Four Shojo Stories back in print

Posted on March 28, 2005 by Brigid Alverson

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin reviews “Four Shojo Stories” by Viz. This is actually an older comic that has been out of print for a while; one of the stories goes back to 1975. Still, it gets good word-of-blog. Bonus points: It was translated into English by anthropologist/manga maven Matt Thorn.

About Brigid Alverson

Brigid Alverson has been reading comics since she was 4. After earning an MFA in printmaking, she headed to New York to become a famous artist but ended up working with words instead of pictures, first as a book editor and later as a newspaper reporter. She started MangaBlog to keep track of her daughters’ reading habits and now covers manga, comics and graphic novels as a freelancer for School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly Comics Week, Comic Book Resources, the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, and Robot 6. She also edits the Good Comics for Kids blog at School Library Journal. Now settled in the outskirts of Boston, Brigid is married to a physicist and has two daughters.
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One Response to Four Shojo Stories back in print

  1. Matt Thorn says:
    March 5, 2007 at 10:43 am

    The title of this entry made me do a double-take. Yeah, I saw that retro-review in The Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

    I’m afraid it’ll be a cold day in Hell when Four Shojo Stories is back in print. Now that more than a decade has passed and everyone I knew at Viz has moved on, I suppose there’s no harm in revealing the truth behind the short shelf-life of _Four Shojo Stories_. Anthology paperbacks are all but unheard of in Japan (which is ironic, since almost all the manga magazines are anthologies), and the commonly accepted rationale boils down to “artist ego.” Viz had permission to do all four stories, separately, as comic books, but they never got or asked for permission to put them together in a paperback. When they asked me to write the intro, I asked, in surprise, “They gave you permission to collect these stories?” The editor (now retired) said, “If we ask them, they’ll say no, but if we go ahead and do it, they may complain, but what can they do about it? Pull the book off the shelves?” Well, that’s exactly what they (Shogakukan) did. When the editor in Tokyo responsible for these three artists (and who was later to become my colleague at Seika University!) found out about the book, he popped a gasket. The two top guys at Viz had to go to Tokyo and apologize. (At least they were spared harakiri. (^_^) ) As far as I know, there are a few thousand copies of Four Shojo Stories locked away in a warehouse somewhere in San Francisco. Meanwhile, if you want to get your hands on one of the few that made it into readers’ hands, you can buy a used copy through Bookfinder.com for a mere $60-$155. (^o^) Or you can take the cheaper route and download a scanned torrent at…um, never mind.

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