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Hey, Answerman! - True Fans

Except they aren't, maybe the North American market in a way, but not the whole Western market. Aniplex USA has a mix of different releases at different price points, not everything is super expensive. More expensive than what Funi and Sentai release, sure, but it's not that crazy expensive. Besides Madoka, their other licensed properties are comparable to what NISA released in terms of price.

If Aniplex was really trying to force the western market to accept Japanese pricing, why is Kaze France releasing rather affordable boxsets for both KnK and Fate/Zero on blu-ray? Also, do realize that Taiwanese fans had to pay the same premium JP price for Fate/Zero Part 1 (Taiwan is also region A and it's a rather large market outside of Japan).

What do you suppose the odds are of an affordable BD set for KnK and Fate/Zero? While I wouldn't expect one day and date of the release of the DVD set (this fall for KnK, maybe sometime next year for F/Z), maybe something release one or two quarters later.

The Japanese companies know that enough western fans will buy the expensive sets for popular series for it to be a profitable venture. Profitable and with no risk to losing domestic Japanese sales. For high caliber titles, I would expect to see this happen more and more often, and there's really not much we can do. We certainly can't stop those people from buying those sets and showing that it works, it's their money.

What do you suppose the odds are of an affordable BD set for KnK and Fate/Zero? While I wouldn't expect one day and date of the release of the DVD set (this fall for KnK, maybe sometime next year for F/Z), maybe something release one or two quarters later. You have to think that most everyone in Japan who really wanted these expensive special editions would have bought a copy within a year or two after release, after which point fears of reverse exportation of a less expensive N. American BD set (something closer in price to their releases of Baccano and Read or Die) would be unfounded.

How to integrate real-world issues into normal comic content. To be sure, manga does deal with real-world issues, but that usually only happens in titles specifically made for that purpose. While it's far from pervasive in mainstream American comics, it isn't unusual to see difficult social issues brought up and dealt with head-on in super-hero titles. Racism, religious persecution, teen suicide, bullying, drug use, homophobia, confusion about sexual orientation, terrorism, genocide, slavery, sexual exploitation, child abuse - major mainstream American super-hero comic books have dealt with all of them at one time or another while still telling their regular stories (or, in some cases, have made them part of their regular stories). I can think of a couple of anime which address some of these issues (Shigofumi most immediately jumps to mind), but if there are manga titles which integrate these elements into their regular content then I apparently haven't seen them. To use a specific example, is there anything in manga that does anything close to what X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills does?

Fear of reverse import unfounded? On that part, I have to disagree with you. Some Japanese buyers are starting to buy Anime Blu ray from US. I'm not sure if they're are growing, but they do buy US anime BD's.

Yahoo Japan auction has bidders bidding on Funimation BD of Eden of the East movies and NISA's Anohana BD. On Amazon Japan, people bought various Funimation BD's and giving them 5 star rating for video quality and other aspects.

Likewise, since you use the show as an example of Japanese fans reverse importing, it's been over a year since AnoHana's first Blu-ray release in Japan, and about five months since the most recent re-release (some big fancy box set).

Whatever reverse importation that goes on now will likely have minimal impact on long-term sales of that series. Any fears that reverse importation of American BDs will cannibalize sales of Japanese BDs are likely unfounded due to the large time gap in release.

Reverse importation is a serious problem, whether its a year or two later or not. People knew that there were going to be dirt cheap BDs coming out, so they'd wait to buy the series when they are cheaper... and now companies want to nip that in the bud. I can't blame them.

But asking for anything less than $5/ep is rather absurd.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' inflation calculator, $30 ten years ago (when anime on DVD was reaching its absolute peak in terms of sales) was equal to about $38 in 2012 dollars.