Deb Aoki writes about manga for Comics Beat and Publishers Weekly, in addition to being ¼ of the weekly podcast Mangasplaining (www.mangasplaining.com), a show that introduces Japanese comics in English to new readers with co-hosts Chip Zdarsky, Christopher Butcher and David Brothers. Deb is also a comics creator, user experience designer and illustrator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. We talk about the cultural impact and economics of manga/manhwa on the entertainment industry below.
Key Takeaways
1. Manga's growth is massively undercounted — and it's already enormous. Manga tripled or quadrupled in sales in the US and France post-pandemic, making it the #3 adult book category in the US overall. But even those staggering numbers are a fraction of the real picture — digital sales, libraries, and independent shops aren't tracked. The cultural footprint is far larger than any data set can capture.
2. The singular creator is manga's secret weapon. The Japanese publishing ecosystem invests in individual voices over long periods, giving creators like Tatsuki Fujimoto (Chainsaw Man) or Koyoharu Gotouge (Demon Slayer) the runway to fail, grow, and find their voice before hitting. The result is IP with soul — one person's vision from beginning to end. This is the structural opposite of American superhero comics, where generations of talented artists are forced to play in a corporate sandbox with 80+ year-old characters they don't own.
3. The anime/manga visual language has become the default global visual culture. It's no longer "Japanese." From Genshin Impact to Scott Pilgrim to animation programs that are now majority female — the Sailor Moon/Nintendo generation grew up, and they're now the executives, animators, and creators shaping entertainment everywhere. What used to be niche is now the baseline aesthetic for games, streaming, AI, crypto, and beyond.
4. Webtoons are a sleeping giant that nobody can actually measure. Korean webtoons solved a fundamental UX problem — vertical scroll, mobile-native, weekly microtransactions — but the economics are almost completely opaque. Platforms like Naver and Kakao don't publish real numbers, creators face serious burnout and ownership disputes, and yet Hollywood and private equity are circling. It's a massive, undervalued medium hiding in plain sight.
5. STEAM, not STEM — and the cost of leaving out the arts. Deb's sharpest point is that the crisis in Hollywood, the blandification of American media, and the ethical failures of AI all trace back to the same root: removing artists and humanists from the decision-making rooms. The best IP — from One Piece to Raina Telgemeier's autobiographical comics — comes from deeply personal singular visions, not focus groups or data models. Manga is thriving precisely because Japan never stopped treating its creators as highs status, masters of their craft.
Brian Gold
Good to see you Deb! Where am I finding you right now?
Deb Aoki
I'm in Oakland in the little kitty chaos house. So hopefully my cats don't come and dash across the desk while we're talking.
Brian Gold
Can you introduce yourself to the people who might be listening or watching?
Deb Aoki
Sure. I'm Deb Aoki. I guess I'm kind of a comics journalist, specializing in manga, and now I'm currently doing a lot of research on Korean webtoons. I write for Publishers Weekly and Comics Beat, and I'm a quarter of the Manga Explaining Podcast, which is a podcast for people who haven't read much manga before. We're also doing some publishing of manga — I'm an editor as well for some of our books.
I'm working on one book called Wandering Cat's Cage by Akane Torikai, which is kind of like an Asian feminist spin on very similar themes to The Handmaid's Tale. That's being serialized on our Manga Spinning Substack and it's also going to be published from Fantagraphics in print in fall 2024. The other book I'm working on is called No Roses Without Thorns, which is a one-volume autobiographical manga about a woman named Nami Sasso who, when she was in high school in the 70s, became an assistant to various shojo manga artists — a really interesting time when shojo manga was having this revolution of content, being very bold and different. So yeah, I'm part of the manga ecosystem.
Brian Gold
And you're also a UX designer by trade, right? Used to work at Adobe, and you're also a lecturer and an educator as well.
Deb Aoki
I'm an illustrator too — I'm working on some stuff for Apple right now. So it's, you do a little bit of everything in this world.
Deb Aoki
Or just to keep things interesting. And I mean, if you stay only with one part of the world, you don't really get — I just like getting exposed to different aspects of different things. If I was only in the comics world, I wouldn't see some of the bigger ecosystem trends that are happening. Working in technology gives me interesting insights into where AI and generative AI and large language models are impacting manga and Webtoon production — talking about licensing and IP. So just having broad exposure to various levels of the artistic and business and technology side of what's going on out there, you start seeing interesting patterns.
Brian Gold
Yeah, that's what I wanted to talk to you about — those patterns. We now live in a world where these platforms basically mediate not only our culture, but also the production of manga and anime as well, which are huge stores of fandom and IP. But yeah, I wanted to ask — what is your take right now on the manga industry? Where is it at? Can you give us a little bit of a lay of the land?
Deb Aoki
Well, for a long time, the perspective in Japan was that manga is made by and for Japanese readers. It was kind of like, that's our biggest audience, it's our biggest market. And if by some chance it gets localized and published in other countries, that's a little extra — like laundry money. The amount they were getting from licensing content and getting it translated and published outside was so small in comparison to what they were making just from publishing in Japan. So for a long time they didn't care.
To this day, the Japanese manga market in Japan alone is far, way bigger than what it is overseas — it's almost hard to overstate that. But what's happening is that manga in Japan is plateauing a bit, meaning it's still doing pretty well in digital and print, but the population is aging. There's not as many kids anymore, not as many teenagers. And thanks to anime streaming and digital publishing, which now makes global publishing possible, you now have this bigger fan base for manga.
It was really weird because when the pandemic happened in early 2020 — I do a yearly report for Publishers Weekly on the state of the manga industry — everyone was just battening down the hatches. Everyone thought, "Oh, we've got to cut back. It's going to be bad." And to everyone's surprise — France, the US — manga just went on this crazy upward trajectory. Numbers tripling or quadrupling from 2019.
