[DonQuigleone]

Originally Posted by Random32

I'll take a stab at this. Maybe its because of piracy. Anime, games, and movies have widespread piracy, comics books as far as I know don't.

Piracy is still fairly centralized. Even though torrents allow the data to be p2p, you still need a place to get torrents from and a tracker. XDCC and stuff is even more centralized. So piracy hubs appear to distribute pirated content. People visit these hubs to get their pirated content, which results in a lot of people with similar interests in one place. Then these people start talking to each other and before you know it, a community of people interested in whatever the pirated content it springs up around a place where that pirate content is distributed.

This would also explain why the anime community in Japan isn't as organized as the anime community outside Japan. Anime watchers in Japan can watch anime on TV, and those who pirate either use English language piracy hubs (which means that they are unlikely to join the community around them due to the language barrier), or Japanese P2P which don't really require piracy hubs like torrents and most other piracy methods.

In fact Anime is unique in requiring piracy hubs, due to the fact it needs to be translated. Many of the foremost anime forums (like this one) were originally just fansub agregators. That said, ANN, one of the earliest and still most prominent faces of the fandom (love it or hate it), isn't built on fansub distribution at all, but seems more like an offshoot of expo culture, or zine culture, rather then pirating.

Also, games is just as well organized (if not more so) then Anime, and, of course, is not really built on piracy at all. So clearly it's possible to build a strong online presence without Piracy.

Another factor with piracy, and somewhat ironic, is the sheer insularity of the Japanese entertainment industry. It's a bit ironic, but the fact that Japanese producers paid no attention whatsoever to tertiary markets (IE us), meant that illicit distribution was able to spread without them ever really caring (at least at the beginning). By contrast, European media companies have always been trying to make it big in the english speaking world, and perhaps crushed any nascent piracy (thinking it will cut into their profits). The interesting thing is that the legal distribution of Anime was spearheaded by American companies and licensors, with Japanese companies taking a relatively bemused backseat (what, these guys are interested? Weird foreigners...), at least initially. The Japanese have played a fairly passive role in spreading awareness of Anime. It's a "Laissez Faire" fandom.

I think Asian dramas/pop leapfrogged off the anime community. European tele/film/music started from zero.

This seems a likely explanation. There may also be other factors like the Korean Wave as well (or is the Korean Wave also an offshoot of Anime fandom?)

Assuming my thoughts about #2 is true, we have to figure out why the anime community didn't help boost French comics like it did Asian dramas/music.

Yes, there's certainly no shortage of english speaking people who know French (in fact, there's far more of them then can understand Japanese). It's possible the French were more vigourous with their copyright enforcement.

Originally Posted by Vexx

European... or rather UK live-action has access to the US via the public broadcasting. Its limited and is mostly the "best of" but fans of public broadcasting dote on them. However, there simply isn't the "community"... perhaps because its passively delivered?

This is reasonable, though it doesn't quite explain why movies are so much better organised then television. It could be the nature of movies though (IE, you need to go out and pay to see a movie, and it requires little effort to tune in your TV). I'm not entirely convinced. Certainly, the same reasoning doesn't necessarily apply to continental europe. That said, the fact that continental europe doesn't serve up science fiction the way anime did is likely a large factor. It doesn't explain why european dramas have languished in obscurity compared to asian dramas. While I could see J-Dramas leapfrogging off of anime, Chinese and Korean dramas did as well. Why didn't the same occur with european media?

Originally Posted by ChainLegacy

I'd agree with Random32 above me on the piracy issue and also add that the popularity of anime has been closely linked to its internet subculture for quite some time now. Shows like Dragonball Z spiked popularity in anime internationally just as internet speeds were reaching the level for pirating the shows online. You had a disparate international audience with few options for watching up-to-date anime shows other than the internet. Unlike with books, TV, and movies, for most there was/is no physical counterpart to the internet for watching and discussing anime. By necessity the fans were forced to congregate online, and are much more centralized because of it. There weren't any other options.

This is likely, but why hasn't sci-fi succeeded in a similiar way? Pre internet, the science fiction fandom was the largest and most organized fandom in the world, operating hundreds of amateur zines. Anime fandom in itself is a spinoff of it. With the internet, most of those zines have dissappeared (for obvious reasons), but no large centralized online equivalent have ever arisen to take their place. This is a strange thing.

An interesting question is if any equivalent "translation" fandoms exist in other languages. I know there are fairly organised french and Spanish anime fandoms. Has translation of American TV similiarly taken off? With similiar hubs of activity as Anime?

Also, when comparing Japanese and English Anime fandom, the Japanese fandom is still fairly well organized as fandoms go. I do not know of any English language fandom that produces the level of fanfiction ("doujin") of such a high quality as the Japanese fan community.

I know of no real equivalent for the Japanese Comiket.