It's worth remembering that while American comics degenerated into Archie and good-guy Superman, the Japanese comics industry remained relatively untainted and explored several different genres. When the 90's started rolling around and Cartoon Network and Kids' WB were taking chances on airing more Japanese cartoons, it began fueling a similar broader interest for Japanese comics. Suddenly, book stores were trying to figure out why all of those collected manga were selling so much better than their American counterparts, parents' associations were denouncing manga as a twisting of a children's artform into something dark and demoralizing, and the young American audience were starting to figure out that a comic books could be about more than some guy in tights with a cape.

Yes, I'm ignoring the indie comics like Image who went out of their way to produce different material as well, but it's an interesting study in just what happens to an artform when it becomes sanitized, and what happens to that artform when another culture with less ground rules about its production starts to return the influence.

Isn't there a popular comic in Japan called RapeMan? I've never seen one and don't know if it's widely available here, but if that's an example of a typical Japanese comic, no thanks.

Inane, Catseye.

Way to miss the point. Do you also not watch American movies because there's a porn producer named Seymour Butts?

People forget that in Japan anime and manga are a /medium/, not a genre.

Close to 40 percent of reading material on the average bullet train to Tokyo will be manga. You will have young action series, high school romances, and porn depending upon the consumer you stand too.

Comics in the Westy have been regulated to the fringes of the kiddies until very recently.

This ties into Jules Feiffer's point that comics and similar trash fiction are a way of expressing and catering to impulses that cannot be acted on. Manga, and the wide adult readership of manga, are a reflection of the tight social constraints in which the salaryman lives and works.