Brian Gold
Wow.
Deb Aoki
To the point where now manga is the number three adult book category — not graphic novels, but overall books — in the US publishing world.
Brian Gold
Overall books category in the publishing world! That's incredible.
Deb Aoki
Right. And the rising tide that was manga lifted the entire graphic novel category. And the really crazy thing is that the book scan numbers you see don't reflect digital, don't count libraries, don't count a lot of independent comics and bookshops. So what you're seeing is that for all those huge sales numbers, it is only a partial picture of the influence and penetration that manga has now.
Brian Gold
We were talking about the state of the industry. You've seen just a huge spike since COVID, right? Quadrupling in sales, you said. Where is that activity coming from? Do you see it mostly in the US, Asia, internationally? I know Brazil is one of fastest growing markets for manga right now?
Deb Aoki
Well, generally speaking, the quadrupling or tripling happened in both of the two largest markets outside of Japan, which is the US and France. My guess is it was probably very similar in the other markets as well — Spain, Germany, Brazil, Southeast Asia.
The trouble is that there aren't really any great worldwide numbers for the total addressable market for manga, and that's kind of a shame because every country tracks sales in a different way. That's a problem in the sense that the lack of data has made manga's influence quite a bit invisible, to be honest. If you think about the entertainment industry, you have Variety, Billboard — and if it doesn't show up on those charts, it doesn't matter. The same thing happens with books. If it doesn't show up on BookScan, it doesn't matter.
It's like that thing: if a tree falls in the forest and nobody heard it, does anyone care? If sales happen and influence happens but it's not measurable in the way that people look for things to be measured, did it really happen? It does happen, and we see it. But you and I are dealing with people who feel a little knocked flat — "Wait, how did this happen? How do we know we're making a difference? Is this a fluke? Is this a trend that's here today, gone tomorrow?"
And some of that comes from past experience. In the past, there was a big manga boom in the early 2000s. Then the recession came, Borders closed, and everything cratered. The industry since then was building back up — and to give you some idea, some people were telling me that the numbers we're at now are still less than the peak in the 2000s.
Deb Aoki
And this year, the numbers are leveling off a bit compared to 2020 and 2021. So people are like, "Oh, here comes the bust again." And it's like — no, it's still 300% bigger than 2019. So calm down.
Brian Gold
Yeah. And you have to also — like you mentioned to me before — there's a problem in that there's a lack of transparency. It's opaque in the way you measure the success of manga, right? You can see this in the podcasting space too, where analytics and data aren't necessarily readily provided or clear as to what is actually moving the needle. But we know the cultural impact that manga is having right now.
I mean, you can feel it in the way that at my Barnes & Noble, the biggest section is the manga section. And not only is it the biggest, but it's the busiest. You see kids there, of all ages, and adults congregating around manga — and you don't see that in any other book section. And then you have to connect manga to other transmedia properties like merchandise and anime, which all stem from manga as source material. So it all spurs from that, right?
Deb Aoki
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, my friend Kuliyung — he's a publishing consultant, he does consulting for the Sharjah book fair in the Middle East, he works with mergers and acquisitions for the publishing industry — he was telling me, "Yeah, this manga is a generational change. It's like hip hop was in the eighties." It's something that has incredible influence and it seems strange and trendy when it first appears, but it has a huge impact and it extends beyond just the sales of actual manga from Japan.
I've been calling it the Sailor Moon generation. Before Sailor Moon or shojo manga showed up in the 90s, there was very little comics for girls — I know, I was one of them. There wasn't much for us. But now I'm seeing that the Sailor Moon generation — they are now comics creators, animators, character designers. They're also becoming executives, entertainment executives, in their 40s and reaching positions of power and influence.
One of my friends, Jim Subb, is a writer for Conan but also teaches at Seneca Animation College in Toronto. He was saying, "Yeah, this happened a while ago — before, it used to be maybe 30/70 female to male in the animation program. Now it's majority female."
So you're seeing it in almost everything. Even games — a lot of games have a very distinctly anime-manga type look, even if they're made by studios in North America, South America, or Europe.
Brian Gold
Yeah, you can almost argue that the visual culture of anime has proliferated into so many things — from movies to gaming. Some of the most popular titles of the last few years are distinctly anime-inspired, whether it's Genshin Impact, PUBG and Dragon Ball collaborations. The visual culture of anime is incredibly powerful, all the way to AI illustrations and what has been fed into the models, and all the way to Web3 and crypto, where a lot of activity was spurred by nostalgia for anime.
Let's talk numbers a little bit. What are some numbers you can share with us, Deb, in terms of the size and shape of the industry that can give us an understanding of the contours of this phenomenon?
Deb Aoki
Oh boy, let me look this up real quick. Right now it says, like, the global manga industry is almost up to $12 billion USD. And it's probably more than that, honestly, if you consider all the ancillary stuff.
Brian Gold
Wow. Global. Yeah, I imagine it has to be. I think it creates probably hundreds of billions of dollars of more value from that one kind of print publishing, digital distribution center.
Deb Aoki
Mm-hmm. When I talk with the Japanese end of the business, they consider it that what the rest of the world is doing now is catching up with Japanese proportions — meaning that in Japan, manga is already a huge publishing segment, a huge profit center, a huge source of IP.
The ecosystem is so hungry for IP. They've even gone beyond manga to light novels, because light novels can be written faster — new stories, new characters can be developed and put out there faster than manga. So for a while, a lot of anime came from light novels first. The same thing happens in that the machine is so hungry for material — they're going into webtoons now. Solo Leveling is coming out as an anime in January, Tower of God is already out, you're seeing more and more. With all the streaming — Netflix, Hulu, Crunchyroll, all this stuff — not everything's gonna be a hit, but you just see this monster that just wants more content.
