The Four Color Media Monitor

The Christian Post says that while Eiichiro Oda's manga series One Piece is drawing to a close (there's plenty of mangakas who write their creations with an ending of some sort in mind, unlike most serial fiction in the USA), some fans have lost interest because it's gone on for too long, at least two decades:

Some fans have reportedly lost interest in "One Piece" due to its dragging story. Many of them have already stopped reading the manga, claiming that its story has already been too long to be interesting.

According to reports, the hit manga by Eiichiro Oda is already approaching its end and has only about 20 to 30 percent of material left. Since its first release, "One Piece" has been one of the most successful manga series. However, its readership has significantly dropped due to claims of its story unnecessarily dragging on for too long. [...]

Many of those who voted for "One Piece" said one of the reasons they decided to stop reading the manga series was the excessive number of hiatuses in its release schedule. According to them, they have also lost interest in reading the manga because of its convoluted and seemingly endless story.

Since its debut in 1997, "One Piece" has already released a total of 84 volumes. Despite topping the list of the recently conducted poll, the manga series remains popular among manga lovers. In fact, it is set to celebrate its 20th anniversary this year. The "One Piece" anime series, is now on its 18th year and has aired 781 episodes in total.

Obviously, there's stories out there that, if they take too long, readers will lose interest. In its own way, it's similar in some ways, if not all, to the situation with American superhero comics today, which have been flooded with too much leftist politics and other SJW garbage that's been making them convoluted. I'd even add that, if DC/Marvel don't want to discard a lot of the post-2000 storylines and start again at a certain point in continuities before that, then that'll only ensure the eventual demise of their superhero worlds as fans have lost interest while prices became too high to be encouraging.

And if the anime series is that long, it brings to mind the Simpsons, which has surely reached as much today, and lost a lot of whatever quality it once had long ago.

The part about hiatuses also reminds me of writers in the US who took their time on some of the books they wrote, like J. Michael Stracynski, Geoff Johns and even Kevin Smith, and led to delays in schedules. And in the case of the Black Cat miniseries written by the latter, it turned out it wasn't even worth the trees that went into its printing. However, the difference is that you may not see any press sources in the US complaining about writers who do a poor job in getting their scripts out on time, let alone how poor their writing talents are to begin with. And that's just one example of a double standard in how the comics press deals with both US and Japanese products.

Labels: animation, dreadful writers, Europe and Asia, manga and anime