Manga maniacs practice art of glint is yet another news story, this one from Eugene, Oregon, about why the kids are so crazy about this manga stuff. I’m linking to it because it includes a point of view that I see pretty often in manga discussions:
“The animes you see from Japan, they have real plot lines and they have characters that have depth,” she said. “The stories you get from Japan are very, very involved. The characters have a lot of depth and they tend to cover topics you don’t tend to find in general Western media.”
I think that’s exactly right. Serious comic critics and bloggers often object to the point of view that comics encourage “reluctant readers” to read. I think that happens sometimes, but my two avid readers read manga for the same reason they read Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s “The Girls Against the Boys” books, and the same reason I devoured Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden: it’s a good story. Comics aren’t what you read instead of books. They are books.
It’s true. I used to feel bad that I hadn’t read ‘prose’ novels for a while, my life being hectic as well as finances and energy put into devoutly reading my latest series.
As an anime/manga fan, I think, often, peers and society make us feel bad that we aren’t reading ‘what’s in’.
But I don’t feel bad anymore. The newsstand magazines I browse while waiting in the grocery check-out line are filled with inane stuff: what celebrity weighs what compared to her rival’s weight loss last month, which politician has been arrested for drugs and why he felt that that particular drug was more suitable than crack…
I like manga because I often identify with the characters. How often do I read a female character’s mind and say ‘was the manga-ka reading my own mind when she/he wrote this?’.
It’s few and far between nowadays when I can relate to a character in a book (Books were better years ago. I don’t know what’s going on with current books).
Yet, with manga, this isn’t a problem. The characters are so well written that I can even understand the villains (though that doesn’t stop me from hating them!).