MangaBlog

ANTARA News brings tidings of British kids reading these strange comics called “manga.” How quaint. Oh, wait a minute:

Data provided by Nielsen BookScan shows sales of graphic novels and manga have shot up from just over 100,000 units ($2.8 million) in 2001 to nearly 600,000 units ($10.3 million) in 2005.

There’s not a lot new here, but I’m going to take issue with this:

By publishing “Buddha,” Harper Collins is hoping to give manga more literary acclaim and change the misconception that manga is only for children. At the moment, the vast majority of readers in Britain are children and teenagers. It is hoped though that in the future these young readers will continue their habit and look for more complex stories.

I would submit that Buddha is exactly the wrong book to carry that message. It will establish that manga is not for children, true. But I’m not sure how adults in a brand-new market will react to its peculiar combination of Astro Boy-like figures with graphic violence and nudity. It’s a classic, but it’s also dated and not particularly representative of modern manga. I would rather see them bring over a modern adult comic like Death Note, Nana, or Monster. I also think that josei manga might appeal to the women who grew up reading Bunty and Diana and Jackie, which were comics for girls and teens that had stories similar to those in manga. But Buddha? No. Save that for the advanced class.

DramaQueen announces the release of a new yaoi manga, Worthless Love. No info is up yet, but I like what they have done with their list of titles: The icons are color-coded by type of book and marked with little hearts to indicate what’s shipping now. Cute!

A couple of interesting items from Manganews: Captain Tsubasa stars in a commercial for Kirin Nuda, the official drink of the Japanese soccer team, new manga titles are announced for Brazil, and a Korean TV drama bears a suspicious resemblance to the manga Eden no Hana, which itself supposedly lifted scenes from Slam Dunk.

At the yuri site Okazu, Erica Friedman gives a rave review to Moonlight Flowers. Spoilers abound, but it doesn’t look like the book is translated so that should be OK for most of us.

Why do women in manga have such prominent mammary glands? Because that’s how schools teach students to draw them. This link is moderately safe for work.

Global manga watch: An article about an exhibit of Haida art and artifacts in Vancouver includes this:

The range is immense, from a 19th-century canoe to a tiny boxwood maquette by the late Bill Reid, and from a 16th-century stone mortar for grinding native tobacco to 21st-century “Haida manga” by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas. “He’s been publishing in Korea and Japan and selling thousands and thousands of books,” Augaitis says. “He’s an absolute star,” adds Collison.

Before you say “That can’t be manga!” check out the artist’s home page: His work has been translated into Japanese and he’s shown in Tokyo, and he became interested in Japanese art when he saw some woodblock prints and recognized their stylistic affinity with traditional Haida art.

Anime on DVD got the scoop. No permalink, so here’s the list. All are due on Feb. 28, 2007.

Basilisk Vol. 4, $13.95
ES ~Eternal Sabbath~ Vol. 4, $10.95
Love Roma Vol. 5, $10.95
Mahou Sensei Negima! Vol. 13, $10.95
Suzuka Vol. 3, $12.95

Also, vol. 2 of Mahou Sensei Negima! is due out on Nov. 30, 2006.

Moving on to weightier matters, The Visual Linguist has an interesting summary of an article on how kids learn to read manga. The biggest gain in ability seems to occur between kindergarten and fourth grade, which is not too surprising. And this seems like confirming the obvious:

He also did some eye-tracking studies comparing the eye movements of an “expert” versus a “non-frequent” manga reader. The “non-expert” fixated far more on word balloons than images and had higher reading times. On the other hand, the “expert” reader made “fewer useless eye movements” that were smoother, in addition to a higher rate of skipping over more panels and balloons. However, the expert also had higher story comprehension recall than the non-expert, despite reading faster and skipping elements.

See, kids, practice makes perfect! Seriously, it seems like the better manga readers were doing a better job of integrating the text and pictures (that’s my interpretation). That’s different from just reading the text.

Several studies also indicated a higher comprehension for learning from manga than from pure textual “novelized” writing.

In other words, kids get more of the content from a comic than from a block of prose. I would say that depends on your sample—different kids learn different ways—but it’s good to cater to all different learning styles.

This, on the other hand, was a bit unexpected:

One interesting finding showed that frequent reading of manga correlated to achievement in language arts (particularly sentence comprehension) and a liking of social sciences, though “not significantly with liking for art class.”

Akadot translates a short interview with a man who dates a fujoshi, a woman who loves yaoi, and blogs about it (in Japanese) at Tonari no 801-chan. Actually, it has a whiff of the fictional about it.

It’s like watching a really cute small animal. I never get bored of it. She has no reservations about expressing her desires – it’s very charming.

That sounds a little disturbing, actually, but I don’t think he means to be quite as sexist as he sounds. He admits to being a bit of an otaku himself, and at least he’s willing to take an interest and try to understand:

It seems as though dating a fujoshi might take a little research on the world of yaoi. Understanding their hobby is definitely the first step towards closing that gap between fujoshi and the rest of us.

Naruto, vol. 10, shoots to number 38 on the USA Today top 150, up from 67 last week. Volume 10 of Negima also makes it onto the list, at number 101. Checking the handy database, I note that every volume of Negima except 1 and 4 has made it onto the Booklist for one week, with volume 5 doing the best at number 95.

Everyone is all excited about Seven Seas’ announcement of a Death Jr. manga. Not being a gamer, I was slow to catch on, but the “franchise,” as they so appealingly call it, is supporting two games and now two comics, a manga and a non-manga, so there must be something to it.

The Lincoln Heights Literary Society looks at something a little different: Project X Cup Noodle, a nonfiction manga about the development of the Nissen Cup Noodle. Manga creep, anyone?

The Japan Times has another article about Chung In Kyung, the political cartoonist who got the first-ever PhD in manga. Kyung wields a sharp pen and gets off some good points about American as well as Japanese politics.

At MangaCast, Ed gives the rundown on the DMP panels at Anime Expo 2006.

ComiPress translates an article on abrupt endings to (Japanese) Shonen Jump series. At Irresponsible Pictures, Pata does a bit of analysis:

In a way, you can see how SJ really is the Big Two (and then some) of manga, getting into these indefinitely long-running adventure storylines and then having to pull endings out of their asses when the series suddenly gets cancelled.

This site made me laugh: Kawaii Not, webcomics and icons that send up those overly cute Japanese cartoon characters. My younger daughter is completely addicted to the San-X menagerie of cuties—Tarepanda, Nyanko Kitty, and my favorite, Kogepan. The San-X characters are so weird they are almost self-parodies to begin with; Kawaii Not just makes it explicit. (Not entirely safe for work, at least, not at second glance.)