Brian Gold
Yeah, you have to feed the beast. Let's focus on Japan a little bit. Who are the major players of the Japanese manga industry?
Deb Aoki
My general guesstimate for the big four: I would say it's Shueisha, which is the Shonen Jump publisher; Shogakukan; Kodansha; and Kadokawa. Now, both Shueisha and Shogakukan are part owners in Viz Media, which is the largest comics publisher in North America. You could argue Viz had roughly 40% of the North American comics market.
Kodansha is a huge publisher, not just of comics but also magazines and books. Then Kadokawa — Kadokawa is interesting in that they're a multimedia company. They don't just publish books and magazines; they also produce movies and animation. They're a huge light novel publisher, and they bought ownership stakes in Yen Press, Anime News Network, J-Novel Club, and they also own an e-book store called BookWalker that sells in both English and Japanese. So Kadokawa is a media conglomerate.
And then after that you've got some smaller publishers that are still big, like Square Enix. Square Enix is a game company and a manga publisher.
Brian Gold
Yeah, they're a really interesting one. Their model is very interesting. Everyone knows Square Enix from gaming — Final Fantasy — but not many people know they also publish manga. Can you talk a little about their publishing side?
Deb Aoki
Yeah, they actually published quite a few big popular series. They have a couple monthly and weekly manga magazines in Japan. They also have manga apps, like one called Manga Up, which is their subscription service. Square Enix's power as a manga publisher was a little invisible for a long time because Yen Press had a kind of sweetheart deal with them as a dedicated supplier. But Square Enix is the original home of Fullmetal Alchemist, Black Butler, Fire Force, Soul Eater — a lot of big popular series originally published in Square Enix magazines.
Brian Gold
Huge. And when you say published, they basically brokered deals with the artists. Fullmetal Alchemist is one of my favorite anime IPs in the world. How do they work with manga artists? How do these publishers work with the artists that essentially own the IP, and then work out publishing and distribution deals?
Deb Aoki
Well, it starts out as manga. The manga starts as a series and if it starts to be popular, the anime studios start pursuing whether they can make it into an anime series. Now the interesting thing — and I'm not really an anime expert, just broad strokes — is it's not like say Disney or DreamWorks, where it's one studio making everything from beginning to end with their in-house team. A lot of anime is done as production committees. The committee are different entities that invest in making the anime, including a studio, and various ancillary studios that do different parts — someone does CGI, some of the in-betweening gets sent off to Vietnam or Korea. And then the original manga creator gets a cut, and so does the original publisher. How it all gets split up, I kind of don't know. All I know is it's a lot.
Deb Aoki
...there are kinds of — one of the big problems that has bothered the industry for a long time and I don't see any solution is that no matter how popular anime gets, animators in Japan are very criminally underpaid.
Brian Gold
Oh my God. Yeah, for the skill that they have. It's also reminiscent of the video game industry too, where they go through these waves — blockbuster hits, and if the game doesn't work out, they lose their jobs. And also criminally underpaid. These are genius-level people.
Deb Aoki
That's one of the things that bothers me that I keep an eye on, because I come from this 80s punk DIY mindset. It just feels not fair that the creators — the heart of this stuff, the source of the innovation, the source of the look and feel — are usually the first to get cut, the first to get put in this situation where the industries are looking for ways to cut you out. "Let's get AI involved. Let's scrape stuff and make our own without the artist's permission. Let's do AI-driven translation, even though it's crappy." What they're trying to do is figure out ways to cut costs as much as possible or cut out individual creators as much as possible, to give ownership back to the larger corporate entity. And I think that's scary.
Brian Gold
Yeah. You're seeing this playing out with media conglomerates in the United States, right? Whether it's Disney and the run of movies that didn't pan out. And if you don't understand the subtle nuances of 2D animation or really good translation or artistic voice actors, you're going to lose the golden goose that's been laying all these eggs.
Deb Aoki
And they've been trying for years. Like the Final Fantasy movie, so many years back.
Brian Gold
Right. The legendary Final Fantasy movie that cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Deb Aoki
Gazillions. But you could argue games nowadays — really good games are as powerful as storytelling mechanisms as manga or anime. One of the things I do is go to a lot of the anime and manga conventions, and you kind of get a pulse of what people are interested in. What's really interesting is that I started noticing at Anime Expo in Los Angeles, it became less and less 100% Japanese anime cosplay. There was much more games cosplay — I'd say 40% is games cosplay, League of Legends and stuff like that. There was also more Disney princesses and Star Wars cosplay. The people just did not care where it came from. To them, it didn't matter if it came from Japan or not. They just liked what they liked.
And a lot of what that reflects is that Scott Pilgrim — it's by a guy from Toronto, right? He just loves anime and manga, and it got produced by Science SARU, which is a Japanese anime studio. So it all meshes together.
Brian Gold
Yeah, it's all meshing together. What you see unifying it is a shared global media culture of people who love cartoons, and what used to be relegated to nerds is now a huge part of shared culture. You know that if you go to an anime convention, dressing as a character from Scott Pilgrim will be appreciated. There's this sense of shared community watching, consuming, and loving similar entities and properties.
What do you think about the debate — now that anime is being made by American studios and produced by Netflix — it's not necessarily relegated to just Japan anymore. It almost needs to be defined as its own cultural export, like Champagne is. Right?
