An Incoming Decline Part Three

An Inevitable Decline

The Painful Irrelevance of Some Industries

Some industries, especially if they've catered to a niche demographic long enough, become moribund and irrelevant to the public. Outside of a few products that are either genuinely original and interesting (Danny Phantom for superheroes) or genuinely appealing to the public (Superman, Batman, Dragon Ball) the products not only become moribund but also repetitive and the people in charge try a lot of ways to appeal to people. In the case with superhero comics, you get never-ending changes made to the characters and the stories they inhabit. In the long run, these are nothing but publicity stunts guaranteed to shock the public. In the case with the anime industry, for every Naruto and Bleach there's going to be figures for every lesser known anime character, reboots and continuations of older franchises such as Hunter x Hunter, Sailor Moon and Evangelion (Yu Yu Hakusho's case is forthcoming at best) and of course, body pillows and questionable mouse pads but the less is said about those the better.

Superhero comics and anime aren't alone in getting used to endless franchising and stuff though what makes them stand out from most media franchises is that they don't pander to anybody else, making them more vulnerable to marginalisation. As what some say on Ganriki.org and AltJapan, anime is clearly in danger of becoming a niche product with less and less anime being made to appeal to wider audiences. While this is not true elsewhere but it holds water in America where there was an anime boom but that was short lived. Most anime are either pirated, found on niche programming blocks or on niche channels. That's true elsewhere and it says volumes about anime's curiously but consistently niche status. Superhero comics have gone from a mass market genre to a niche genre outside of film and television adaptations that always make more money than the comic books themselves.

Here's what somebody said in an online forum about them:

Neither. CoD titles sell more in their opening week than all superhero comics combined do all year. And for some reason, increasing their pandering to demographics that don't give a shit about them isn't reversing this trend!

But they can't stop, because people who share their politics but don't buy their comics will then say mean things about them on the internet, and that's more important than sitting atop a thriving industry.

Comic-based movies earn orders of magnitude more money than the comics they're based on precisely because they have avoided this pandering trend. Comics, in fact, are a dead industry totally irrelevant to the US mainstream outside of the IPs studios can mine.

This is why comic companies have all been purchased by movie studios. The actual comics produced by them are a sad, unprofitable, atrophied legacy.

From Encyclopedia Dramatica's forum thread on the webcomic cartoonist Andrew Dobson.

The same thing could happen to anime at any time, made worse by Japan's declining population and refusal to allow immigrants to enter. At this point, growing numbers of anime productions are outsourced to other countries. In a series of interviews with the author behind the Love Hina franchise, there will come a time when publishers like Shueisha would continue franchises without using the original authors. I can say that this is already being done to stuff like Obake no Qtaro, Fist of the North Star and Evangelion where you have stories not written and illustrated by the original authors themselves. You also have forthcoming continuations of older series as I've mentioned Yu Yu Hakusho before.

Continuations and reboots can help reignite nostalgic interest in older franchises like Sailor Moon and Yu Yu Hakusho even if it's not for the better. However if this is done frequently as it is with superhero comics, people will eventually tire of them and the companies behind the likes of Superman and Batman would make superhero stories undergo an artificial scarcity. If an artificial scarcity is any indication other than reboots and continuations, it would mean that the franchises will die at any time.