Ryan Matheuszik runs the V-SWAT anime club in Vancouver, British Columbia and is occasionally a guest columnist on Ryan Mathews' Last Exit Before Toll on The Anime Web Turnpike. Akadot recently asked Ryan to weigh in on the state of anime in the western hemisphere. - Luis Reyes

As guest columnist for this month, I suppose I should live up to my reputation and pick something extremely controversial to rant about. However, since Akadot has impressed me with its high standards of reporting as of late, I'll try to keep it civil. - Ryan Matheuszik

Near the end of the 1990s, I made a dire prediction about the fate of anime in North America. Taking a hard look at the state of the industry - as well as anime fandom - I suggested the disturbing possibility of a crash in the anime industry. And now, some years later, I find myself asked to revisit this topic in a climate that may remind some of my original discourse all those years ago.

In the beginning there was no Anime. Japanimation was an art form primarily confined to Japanese soil, and what few titles did make it to North American were badly edited and horribly dubbed. In the mid 80s, fans of this novel form of animation began to import copies of Japanese animation and spent considerable time and effort reworking it into a form easily accessible to all - even those that did not understand Japanese. These early fans were dedicated and extremely loyal to the art form. They were so passionate about Japanimation that their efforts spawned a niche industry of studios, such as US Renditions and US Manga Corps, who would license and redistribute Japanese animation. Anime as we now know it in North America was born.

Through the years, in an effort to increase market share and expand the industry, anime has inevitably become a lot more mainstream. Ravers, clubbers, and a number of "alternative media" fans have been introduced to the anime scene through aggressive marketing tactics undertaken by American distributors. But how dedicated are these fans? To them, anime may just be the next trend, the next hot topic of the month. What happens when these "fans" get tired of anime and move on?

In the early 90s a similar situation happened in the comic book industry. Superman was killed off, foil covers hit the scene, and soon a lot of people were buying comic books - not to read them, but for the "collectable" value. More and more people began buying comics, some for collections, others merely because the comic scene had become the next "in" thing. This created a kind of miniature bubble economy (just like the tech stock sector, but that's another analogy …), with issues becoming highly overvalued, and a flood of quickly produced and overabundant series beginning to overwhelm the market. A few years later when these "false fans" of the comic book scene moved on to the next big thing, the industry all but collapsed. The glut of titles meant that the surviving base of comic fans could not hope to support the industry. The comic industry is only now climbing back to the levels it enjoyed before the boom.

Currently a lot of the anime fan community is comprised of bandwagon jumpers who, when they tire of the "flavor of the month" status anime is currently enjoying, will move on to the next trendy thing. Meanwhile the anime companies are releasing huge quantities of product into this expanded market. When these "false fans" get tired of anime, the resulting collapse of the target market will kill off a lot of the anime industry.