Girls just want to have manga

Posted on July 6, 2005 by Brigid Alverson

Now here is some synergy: USA Today and other sources report that manga has come to CosmoGIRL, in the form of a two-page strip that will run in the monthly magazine. The writer is Svetlana Chmakova, author of the online manga Chasing Rainbows and Night Silver. Judging from her online work, Chmakova seems to get the manga genre, so hopefully this will be more than just an American strip redrawn with chibbi and big eyes.
Meanwhile, the Papercutz manga of Nancy Drew is on the racks. I haven’t found a copy yet, but Darren Schroeder reviews it on the Silver Bullet Comic Books site and finds more good things to say about the art than the writing.
With Dark Horse publishing manga versions of Harlequin romances, manga is definitely infiltrating the girl world. While Nancy Drew does lend herself to simplistic plots, I can see the Harlequin romances as being a good fit with the manga mindset. And if they break the usual romance formula a bit and add some complexity, well, so much the better.

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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