Deb Aoki
Yeah, well, fortunately, it has never really occurred to anyone to say, "If it doesn't come from Japan, it's not anime." Although that sentiment is out there — and I'll tell you, it is getting harder and harder to tell. There's a book from Kodansha called Kingdom of Crystal. I saw it in a bookstore in Tokyo last May. But an editor at Penguin Random House/Kodansha told me, "No, the artist is from Canada." And if you looked at it, you could not tell.
Brian Gold
Yeah, because you've had generations of people consuming manga and anime for 30, 40-plus years. They've inspired a new breed of artists taking the medium all over the world.
Deb Aoki
And that's one of the things I found really fascinating over the past month — Hisashi Sasaki, the former editor-in-chief of Shonen Jump, basically retired from Shueisha and is now at Viz Media heading up their Viz Originals line. He announced this open call asking comics creators to submit their best one-shot manga — short stories. What was so fascinating is that he's trying to replicate the ecosystem as it works in Japan. How the ecosystem works in Japan is: people submit short stories, they work with an editor, they get feedback, they keep trying and trying, doing slightly longer stories until they can make a pitch for a series. They get introduced to other assistants. It's a whole ecosystem. Or they do fan comics, which we don't really have here in America.
Brian Gold
Yeah, you were telling me before — the main difference in American comic culture is that we don't have that incubation ecosystem. Going back to the corporate structure of DC Comics, and instead of promoting new works, comic-book artists still have to take on the mantle of old IP and superheroes from the '60s — can you explain that a little further?
Deb Aoki
Oh yeah. Superman and Batman were created in the 1930s and 40s by creators who own no part of it. And like Bob Kane, one of the original creators of Batman — his family gets no real credit for that. These are all wholly owned by DC Comics and Warner Brothers, or whatever corporate conglomerate owns Warner Brothers. And the same thing goes for Marvel. Spider-Man debuted in the '60s, written by Stan Lee and drawn by Steve Ditko. And Ditko's not a rich man. I'll say that.
So a lot of American comics, particularly the superhero stuff, is work for hire — they're hired by the companies to play in this character sandbox and they get a check and that's the end of it. Maybe if they create a new original character they get a little credit. But did they make any money off of it? Debatable.
Brian Gold:
Right.
Deb Aoki
So basically, for generations you're forcing the most creative people of each generation to play in this one sandbox called superheroes and play with these same characters. Superman and Batman, sure, certain aspects are timeless, but each generation struggles to redefine Batman, I feel. Each generation struggles to redefine Superman. How do you define a guy from outer space who is the most powerful person on earth, who is inherently incredibly virtuous? What do you do about the guy who is a rich man whose parents died and he becomes a vigilante? You either make him comical like the 1960s or super dark like The Dark Knight Returns. How many ways can you push and pull a guy in a bat suit to tell different stories for each generation?
Whereas Japan lets each generation find its own stories and creators. One Piece is created beginning to end by Eiichiro Oda — one singular creator, with lots of assistants, but one singular vision and voice. And when they had the One Piece live action, he had a ton of control and veto power over it. And that's not a given.
Brian Gold
That's the way it should be. I bring up that point because unless you're really in the weeds and understand this particular insight, you won't realize that the superhero structure has done so much for culture and they're revered — but at the same time, you run the risk of exploiting the passions of these artists. And it is a straitjacket at times. It is not creating net new IP or letting a thousand flowers bloom, so to speak. And that's what we see in the Japanese industry.
Deb Aoki
Mm-hmm. I kind of worry a little bit sometimes because what I think we don't understand is the amount of risk that Japanese publishers put out there, the amount of risk they allow for. They'll open it up to a lot of different creators and give them runway.
Like, if you look at Tatsuki Fujimoto, the creator of Chainsaw Man — there are two books out from Viz which are basically just his short stories from early in his career. And you can see how much runway they gave this creator to figure out his voice. Then he did this series called Fire Punch, which is honestly almost disturbing to read because it's so violent and gory. And so when Chainsaw Man came along, a lot of people at Viz were like, "I don't know if we should pick this up because Fire Punch was weird." But for some reason, it just struck lightning.
Same thing with Demon Slayer. When I first read Demon Slayer, I was like, "Oh great, more kids fighting demons. Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt." Then for some reason it just blew up. It captured this moment and hit its peak of popularity at the beginning of the pandemic.
Brian Gold
Another solo manga artist/writer — a singular vision.
Deb Aoki
Mm-hmm. And it was allowed to end. It ran its course and it ended. It had a nice ending. There are little spin-off series, little prequels and sequels, but they just let it end.
Brian Gold
Yeah, the merchandise team or the licensing team didn't try to elongate the series in a way that would compromise the integrity of the whole IP.
Deb Aoki
Mm-hmm. It's kind of like K-dramas, right? K-dramas get to end.
Brian Gold
Right. And that's actually nice and sweet. Jerry Seinfeld — nine seasons, done.
Deb Aoki
And that different mindset — giving the creator time to develop a singular voice. Yeah.
Brian Gold
So important. There's also a culture of reverence, right? They're actually looking for these people with visions and trying to seed them into the culture. But that reverence is so nuanced that it's not really talked about — a corporate structure is not looking for that visionary manga artist in America, which is a shame.
Deb Aoki
Mm-hmm. Well, you could even just say that manga artists are called "sensei" as a title — the same title that people use for doctors and professors in Japan. Honored teachers. You're considered a master of a craft worthy of respect, not just a journeyman illustrator.
Brian Gold
Right. Very high status. Prestigious even.
Deb Aoki
Not that there's anything wrong with being a journeyman illustrator — I am one — but treating someone with a singular vision and style with the respect they deserve, and allowing them to profit from that.
