Forum - View topicHow does "discoverability" work for manga?
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gsilver
Posts: 762 |
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Unless something is massively popular and sounds appealing, or I just randomly stumble across a series, how exactly do people find new manga to read?
Especially if one isn't into the major genres like shounen action. Sometimes, I just *happen* to stumble across something like An Invitation from a Crab, enjoy it greatly... and have no idea where to go from there. Aside from Guyabano Holiday and watching as the release date for Fish Society gets pushed back further and further, I suppose. It's relatively rare that I see an anime that makes me want to check out the manga, but it at least worked with Land of the Lustrous and Girls Last Tour. |
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mdo7
 Posts: 8222 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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Saw this thread and I'll say this: It's the same problem for indie comics (and that applies to indie manga too) when it comes to discoverability and obscureness. Let me quote this from Screenrant:
Yeah, lesser well-known/obscure manga and that include indie manga will have a low discoverability amongst casual and even some hardcore fans (like me). I could imagine how obscure Garth Ennis's The Boys was before it became the live-action TV series on Amazon Prime TV. I could say the same for half of Marvel's superheroes before the MCU was conceived. Oh hell, there's a lot of obscure DC and Marvel superheroes that I've discovered on an almost daily basis that not even casual or core fans might not know or familiar with. I mean yeah, I agree that there's a lot of obscure or lesser well-known manga and even indie manga that are yet to get the wider audiences it deserved. It's the same thing to indie comic, obscure or lesser well-known comic, and even lesser well-known or underrated superheroes/characters out there. So unless that obscure comic/manga get a well-known adaptation (like in the case of Amazon Prime's The Boys), it's going to remain obscure and niche to a certain audiences that read these obscure manga. The same can be said about indie manga. That's how it work in this environment. For every popular or mainstream manga titles, there's going to be a lot of lesser well-known, under-rated manga titles out there. Indie manga and their discoverability are also very low because they're not on the same level as a Shonen Jump titles. Last edited by mdo7 on Thu Jul 10, 2025 7:59 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Fluwm
Moderator
 Posts: 1624 |
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I mean, I don't think it's different than any other form of media, really. Advertising, word-of-mouth, and awards all do the job of highlighting titles, and when looking for more specific kinds of things, asking around on social media is typically pretty effective (thought that's really still just word-of-mouth, or maybe word-of-fingers).
The only real difference here is that a lot of those manga-awards are in Japan, and don't get a ~ton~ of coverage in the anglophone Internet. And, of course, there's also the fact that anime adaptations do a lot to promote manga (how many new folks are checking out CITY this week, I wonder? Or discovered Ranma or Urusei Yatsura in the last year or two?) and that we're all here, in the ANN forums, where we get lovely little news articles each time one of the big publishers announces new acquisitions --makes it pretty easy to have a general idea of what's new and what might pique our interests. Frankly, I think it's easier to discover new manga now than ever before, thanks to digital platforms that let you read for free, like the Jump app. It's so much easier to just... browse around, and read a little of everything that catches your eye. Back when I first got into manga, around 2007/2008, word-of-mouth was practically all we had, unless you were willing to tempt the ire of the local bookstore by parking yourself in the manga/comics aisle and reading whatever seemed interesting. The only thing I can really say that I do, personally, that I wouldn't assume most folks do already is use the occasional source (MU or a wiki) to browse for titles with specific tags, or that cover specific topics (mostly w/r/t historical fiction). |
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gsilver
Posts: 762 |
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In some ways, it's getting worse. Crunchyroll Manga had a pretty good thing going for a while, but seems to have folded into the Kodansha app. I was reading Talentless Nana there (after seeing the anime) which was running on Crunchyroll but now is on Kodansha, but whenever I look at that Kodansha's page, I see a whole lot of "mobile" fluff, like "xp" and "points" and you can't even sign up without going through a mobile app, and there's no 'simple' way to just read things, like a traditional subscription or even purchasing individual books. Add in stories of absolutely baffling censorship (of things that sensible people wouldn't even think to censor; didn't an article here say that *knees* were getting censored at some point?) and I just close out the page without figuring out what hoops I have to jump through to keep reading it. |
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