She writes:

I’m not sure that manga readers here are really manga readers and I would even go so far as to say that they’re not even comics readers. There’s a love for the medium, but only within the shojo or shonen genre... [T]he audience for manga is the anime audience, and they love the anime, but they’re young. And they’re not going to be loving this when they’re older. It really looks like this market is going to outgrow manga. That doesn’t mean that manga is some trend that will die, but that it’s going to take a lot longer for the market to mature than we’re anticipating. It’s not going to be within this generation. This generation is going to outgrow it and it’s the next generation going in that’s going to keep the current market as we know it alive.

The flipside of this fear - that the manga audience is not going to outgrow the material its currently reading - is what worries retailer Chris Butcher:

If you were the recommended age of 13 years old when Naruto Volume 1 dropped in August of 2003, you’re going to be coming up on your 19th birthday any day now. In Canada at least, that means booze, and College or University, and sex. Does it also mean Naruto Volume 30? Are childhood readers and watchers of the spunky young ninja going to become adult fans, emulating Japanese otaku in more than name? Is Naruto going to be one of those properties–entertainments–that cross age boundaries like South Park does, able to enjoyed all the way through your drunken frat/sorority years? Or is it a childish thing, and it’s time for you to put childish things away (except for getting drunk and joining a frat or sorority)? No one I’ve spoken to in the industry has been able to definitively answer that question ...I am outright terrified that the North American manga publishing industry is going to turn into a mirror of the superhero publishing industry; comprised of adult fans clamouring for vaguely more mature versions of children’s material, operating in a two-company system, growing steadily more insular and inaccessible to the world at large.

Both agree, however, that the successful manga titles in the US have been predominately based at a teenage audience, and that there hasn't been any sign that that audience is crossing over into more mature titles. A potentially greater worry is that any potential new audience for non-teen books seems to be staying away from the books because of the success of teen manga. Butcher again:

It’s a little bit like why I think the pleas for more josei and more seinen are misguided; there’s no market for these books. There isn’t even an effective delivery system for them, they aren’t even designed for their target audience. The [intended] audience for the books isn’t going to find them in the manga section, and the books don’t look like something that they’d like in the first place because they adhere so strongly to manga packaging conventions (likely in a bid to capture the existing market) that even if you put a josei title next to the women’s fiction (read: chick lit) most women would look at it like some child/freak/pervert dropped it on the wrong table.

While it's tempting to put this commentary next to news of manga publisher Tokyopop's dramatic downsizing (around 45% of the company was let go in June, and publishing plans were slashed) and run a "Manga is dying!" headline, the reality is less neat. Yes, manga sales are falling even in Japan and there may be widespread confusion over what will happen to the current audience when they discover girls/boys/drugs, but in addition to Kodansha's NY arrival, San Francisco's Viz Media are also an all-new line of original content in the near future. If these are the death-throes of the manga boom, it's clearly not the death of manga-based publishing in the US.

Manga: A Long And Winding Road [Genuine Article]
The Shape of The Manga Industry Part 1, Part 2 [Comics 212] (via The Beat)

Clearly Kodansha thinks so. So far, the company hasn't made any moves to re-acquire rights from Del Rey to distribute some of its Japanese titles. And the company is starting with a two-million-dollar US nest egg, presumably to jumpstart the office and start buying some titles. With US pop culture already saturated by manga references, from the recent Speed Racer movie to the awesome Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane comic books, the question is what Kondansha will do to distinguish its U.S. manga product from what's already out there?

My question is whether Kodansha's move proves that manga is just a kind of illustration style rather than being "comics from Japan." If so, what exactly is that style? People in mecha suits? Girls with gigantic eyes and strangely tumescent bows on their heads? Giant monsters?

Maybe manga is less about visual style than it is about the kinds of stories you get from publishers like Kodansha versus, say, Marvel. But the violent, adult soap operas in manga like Mobile Suit Gundam aren't that far removed from the sprawling soap opera represented by something like last summer's Civil War series from Marvel. Maybe one could argue that manga tend to be darker, more sexual, and more generally creepy than U.S. titles dare to be. However, U.S. comics publishers like Dark Horse have always dabbled in manga-esque subversion with titles like Hellboy. And DC's Vertigo imprint (which publishes Sandman) puts out stories that rival the manga series Death Note in their morbid beauty.

So what exactly will Kodansha's U.S. list look like? I have to admit I'm rubbing my hands in anticipation. No matter what they do, the definition of manga is changing — expanding to include comics from the West that somehow make us think of styles that originated in Japan.

Kodansha to Publish, Sell Manga in U.S. in September [Anime News Network]