Brian Gold
Right. Yeah, we should be birthing like ten Frank Millers a year, ten Will Eisners. And unfortunately, they have to go into entertainment or gaming or advertising in the United States, or be lucky and dedicated enough to be like a James Jean who does covers for DC Comics and Fables and then ends up having a really great artistic career.
Deb Aoki
Yeah, comics is not a lucrative career by any stretch of the imagination. I think we have a poverty mindset about comics in America — that making comics is something you do out of passion, not to make a profit. And America's comics industry is so, I guess, dysfunctional — we have to have a charity called Hero Initiative for comics artists who are without health insurance or going through hardship. That's stupid. That's awful.
Brian Gold:
It's as stupid as the fact that VFX artists in Hollywood just unionized in 2023. The same kind of idiocy — I really feel for those artists. They're incredibly dedicated, so talented. But being forced to play Beatles covers over and over again.
Deb Aoki
Like, why? Everything has to have a superhero spin. You could argue a lot of manga has a hero spin, like they have amazing powers. The sports manga — who can serve a volleyball like that? But they don't have to wear a cape to be heroic, to have a hero's journey story. The fact that everything has to be spandex and heroes is so limited. There are tons of great comics that don't follow the superhero paradigm. But focusing primarily on that as defining what comics are, what stories people want to read — that's so limiting.
I went on public radio the other week where I was talking about wine and food manga. And the wine and food people were like, "Oh my God, there's comics for us!" Yes, there is.
Brian Gold
Yeah, there can be manga for anything. Drops of God is a series now on Apple TV. But out of all this frustration, we now have Webtoons from Korea. Currently there's a show called Moving by a webtoon artist, Kang Full. He's one of the original Webtoon artists and the show is produced and distributed by Disney, but it is kicking Marvel's ass. The Mandalorian has like a $15 million budget, and this Webtoon show that's beating the charts all over Asia has a budget of like $4.5 million. So there's a new kind of player, and stories that are breaking the mold — even from the mold of the manga industry to the American traditional comics industry. Why are you looking into the Webtoon space, Deb? What's got you fascinated and where are you looking?
Deb Aoki
What's fascinating about Webtoons is it's this amazing intersection between technology and storytelling. The story of how Webtoons were created is so fascinating to me because it's the product of economic necessity. The financial crisis that hit Korea basically decimated the traditional print comics publishing ecosystem. And so they had to start from scratch, completely from scratch, having nothing.
Brian Gold
Like any great Korean innovation — it comes from necessity. Like whether it's kimchi or being ravaged by war. Every great Korean innovation comes from necessity.
Deb Aoki
So their whole thing — they had to make stuff that was digital. And still, every place else in the world — France, the US, even Japan — still makes digital comics that were originally created to be printed on letter-sized paper, and then tries to make it readable on a tiny phone screen. Webtoons just said, "What if we made comics that you could just scroll? One panel at a time, made to be read efficiently on a phone." Made for vertical scrolling, the way people hold up their phones.
Brian Gold
Vertically — the way that people hold their phones.
Deb Aoki
And they do microtransactions. You don't have to go to a specialty comic shop, you don't have to order anything in advance. You turn on your phone. Every week there's a new chapter. You can read a certain amount for free, you can watch ads, or you can pay some kind of weird digital currency that basically obfuscates whatever money you're actually paying — coins, ink, et cetera. And so I'm dealing with people in America who are like, "What are we gonna do? These floppy comic books aren't selling anymore." Well, they're five bucks for 20 pages. They come out once a month, it's only one story, and I've got to go to a special store to get it. And sometimes it's sold out unless I pre-ordered it two months in advance.
Brian Gold: Yeah.
Deb Aoki
You can't tell me you're going to get new readers who will put up with that kind of inconvenience. And the Webtoon market is a huge sleeping giant. Because none of those sales are tracked. Whenever you ask for sales numbers from the Webtoon people, I swear to God, they're pulling those numbers out of thin air. Nobody is tracking this.
Brian Gold
I mean, besides Kakao and Naver, and it's probably just kind of hidden in their financials. Yeah.
Deb Aoki
Nobody knows — there's no charts to say, "This is the best-selling, most-read webtoon." Each platform says, "Oh yeah, this one got X million views."
Brian Gold
I mean, Netflix does the same thing — they celebrate the wins and hide the losses. But yeah, there is this opacity. I think we'll have you on again because we're both really researching this medium, I think, together and in tandem and parallel. But the fact that this is really a medium of this hybrid culture of art and technology, and at the same time it is being leveraged by these platform players — whether it's Apple, Tencent, Kakao, Naver — they understand they are looking at wWbtoons as a digital content medium that is really important. And I know private equity groups are even looking into it. So yeah, it's only rising in importance, because whether it's the monetization mechanisms or simply time spent on the platform — that's their entire incentive.
Deb Aoki
Yeah, how the money flows is beyond me, because some of the companies I've talked to have a very integrated multimedia strategy that would blow most people away. Like I was talking with the people from HYBE Original Stories at New York Comic Con and—
Brian Gold
Yeah, let's get into HYBE. Let's define what HYBE is a little bit, because they're kind of the epitome of what the media mix is to the max, right? How do you look at HYBE right now?
Deb Aoki
Oh, you know, I have so much respect for them in the fact that it's like they're like the blob — they just swallow up things and integrate them into their bigger mass. And it becomes like this really powerful and contemporary mix that is almost irresistible. I mean, HYBE is behind BTS, which is probably, arguably — they're a profit center, let's put it that way.
Brian Gold
But they're not also a one-hit pony now. They have NewJeans, which is dominating K-pop and global media culture right now. They're about to headline League of Legends' championship. They're huge. Sorry, I cut you off — please.
