Blackstone Bought A Major Manga Producing Company, And Japanese Comic Fans Should Be Scared Their Culture Will Go The Way Of Marvel And DC

American Corporations Come For Manga After Destroying Comics

Over the last decade, American corporations have destroyed their comic industry with diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. It crept into everything in the mid-2010s, with Marvel Comics replacing nearly all its beloved characters with minority or female variants. The wokeness nearly sunk the company, but DC Comics hasn’t taken that lesson to heart in the 2020s, where they’ve turned all of their characters gay in recent issues. However, now American funds are taking aim at one of the last cultural bastions free from globohomo tentacles: Japan. 

Recent reports show that Blackstone, Inc., an asset management company based in New York City specializing in alternative investments, has decided to try its hand at manga publishing. 

The private equity fund invested more than $1.7 billion into Infocom, from which they purchased the majority of shares from Teijin, to sneak their way into Japan’s digital manga market. 

Manga fans have largely mocked American comic fans for years, calling American comics “dead” and laughing at the fans as Marvel and DC Comics circled the drain and slowly killed their content. Even superhero manga like My Hero Academia blew away the competition from Marvel and DC in American markets, which should have given the companies a signal something was drastically wrong. 

Now, manga may no longer be safe. We’ve already seen changes in recent years with American companies using localizers to translate different portions of Japanese manga to add in woke agendas where there were none in the original Japanese. With a company like Blackstone involved, they may even commission manga to promote their social agendas, as these funds often bully creatives into D.E.I. content. 

Infocom’s primary content source comes from Mecha Comic, a website with serialized manga that charges a fee by the chapter. Bloomberg hailed the purchase by Blackstone, saying the company “sees billions in Japanese manga,” which may signal a foray of more corporate funds to be looking to purchase manga studios to further their social plans if this goes well.

Blackstone has already announced its plans to focus on female-centric content by focusing on genres with that target audience in mind. This means manga fans are likely to see a rampant feminization of their content out of the gate.

These companies make the excuse that middle-aged women have a lot of disposable income and like to spend, which is why American media has turned nearly every boy’s intellectual property into a female-led franchise in recent years—just look to Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe as examples.

Blackstone’s head of Japanese acquisitions is focused on creating more original content that they might be able to bring to modern American audiences. “The more original content we have, we can monetize that intellectual property over time,” he said. “We can create animation or merchandising around that, which is going to be the potential opportunity in the midterm.“

This news should put manga fans on alert, as their medium is about to be corrupted by American mega-corporations. Where one goes, others soon follow, and these companies have had a history of investing in media companies and turning them into something unrecognizable to the fans.

What do you think of Blackstone buying a large manga operation? Leave a comment and let us know.