Here is a nice local-personality feature about a 15-year-old manga artist. I have a soft spot for this type of story because I wrote so many of them myself when I was a reporter. And here is my favorite quote, which I think summarizes the hole in the market that manga has come to fill:
“Manga characters are bumbling, clumsy, normal teenagers with typical teenage problems, who just happen to get involved in exciting adventures,” Alex said.
Exactly. Childhood, after all, can be pretty boring, what with all that school, chores, and your mother turning off the TV and sending you outside to “get some fresh air.” I discovered daydreaming in third grade (I remember it distinctly because my teacher regarded it as some sort of problem). From then on, I spiced up my life by imagining that the piece of paper blowing down the road was actually an important clue to a murder, or that my teacher was an alien (her antennae cunningly concealed beneath her bubble haircut), or that I had suddenly and inexplicably developed the ability to fly. There were no American comics directed at girls like me, but I was fortunate to have access to British comics, which did a great job of plucking schoolgirls out of context and dropping them, still clad in blazers with the school crest, into networks of secret tunnels or international tennis contests.
The U.S. has plenty of genre fiction along those lines, from the Babysitter’s Club to WITCH (which walks the border between comic and book and between fantasy and reality), but manga were the first comics to go there. How appropriate that some of that fiction, like Nancy Drew, is being converted into manga, or at least something that looks a lot like it.
Superhero and fantasy comics left me cold. They weren’t taking place in my world, and I always felt like I was missing a lot of backstory. But a story about an ordinary eighth-grader who suddenly is swept from her boring classroom into a world of spies, crooks, or space aliens—that’s something I can relate to. Even now.