Deb Aoki
So the thing that I saw at HYBE at Comic-Con was they were talking about their Original Stories business. Which means — let me see — they're working with various webtoon studios. This is a work-for-hire situation where they work with some of the biggest webtoon studios to create original stories that are basically based on the band members, but this is not like, you know, Marvel's KISS comics or Archie's Meet the Ramones where they played themselves.
The BTS one is called Seven Fates: CHAKHO, where the members of the band are transported to another world, given completely different names, and they're in this dystopian world where they're hunting tiger demons. And they got another studio to do one called The Star Seekers with Tomorrow X Together. And they did another one called Dark Moon, with the members of ENHYPEN playing vampire boys in a private school pitted against werewolf boys from another school.
Brian Gold: Oh, tale as old as time.
Deb Aoki
It's kind of like they Hogwarts-ify them a little bit. ENHYPEN does a whole line of albums and mini albums with this vampire, dark moon, dark blood theme in their songs. It's a whole concept album. But the thing I didn't know until I saw the New York Comic-Con panel was how far they're taking it. Like Dark Moon — they basically did a takeover of Lotte World, which is the big amusement park in Korea. A complete takeover.
Brian Gold
A complete takeover — that's like taking over Disneyland for one brand.
Deb Aoki
Banners and projections and photo ops and all kinds of stuff. A whole line of branded Dark Moon clothing and merchandise and gifts. They had pop-up shops. The pop-up shop in Korea was in a stadium. The one in Tokyo had 500 people lined up before it opened, and it was cleaned out in two days.
Brian Gold
Wow. But is your sense — and this is where I feel like HYBE can kind of over their skis a little bit — they've had this incredible 10-year run with BTS. Usually after every 10 years, the culture wants a new group. Bands don't last more than 10 years dominating culture. And now BTS has military service, they're probably going to have wives and kids. I wonder — are you seeing actual reception toward the story itself, or is it more of an extension of their fandom that may reach a half-life and decay in energy?
Deb Aoki
That's the thing that doesn't quite fly with me right now with this stuff. I don't know whether these stories, on their own, without the existing fandom, can stand on their own as quality stories.
Brian Gold
Can stand on their own. Right. Yeah — if you're creating a webtoon story out of the BTS boys, it would behoove you, especially because you have the money and resources, to try to create a standalone story instead of a subpar extension of an already known genre. And that's maybe what you're worried about.
Deb Aoki
Yeah, it's funky. Because the BTS one is by the same studio that did Solo Leveling. So they're creating a story that is surprisingly dark and violent, given how bright and bubbly BTS's songs are. That's a little bit of a disconnect, but...
Deb Aoki
What struck me was — I interviewed two of the people who worked on the stories and I asked, "How much influence did the artists have on the creation of these stories? Did they get to say, 'I like how my character is drawn here'?"
Brian Gold
Yeah, who's in the writing room creating the show bible for this is what I wonder.
Deb Aoki
I don't know. Even when you look at the print version, it just says "By HYBE" — there's no credit to the webtoon studio at all, whereas that shows up in the digital version. So I asked them at the panel, "Why is that? Because if you credited each of these studios, that's actually a selling point for people who like webtoons first."
Brian Gold
Totally. Yeah. I would have probably been like, "Oh, from the creators of Solo Leveling" — that would have made me interested.
Deb Aoki
I think what it was is that if they mentioned them as co-creators, then they would get some rights. They were pretty dodgy about that. They were almost irritated that I asked the question. And then I said, "So did Jungkook have any input on how his character was portrayed?" And they went, "Well, you know, he's very busy and we were working on a really fast schedule, so we don't really have time for people to nitpick..." And I went, "I get that. But did he have any input at all?" And they said, "Oh, well, he says he likes it." That's it. And I'm like, why are you so dodgy about this?
Brian Gold
Yeah. I think they know there's maybe a lack of artist integrity — that spirit wasn't necessarily poured into the IP, and it was a job for hire. Nobody wants to take credit for it or talk about it in a way that diminishes the work's artistic standing.
Deb Aoki
I guess so. I mean, because I don't know BTS members individually as personalities. Like, you could watch Yellow Submarine, right? And the personalities of John, Paul, George, and Ringo are apparent even though it's a cartoon story — oh, John is the cerebral one, George is kind of shy and cool, Paul is gregarious and flirty. It matches the broad strokes of who their fame personas are. But I don't know the BTS members well enough to know whether their characters in this story feel authentic to them.
Brian Gold
They do for sure have their own character traits — they're hyper-productized. And the reason they got there is really interesting. It's very similar to Taylor Swift. Because they were from a label that nobody was watching, they weren't given a lot of opportunities on the main stages. So the industry insight is that they were forced to do YouTube and live streaming, and that's what allowed them to establish an incredible fan base, which became the BTS Army. It was out of necessity — a lot of people were writing them off, thinking they wouldn't be successful. But just like Taylor Swift responding to every MySpace message, that direct connection with fans — even more than the music itself — is what made them.
Their music is great, but you can't say it's objectively the best music. But they're winning on fandom, on commerciality, on internationality and intersectionality, and on authenticity, mental health, and love — the hubs you need to center your artists around.
Deb Aoki
Interesting, right? Because I think it's a generational shift in expectations — what you expect from who you're a fan of. I think I get cranky about the superhero stuff because it's like, are you even responding to what kids today are anxious about? Their fantasies? Their psychological needs?
Brian Gold
Please get cranky more. Get loud.
Deb Aoki
When Spider-Man came out in the sixties, it was kind of revolutionary because it was an everyday boy who got powers and then had to deal with some tragedy. And...
