this is genuinely informative and i think this system is probably better than the way that it works in the US. DC would probably make more money if they sold monthly catalogs with different episodes instead of what I got in the mail.
i like my cheese subscription a lot and towards the end of the month I get excited for my new cheese. Every month would get the nerds excited for new capeshit.
Someone has almost certainly pointed this out, but I'm catching up from long not reading this thread so I'll go ahead:
DC tried this a few years ago, it was called "Wednesday Comics". It wasn't the same as the Manga
phonebook format, it was an oversized, newspaper-like weekly magazine with several more or less standalone stories, inconsequential to continuity, about different characters. Each issue contained a couple pages of the story. It didn't last long, but I'm not sure I remember why. Maybe DC just lost interest fast; there may have been some distribution limitations that killed widespread access; maybe the offer was just too meager in comparison; maybe people just didn't care. It may have even been a limited scope project, to test the waters of that kind of publication format. I remember the format and the art being rather nice-looking, and that the stories were well-received, but nothing else like this has been attempted since.
Now, there's something important to point out about this: Japan has a culture of
throwaway books. They'll buy the weekly/monthly/quarterly phonebook-sized editions (that are even printed in low quality paper, sometimes with art unfinished) and read them (often just a few stories they're actively following, at most browsing the others in case there's something interesting) on the way to or back from work/school, then throw them in the trash or give them away. If they really like a story and want to keep it, they'll buy the collected volumes. Feedback and public interest in each story, and sales of early collected volumes, decide whether a story continues publication or gets axed. So, all in all, you buy a low cost, low quality book with a few stories you like, a few you may potentially like, and that you can dispose of. It's a good value and a good way to occupy otherwise wasted time.
American comics are straight up geared to collectors from the start. There's no culture of disposability. Every book is printed in high quality paper, regardless of how dogshit or unpopular it is, because there'll be someone hoping to put it in a mylar bag and keep it, and hopefully sell it much later. There's variant covers for almost every book, simply the same issue with a different drawing on the cover, again, to incentivize collectors to buy and store these "rare" copies in hopes they'll be worth something some day. They do every trick and gimmick they can to get people to buy them for these collections. Relaunch unpopular books with new "Issue 1" every year or two, because that boosts sales temporarily; do crossovers, do events, do stories that start in one book, continue in another, then return to the first and so on. It's all a bunch of anti-consummer tricks that only work on people already hooked, or speculators. And then there's the collected versions, between 5 and 10 issues in one collected book, a few months after the last collected issue comes out. This makes some people want to just wait for the volumes to come out and not follow the "floppies".
TL;DR: the American and Japanese industries are structured in diametrically opposed ways. Japan has throwaway books that people read on the go and dispose of, with hundreds of pages giving room to countless stories and artists
every week. America has an industry captured by collectors and speculators, with publishers using tricks and gimmicks that are counter-productive to attracting new readers and generating new talent. I doubt America would adopt the Japanese phonebook format, because lifestyles are too different.
