Author: Yuri Kageyama
Associated Press
Image via Kasama Sanshiro’s Deadpool: Samurai, published in Japanese in 2021 and in English in February 2022. This marks Marvel’s first collaboration with Japanese manga publisher Shonen Jump. (Deadpool: Samurai © 2022 MARVEL, The Story of Sanshiro Kasama, The Art of Hikaru Uesugi, Translated by Amanda Haley, Letter by Brandon Bovia via AP)
TOKYO (AP) — Deadpool, meet the almighty.
Perhaps nothing highlights how the world of manga – manga and cartoons that originated in Japan – has gone global more than the coming together of American and Japanese superheroes.
In Deadpool: Samurai, Marvel’s Deadpool is aided in the battle against evil by All Might, the muscular hero of My Hero Academia, a 65 million copy worldwide film Popular Japanese manga.
Deadpool: Samurai, published in Japanese last year, was published in an English translation in February. Japan’s “Deadpool: Samurai” was the best-selling Marvel comic last year, with more than 1 million views online. This marks the first collaboration between Marvel and Japanese manga publisher Shonen Jump.
“Deadpool: Samurai” author Sanshiro Kasama said he was happy to take the job because he has always liked Marvel heroes and wished more Japanese would like Deadpool.
“I said, yes, yes, yes, yes! I really want to do it. It’s unbelievable that a guy who always wanted to create a comic like Deadpool would actually do Deadpool. I Excited,” he told The Associated Press.
One challenge is that Marvel protects its characters, and often insists that what he makes Deadpool do doesn’t fit the character. In one scene, Kasama said, he had Deadpool shoot someone, so the gun had to be changed to a paint gun.
Deadpool: Samurai features paintings by Kasama collaborator Hikaru Uesugi, but the scenes with All Might feature paintings by original manga artist Kohei Horikoshi. Deadpool: Samurai is Marvel’s first collaboration with US comics publisher and anime publisher VIZ Media.
Comics have quickly become the top-selling adult novel category in the U.S. graphic novel category — which includes comics, exemplified by My Hero Academia — growing 160% year-over-year in 2021, 15 times faster than total adult books According to the NPD Group, which tracks such trends.
Japan will still account for 45% of the world’s largest manga market in 2020, but the rest of the world combined is rapidly catching up, according to Grand View Research, a San Francisco-based researcher and consultant. The global comics market was worth $23.5 billion in 2020 and is expected to surge to $48 billion by 2028, according to the report.
Julia Mechler, creator of the manga “Cha Tian’s Hymn,” found that an American publisher was more interested in her work, starring an Okinawan woman, than a Japanese publisher, who saw it as a niche and politics.
Meckler hopes her work will give a voice to Okinawa, an island in southwestern Japan where a gruesome land battle was fought at the end of World War II.
“I think the beauty of Okinawa is that they really value peace,” said Mehler, whose mother is Okinawan and her father is American.
“I was told that peace is the most important thing in the world. Peace and life. It sounds like a cliché, but in the world, it’s actually very difficult to achieve.”
Meckler believes that the lines between Japanese manga and non-Japanese works are blurring, and the world of manga is increasingly global.
Japanese animation, known as anime, is very popular on Netflix. Shows like “Demon Slayer” and “Attack on Titan” were originally published as comics. Netflix is promising more anime this year, as are other streaming services like Hulu and Disney+.
The manga is also behind the hit Netflix series featuring human actors like “Fish Tank Wife,” which focuses on marital infidelity in Tokyo’s middle-class neighborhood. These shows appeal not only to Japanese audiences, but also to American and other global audiences.
Another Netflix hit, “We All Die,” in which zombies overrun a high school, is based on Webtoon, a comic form that originated in South Korea.
While comics have long been available online via Kindle, Apple Books, Google Play and other platforms, Webtoon caters to its mobile reading product by rearranging vertically arranged boxes, allowing readers to scroll from one panel to another with the flip of a finger.
As the comic is read on the page, the story moves from one box image to another. Some Japanese manga fans still enjoy reading the old way, even online, but newcomers seem to be adapting quickly to enjoy manga Webtoon style.
The Webtoon Worldwide Service, which includes South Korea’s Naver Webtoon, founded in 2004; Japanese line manga; and services in the US, Europe, and other countries, recently reached 82 million monthly users. Growth has been particularly strong in the U.S. “As a platform, we want to provide the best possible environment for artists, and of course readership and profit,” said Baku Hirai, chief operating officer at Line Digital Frontier, who oversees the Webtoon business in Japan. “By being on our platform, the work is disseminated nationally and globally, providing the opportunity to become a global hit,”
Despite being 20 years behind Korea, Webtoons will remain in Japan.
The work being developed in Japan brings together the best of Webtoons and manga, said Kojuro Hagihara, CEO of Tokyo-based Sorajima Studio, which produces Webtoon titles for various platforms.
“All we needed was a big hit that would normally be of interest to people who don’t read Webtoons. For that, we needed to create a Webtoon production that would be made into a series on Netflix or Amazon Prime,” he said.
The 2021 startup studio has already secured investments from traditional Japanese manga publishers such as Shueisha and Shogakukan. The studio has so far released three titles, all of which are profitable, including one published in the United States. It plans to have 26 titles this year and 50 titles next year, which will rival the productivity of South Korea’s Webtoon studio.
“Things are going very well,” Hagihara said.