Brian Gold
Totally. Well, I think that's why — going back to our original conversation — manga is taking off in places like the United States, Europe, France, and Brazil. Japanese manga artists are able to explore these more humanist themes. That's why it's so powerful. And now when you meet middle school kids and high school kids, they all have a top five anime that touched their hearts, right? From the popular kid to the jock to the computer programmer. This is kind of unprecedented.
Deb Aoki
Yeah. And it makes you feel something. Like you could argue Chainsaw Man — yes, it's wild and outrageous, but it's also about income inequality. It's about this guy who's poor as dirt. All he wants to do is have some really good toast and maybe feel a human connection. He's just so poor.
Brian Gold
Yeah. That's a real desire. Especially now, when there's no intimacy, kids aren't having sex apparently.
Deb Aoki
And then he's exploited by his manager. How relatable is that?
Brian Gold
Yeah, I mean — in a weird way, this place that's been seen as foreign for so long is actually reflecting back human conditions better than our home countries.
Deb Aoki
Or it even tries to, right? It even tries to touch you. One manga editor told me, "You start with characters. You start with good characters and the story will almost write itself." One Piece — one of the benefits of it being one person's vision from beginning to end is that Zoro is Zoro from the beginning. Even after the time skip, even after he gets his scar, he's still kind of this super strong guy who has his principles, who just gets lost all the time. He has very well-rounded, interesting qualities that make you root for him. He's not perfect, he has emotions, but he's not a one-note character.
And you know that from beginning to end he doesn't have a distinct personality shift. He's still the guy you loved in volume 10 to volume 110, inherently. He just grew, maybe changed — like your friends grow and change. But inherently in their hearts, when you see them again at your reunion, they're still kind of the same person.
Brian Gold
Well, I think the best storytellers — whether it's Neil Gaiman or these manga artists — they have these characters in their head and they know how they should develop. That's really important.
Let me ask you a couple more questions before we have to go. Have you ever seen a group that has ever made a successful IP story in manga or anime? Because my thesis is that the best stories come from a singular vision, like a Tolkien or a J.K. Rowling. Has there ever been a group or duo that created a successful piece in the manga industry?
Deb Aoki
There's a fair amount, actually. Like there's CLAMP, for example. CLAMP is four women who co-create comics together. They did like Tokyo Babylon, X/1999, Tsubasa, Cardcaptor Sakura. Kurisaki is actually the pen name for two women. They did the Avatar comics. They're working on the Unicorn Story for Scholastic, which I'm also working on. Adachi Toka, who does Noragami, is also two women.
Brian Gold
How interesting. More women groups. This is interesting.
Deb Aoki
Yeah. And Akira Himekawa is two women as well. Akira can be an androgynous name — just like Hiromu Arakawa, who does Fullmetal Alchemist. There are people who did shonen manga who are women with pen names that make you wonder whether they're male or female. People kind of don't know whether the creator of Demon Slayer is male or female. They have suspicions, but no confirmed photos. So yeah — there are creators who are teams, even if you may not know it.
Brian Gold
I know you have a really interesting model now that's very of-the-moment, very creator economy. You have a Substack that has thousands of subscribers, you're serializing manga, and you're going into publishing. Can you talk a little about your vision? I love the way you're using current technologies and building in public. How's that going?
Deb Aoki
Well, Substack is very interesting. We got involved with Substack because Chip Zdarsky, who is one of the Manga Splitting Podcast hosts, got a grant from Substack to publish his own comics. He introduced us to Substack and we got a first-year grant to do it. They gave us the grant because we were the only people even attempting to do manga on the platform — every other creator they'd given a comics grant to was publishing their own original comics, whereas what we were doing was licensing existing manga.
Chip serialized his original comic Public Domain, which is about a family dealing with the ownership of their superhero IP after the original creator dies — it's kind of a neat little story, and he's actually been nominated for a couple of awards for it. If you're interested in the kind of Superman/Batman IP ownership issues we were talking about, Chip's Public Domain will give you a taste of the politics involved.
Brian Gold
Hmm. If you're independently publishing your own comic, how do you get recognized? Can somebody just be quietly toiling away and never get industry recognition? What are the dynamics there?
Deb Aoki
Right now it's just a total free for all, to be perfectly honest. Like I was saying, there are still people who — and I'm wondering if I should build out my own comic strip for my newsletter or do it on Webtoon.
Brian Gold
And that's kind of the question, right? Like Webtoon has the platform and the distribution and the monetization, but...
Deb Aoki
But does it have your audience? I think you have to think — Webtoon as a platform is interesting, but one thing that's a little bit opaque is how they're paying their creators, and whether that ecosystem works for all creators. The stress and burnout that webtoon creators in Korea go through is well-known. What's interesting is that in a lot of webtoons, at the end of a series or between breaks, the author will write little notes to the readers saying, "Oh, I got sick," "I have carpal tunnel," "Oh my God, I'm exhausted."
There's one webtoon creator named Leanne Krasovic. She did a series called Let's Play on Webtoon and famously left the platform, citing disagreements about financial compensation for what is a very successful series, and about ownership of her work. She was at New York Comic-Con and announced she got a Netflix deal to adapt it as an anime feature. She also made a deal with Manta to do a whole new original series just for them — a competing webtoon platform. So there's so much we don't know about the economics of Webtoon right now. I only hear anecdotes here and there.
Brian Gold
But I think we will almost never find out for a long time — just as ESPN hid their financials for decades. At one point ESPN was making more money than Disney Parks and the studio combined, and it was only recently that their financials were leaked.
But I do want to end on this note — we're seeing a kind of crisis in Hollywood right now. Whether it's newsrooms shutting down like BuzzFeed and Vice, or Hollywood studios like Paramount and Disney that are in the red on what they're creating. And perhaps, if you still have this dream of creating a show or a movie, that dream — although always difficult — is more available and possible today than ever before. Instead of toiling away on a script trying to get an agent, you can literally just open an Instagram, open a Substack, publish on Webtoon. These creative platforms allow you to test your ideas.
