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context: comics
Why are manga so successful?
Clearly comics are much bigger in Japan than anywhere else in the world. There doesn't seem to be a single obvious explanation. Crossover bande dessinee/manga artist Frederic Boilet says "At least half of manga tell stories of men and women and their everyday lives. For me this is the principal reason for manga's success in Japan with a broad range of open-minded people who read comics as they would read novels or go to the cinema" This tendency towards more realistic subject matter certainly separates manga from the majority of anglophone comics, at least, and helps sustain the breadth of readership, but there is a cause/effect problem here, in that it seems to have been an expanding adult market that licensed/encouraged mature work, at least as much as than vice versa.
Some other possible reasons: