More evidence of manga creep?

Posted on June 11, 2006 by Brigid Alverson

We are nothing if not eclectic here at MangaBlog. The LeRoy (New York) Pennysaver reports that Elizabeth Kovach, a student at Rochester Institute of Technology, received a Ralph P. Kepner Memorial Scholarship “Excellence” Award from the Rochester Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication for her booklet, “The Impact of Manga on the United States Print Industry.”

I found that to be a very interesting subject. What on earth would the impact of manga be? Do you have to use special inks to get all those patterned backgrounds just right? Does the right-to-left thing mean you have to set up the presses differently? As a former book editor, I tend to notice how books are printed, and I see a huge amount of variation among manga, in the type and quality of paper, inks, and covers. It’s intriguing to me that manga are important enough to have affected the U.S. printing industry at all.

Full disclosure: I got my Master of Fine Arts degree from RIT, in printmaking, which is a million miles away from printing. But it is one of the few places where you can actually study commercial printing, and I always thought that was kind of neat.

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 More evidence of manga creep?

  1. Jack says:
    June 12, 2006 at 7:58 am

    I’m interested too… Did they mean “Publishing” or “Printing”? I am in graphic design and I am not aware of anything special that occurs.

    Page Flip? Nope, software takes care of pagination.

    Inks? Covers are 4 color but all the insides are BW… which means simple registration. *

    Paper? Buying any type of paper from a paper vendor is a non-factor to the printer.

    Size? The smaller Tankuban size saves money probably compared to American graphic novels. (…as you can make get more 4 color covers from the same sheet. Ditto for the BW insides.)*

    The only thing that I can see on the surface level is that it is a influx of business and money to the printers. Perhaps saving the printers who lost business to the internet?

    * For those of you who didn’t know — 4 color jobs, (basically color) makes any job significantly more costly/difficult/time consuming. So having a color cover and BW insides is a pretty simple job IMO. Printing a manga title is akin to printing a paperback.

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