing in the United States and Canada but also done in other parts of America like Mexico and the rest of Latin America. They were all trying to find their way of bringing manga to the market. Especially since in LATAM anime was already so popular, there were coloring comics in a way but they also tried bringing manga in different ways. I’d like to highlight a few of them like Magic Knight Rayearth where they decided to color the manga. This was criticized by fans a lot but honestly I think they did a great job at it, some panels are obviously better than others, but they’re respectful either to the manga or anime colors.
While each of these deserve to be an article of their own, I’d like to also mention the times when a popular anime instead of bringing a straight adaptation of the manga; They created comic books based on them instead. Here you have Captain Tsubasa under Super Campeones dub name that instead made brand new storeis instead of just adapting the manga or anime. The U.S. had also done something similar with Astro Boy although that’s just a straight up reboot. The Mexican Captain Tsubasa comic book while influenced by the manga seemed to have it take palce through out the original anime.
There were other ways that manga also got its start in the North American and South American countries, and that includes one that is not so much a manga but having the anime made into comic form. Sailor Moon for example got a couple of their seasons adapted into comics by taking screenshots from the anime and just adding text bubbles. This was still being done in the 2000s as I remember Nintendo Power doing the same for the Pokemon anime, despite a couple of Pocket Monsters manga already existing and even being published. But just look at all the covers, in a way it doesn’t feel wrong to read a manga in comic book format.