MangaBlog

The conversation on the Anime News Network Forums about the recent layoffs at Tokyopop veered briefly into another topic: the question of OEL (original English language) manga versus licensed manga from Japan.

Two commenters summed up the two sides of this debate admirably. Here is applepro:

we don’t buy manga just for the stories. we love authentic manga because it has it’s own unique charm. the hype from japan, the fan subs, the joy of seeing it licenced… it all comes together to what we currently witness at out local bookstore. an entire shelf packed with just manga.

To which wisdom_of_trees responds

OEL is just another format of Manga. It’s good art and interesting stories that sell me; not authenticity.

applepro’s riposte:

i think that’s cool. to me OEL is more closer to american comics than it is to authentic japanese manga. so you can check out a lot of interesting stories out there because you’re not stuck on the “authenticity” factor.

i am though,…

It’s nice to see the two sides laid out without rancor. I’ve been reading a lot of OEL manga lately, and it’s all been pretty good, but aside from the format of the book, it doesn’t seem like Japanese manga. Others more knowledgeable than me have discussed why that is. My reaction is, eh, it’s a good comic so why try to make it something that it’s not.

The point I want to bring to this discussion, though, is that OEL is extending a new market that was opened up by Japanese manga: people like me. I buy my books in bookstores, not comics shops, and I don’t buy floppies because they don’t seem like a particularly good value for the money. Before the advent of manga, I vaguely knew there were other graphic novels out there but couldn’t be bothered to seek them out. They weren’t easy to find in bookstores, and they weren’t all that easy to read. When I did pick one up, I felt like I was missing out on something.

But now that I’ve been trained, by Tokyopop and Viz, to buy $10 black-and-white trade paperback comics, it’s not much of a stretch to buy the same format book by an author who is not Japanese. OEL manga seem easier to read than other GNs. The standardization of format and the straightforward style make them feel like old friends. Even better, my girls now have comics for them. Not superheroes (too boyish!), not Archie (too babyish!), but drama and romance and the stuff they like to read about, in graphic novel form.

The impact of format can’t be understimated. We’re talking about lesiure reading here, after all, and it’s relaxing to read something familiar. If I liked one Nancy Drew book, or Harlequin romance, I’ll be more inclined to pick up another one. Before manga came along, graphic novels weren’t standardized in any way, and many of them are very hard for the inexperienced reader to follow.

This is not to say that I want all graphic novels reduced to cookie-cutter uniformity, just that the more accessible books are more likely to draw new people into the market. Recently I’ve been reading Persepolis and Capote in Kansas, and they are both very different from OEL manga. But I probably wouldn’t have picked them up if Queenie and Rivkah—and a slew of Japanese manga-kas—hadn’t lured me in first.

Now that things have loosened up a bit in the rest of my life, I’ve had time to do more reading and writing. My review of Cantarella is up at Manga Life. That is my favorite of the Go!Comi titles so far, but Crossroad is the clear runner-up, with lots of rich, soapy goodness. If you like relationships with complications, this one’s for you.

I also went through an OEL frenzy, keeping up with what looks like the cream of the Tokyopop crop: Dramacon, The Dreaming, and Roadsong. (Sorry, Rivkah, I read Steady Beat the day it came out. No procrastination there.) It’s all good, but I have a special fondness for Dramacon, because it really is funny and the heroine is so engaging. Like all good manga, it left me wanting more.

Roadsong is OK, entertaining without troubling the mind with plausibility or existential concepts. It’s sort of a manga version of a road picture: Two musicians grudgingly collaborate on a song for the wedding of two of their family members—then have to take it on the lam when a bomb kills most of the wedding party and they start looking like suspects. (Here is a Newsarama interview with artist Joanna Estep for those who want to know more.) But I didn’t get so involved with the characters that I’d slap down ten bucks for volume 2.

Of the three, though, The Dreaming, really grabbed me. It’s scary and beautifully drawn, and artist and writer Queenie Chan reveals just enough of her secrets to keep me interested. It also took me back to my childhood, as the art is eerily reminiscent of my beloved English girls’ comic books (which made something of a specialty of ghost stories). I’m willing to send a case of No-Doz to Queenie if she will only stop sleeping and finish the next volume.

Earlier this month we started hearing some details of Richard Branson and Deepak Chopra’s new venture into comics in India. Actually, India already has a homegrown comics industry, but it looks like Branson and Chopra will be extending the concept quite a bit.