I wrote a piece about how the power of webtoons is really about the fact that it's a vertically integrated storyboarding platform, and the core of any great movie is really storyboarding — that's the art that needs to be highlighted more. So perhaps we're all becoming like mini Hollywood studios, and that's what the future is.
Deb Aoki
There are just more on-ramps than there ever were before. And what we traditionally thought were the on-ramps — being a comic book artist, going to a convention, showing your portfolio, and hoping they give you a shot at drawing Legion of Superheroes — most people are not even bothering with that route anymore. You either start your own webcomic, create a webtoon, serialize your comics on Twitter or Instagram. And as many people have found out — particularly the early adopters on YouTube — if you're savvy enough to be consistent and have a compelling persona, you can make a ton of money.
But it's kind of a gamble, right? Some people were the first in the space on Clubhouse, and Clubhouse isn't really talked about now. You could be the first person in the metaverse or in Second Life and not many people are there. So it's a huge gamble. You have to pick your platform.
Brian Gold
Yeah. I think what's happening is there's a return back to basics. It wasn't virtual reality — it was podcasts. It wasn't another app — it was actually having a newsletter. It wasn't like having a VC-backed startup worth $100 million — no, it's actually using these new technologies to create sustainable lifestyle businesses that can make you a millionaire without having to have all these investors. There's a back to basics, first principles, and the mediums that work — like email and newsletters — because they're about direct connections with people that people just don't have anymore. That's why emails are so valuable.
Deb Aoki
Mm-hmm. Yeah, ecosystems are very fragile and fascinating. When they work, they work well. I'm watching the implosion of Twitter right now — Twitter is still the big source of a lot of my information and networking. But I've been locked out of Twitter for four weeks now because my two-factor authentication failed, and I can't get anyone at Twitter to help me.
Brian Gold
Yeah. I have the same problem with Facebook — I can't even log in. They think I'm like a bot or something.
Deb Aoki
It's like — I get it. I work in technology. That was one area I used to work in a lot, actually — sign-in and account recovery. So it's like, oh, I'm being punished for knowing too much. To be in the space where I'm now, with the tech career background, it's like, "Oh, I know exactly how these awful decisions are made. I've been in the room where some of these awful decisions are made.
Brian Gold
What is your take on the power of the platforms and their effect on business models and culture and society? And another thing — the role of the product manager and how these decisions are made within tech companies. Are they just enclosed off from society? I do feel like we don't have the human interface designers of the early '80s and '90s — that kind of sensibility is a little lost. And becoming a product manager or UX designer became like a status symbol — a career to get into just for good money, a vesting schedule, or pedigree. But I wonder — who's actually creating for people and to improve people's lives?
Deb Aoki
Nothing against good product managers — I've worked with many great product managers who think about customers, users, ethics, larger digital ethics issues, the impact on humanity versus making quarterly KPIs. But I think it all comes back to — it's emphasizing STEM. Science, technology, engineering, math. STEAM is important — the arts and humanities need to be included in the mix.
Brian Gold
Right. Oh, I love that. Not STEM — STEAM!
Deb Aoki
And that's what's missing. That's where, you know, the whole thing about AI — yes, there are some really good ethical uses of it, but there are also some very unethical uses of it. And do you know the difference? You wouldn't know the difference unless you've actually created something yourself and felt it was stolen from you. Or unless you treat artists as more than clip art, and understand creators' rights or intellectual property as something that comes from individuals, not just corporate meetings.
The stuff that really pushes the medium of storytelling forward — like Raina Telgemeier, who did these self-autobiographical comics about being a tween, about the time when she had to get braces because of an accident. It became one of the bestselling graphic novels, period. At a certain point, Raina's books were like five out of the top ten on the bestseller list. And she got an award last month from the Columbus Crossroads Comics Festival for having a transformative work.
Those kind of transformative works that open up a new avenue, a new style of storytelling — they don't come by committee.
Brian Gold
Amen, yeah.
Deb Aoki
They come from someone doing something that's so deeply personal to them, and then it resonates with other people by whatever means. There's a ton of people who do deeply personal work that never resonates or reaches other people. I'm not saying that deeply personal work will always be a home run — it's always going to be a gamble. But to close off the avenues for those types of stories to come out into the world, or to only greenlight sequels and "blank meets blank" mashups — that's the death of something.
Brian Gold
Yeah, let's do what's already been proven. There's a great article called "What Moneyball-for-Everything Has Done to American Culture," and I think that's what's been happening over the last 20 years — we've gone into this AB-testing-everything mindset, where you have to give me proof in the data that this is going to work. Data from the past, supposed to predict the future. Which doesn't even make logical sense. And you can kind of see how this blandification, this homogenizing of American culture, is happening — whether it's sports, advertising, movies, or even music, where not a lot of genuinely new things are being greenlit or created or encouraged.
Deb Aoki
So that cycles us back around to manga and anime, because manga and anime was offering something fresh and different by comparison, right?
Brian Gold
Yeah. Which is life, right? That's what's missing. Art is magical, but it's also life. And you're right — not STEM, but STEAM. I love that. Well, Deb, thank you so much for your time. I'm sure we'll talk again. I always love talking to you about the industry.
Deb Aoki: Thank you!
Brian Gold: Yeah — let's go deeper when you come back from Korea. Let's go deeper on what you're seeing in Korea and webtoons and the media space. But until then, thank you so much. All right.
Deb Aoki: Thank you.
This interview was edited lightly for clarity.
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