MangaBlog

There seem to be a lot of librarians in the comics blogosphere, but even those of us who are only library users may find something interesting in this journal article on cataloging manga and anime. My family uses inter-library loan a lot, and my chief complaint is that my library system lists every volume separately, without a volume number. So when I type in “Rurouni Kenshin,” I get a list of 20 titles, and I have to click on each one to check the volume number until I find the one I want.
This article suggests a sensible alternative, which is to classify all the volumes in a series under a single heading.

Here’s Comics.212.net’s Chris Butcher on the popularity of shoujo manga:

“The romantic genre is known as Shoujo manga, and over the past five or 10 years, you’ve really seen it blossom. Girls have flocked to it.

“We’re even starting to see the general aging of the demographic, with mothers coming in and buying it [with] their daughters.”

It’s true; I’m one of them. However, as pre-teen girls are usually mortified by the mere presence of their mothers, it goes something like this: I drive them to the bookstore, we split up and find our manga separately, and we reunite at the coffee shop to compare notes. Once we’re home, though, everyone reads everyone else’s books.

And don’t leave out the fathers. My husband regularly pillages my unread-manga stack and has started getting cranky if there isn’t something new. Last weekend he made his way through Dramacon, The Dreaming, Roadsong, and all four of the Go!Comi offerings, and the other night he read Alichino (chief complaint: “It’s hard to tell the characters apart”). As he reads a lot of mysteries and science fiction, and even the occasional volume of chick lit, manga aren’t too much of a stretch. But I don’t think he’d go out and buy it for himself; fortunately he has three females in the house to do that for him.

So, I opened up the Boston Globe this morning and there was Peach Fuzz, right on the funny pages.

And it was tiny. Teeny tiny. The Globe runs their comics small, but they allotted a decent amount of space to Peach Fuzz. The problem is that much of it is taken up with a flowery border and “Amanda’s Journal,” a narrative addition that runs down one side.

Naturally, I picked up the book for a side-by-side comparison. I immediately saw why “Amanda’s Journal” was necessary—the two-page spread in the comic strip consists of pages 1 and 6 of the book, with no transitions. So without the “journal,” the story makes no sense.

Perhaps anticipating that the strip would be shrunk down, the creators redid the lettering, which is now much larger. I know this makes the strip more readable, but it also makes the tiny panels look really, really crowded.

(Off topic, but interesting, is this livejournal discussion of the differences between Japanese and OEL manga, which includes commentary on lettering size. I hadn’t paid much attention to it before, but now I’m more aware.)

Overall, I don’t think the Sunday strip does justice to manga and may even turn some people off because of these deficiencies. The format simply doesn’t lend itself to the design of manga. On the other hand, it may inspire a few people to check out the real thing.

I know the manga-to-funnies transition is old news, but for those of us with eggnog-induced amnesia, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, has a nice background story.

There must be a serious Rumiko Takahashi fan on the editorial board of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, because that paper is running a series of six articles about Takahashi’s work. The fourth, which runs today, is about three stand-alone works that I had never heard of, although they are available in translation here.

I just saw this series today for the first time, but the previous stories are still available on the web. Here are the links:

October: Urusei Yatsura

November: Mermaid Saga

December: Maison Ikkoku

The writers take their manga seriously, and the articles are well written, although I think it’s remarkable that the paper will devote so much space to such a narrow subject. The purpose of the series, I gather, is to demonstrate to the world that Takahashi’s work goes way beyond Inu-Yasha. Not a problem in my house, where Ranma 1/2 ruled for about six months last year. However, the articles have made me curious, and I’ll be on the lookout for some of these lesser-known volumes.

Perhaps you’re one of the millions of people who don’t read CosmoGirl!, but you’re curious about the manga feature that Dramacon artist Svetlana Chmakova draws for it each month. Well, here it is. The page is very pink, and there are prom ads on the sidebar, but hey, it’s free. (Tokyopop’s Manga Online pointed me there.)

If that leaves you wanting more, check out Chmakova’s web page, which is very minimalist but has links to her web comics and her livejournal.

By sheer coincidence, I finally got around to reading Dramacon today, and I liked it a lot. Good art, very believable characters, and a wicked sense of humor. So now I have something to keep me occupied until the next volume comes out.

In her new column on Buzzscope, Sabrina artist Tania Del Rio puts in the last word on the are-manga-comics controversy. I agree with everything she says. Now let’s all go on to something interesting. (Thanks to David at Love Manga for pointing me in that direction.)