Virgin Comics is already in development on three lines of comics: Maverick, based on the work of songwriters; Director’s Cut, working with film directors (John Woo has signed on); and Shakti, which will focus on Indian content.

I have to admit the first two sound original and intriguing. The third seems to include a retelling of the Hindu epic Ramayana in comic-book form, a project that I’m sure has been done before. I had Indian gods-and-goddesses comics when I was a kid. And this brought on a spasm of eye-rolling:

Shakti means “power” in Hindi, and titles in the line include “Devi,” which means “goddess.” [Gotham] Chopra describes the character as “Asia’s first superwoman.”

“She wears the different faces of the goddess,” he said. “On one hand she plays the typical submissive Asian housewife, on the other hand she’s Angelina Jolie.”

Way to challenge the stereotypes, guys. Anyway, I’ve got bad news for Mr. Chopra. She was there first.

UPDATE: Paul O’Brien provides a much more informed and detailed critique of the whole enterprise at The Ninth Art.

For those of us who don’t read Japanese, the Mainichi Daily News Wai Wai column is a great way to sample the trashier aspects of the Land of the Rising Sun, as they present translations of articles from popular magazines. This article, drawn from the women’s magazine Josei Jishin, focuses on female otaku, who now call themselves otome (“maidens”) and have staked out their own small section of Tokyo, an alley full of comics shops that specialize in shonen-ai (boys love). (Hence the haltingly alliterative headline “Geek girls read into new gender roles with gay guys’ manga.”)

An interesting aspect of this tale is the popularity of doujinshi, fan-drawn manga that often use characters from established manga.

“I’d say there’s less of the visual appeal of manga targeting younger readers, but a feature of the business is the large number of women who find the relationships between the characters enjoyable,” Otome Road’s Okuma tells Josei Jishin.
“Many of the manga are sort of like sidebar stories for the real characters they’re copying. Many of the characters build up a real devoted following, and the most popular characters are nearly always really passive types.”

I find that last comment, about the most popular characters being passive, intriguing. I haven’t read any doujinshi, but it does lead me to wonder whether Japanese women are getting fed up with wimpy characters and are taking matters into their own hands. It seems like Otome Road would be fertile ground for slash fiction as well.

(On a side note, perhaps I was too quick to describe Josei Jishin as “trashy,” as one website describes it as “Weekly magazine for women who are in pursuit of peacefulness and truthfulness.” As opposed to U.S. women’s magazines, which are all about finding just the right shade of eyeshadow (sigh). Apparently in Japan, the search for tranquility doesn’t preclude neon cover art and celebrity news.)

David at Love Manga brings us the latest news flash: Seven Seas will be bringing out a Speed Racer comic. It’s going to be a comic book (32 pages, printed in color), not a manga, which is sort of an interesting departure for them. Maybe when they publish a few issues they’ll collect them into a tankoubon, thus completing the cycle.

David doesn’t remember the cartoon, but I do—as I write this, the theme song is blaring in my head, and I have a sudden craving for chocolate milk and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Just as well I don’t have them, as I would have snorted the milk out of my nostrils when I got to this part of the press release, uttered by Seven Seas president Jason DeAngelis with an apparently straight face:

“There are lots more stories left to tell in the Speed Racer mythos; stories that today’s readers will find both fresh and exciting while staying true to the classic series that has kept fans spellbound since the very first day the Mach 5 roared onto their TV screens.”

The Speed Racer mythos? I didn’t realize endless car chases added up to a mythos. As for “fresh and exciting,” they could have run the same episode every day and nobody would have noticed. Admittedly, I never made a study of the Speed Racer oeuvre, but all I remember is roaring engines and puffs of smoke.

I’m mocking the show, though, not Seven Seas. Everything I’ve seen of theirs, I’ve liked. If anyone can make Speed Racer readable, it’s them.

In his latest Flipped column, David Welsh suggest some New Year’s resolutions for the manga industry. Most of them boil down to more variety—more classics, more anthologies, more adult manga. I agree. Having read many, many books about the angst of middle-schoolers, I’m ready for a bit of variety. Jog’s review of an anthology of business manga piqued my interest, as did the re-release last year of Four Shoujo Stories (translated by manga prof Matt Thorn). I’d especially like to see some of the more specialized titles, like business or fishing manga. And I’d really like to see them at my local bookstores, which seem to carry a lot of the standard-format Tokyopop and Viz offerings and very little of anything else.