MangaBlog

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.

… at least on TV. According to the previews, in the new NBC show “The Book of Daniel,” one of the characters, a teenage girl, sells marijuana to finance her manga.

Because otherwise a teenage girl would never have the stuff around…

Actually, I’m intrigued that manga is this mainstream. I may have to actually watch the show to see whether they can mention manga without a lengthy explanation for the audience.

Although, since the LA Times article I linked calls it “manga animation,” I suspect they’ve already got it wrong. It’s CARTOONS that lead the kiddies astray, not COMIC BOOKS.

Whew!

This is my hundredth post, which marks a blogging milestone of sorts. I had some nice plans for this post, back in November, but as nobody seems to have noticed, I haven’t posted since then. Since this is a comics blog, I’ll spare you any details other than to note that having a parent with Alzheimer’s is no fun, and that unless you spent half the Christmas season standing around in the hospital and the other half shopping for a nursing home, my holiday was worse than yours.

But now things have settled down and I have time to blog again. In the next few weeks I’m hoping to get back to regular posting and add more substantive content. I have a couple of things up my sleeve, and I’m counting on the blogosphere to provide a few surprises.

In the meantime, my New Year’s resolution is to get myself a copy of The Dreaming and find a quiet place to curl up and read it. I’m ready for a little escapism.

Here’s a troubling new wrinkle: xenophobic manga. “Hating the Korean Wave” presents South Koreans as a bunch of losers and cheaters; it has sold 360,000 copies so far, and the creator is working on a sequel. “An Introduction to China” depicts the Chinese as obsessed with prostitution and has sold 180,000 copies.

The popularity of these books seems to have come as a surprise, even to the publishers:

“We weren’t expecting there’d be so many,” said Susumu Yamanaka, another editor at Shinyusha. “But when the lid was actually taken off, we found a tremendous number of people feeling this way.”

It seems to be an unfortunate part of human nature that people like to take a whack at anyone “different,” especially foreigners. During World War II, U.S. propaganda artists gave the Japanese pretty much the same treatment these manga are handing out to their neighbors. Ultimately, the amount of influence these books have will depend in large part on whether the attitudes they espouse are socially acceptable. The article sounds a pessimistic note on this point, noting that nationalists who deny Japanese atrocities of the past have become more prominent of late.

It doesn’t have to be this way. As I noted last July, the Japan Forum on International Relations is pushing the idea of using the popularity of manga and anime as a way to improve the image of the Japanese in neighboring countries. Indeed, “Hating the Korean Wave” is push-back against the recent popularity of Korean pop culture in Japan.

On a more superficial note, the article has an interesting comment on the look of manga characters.

But the comic book, perhaps inadvertently, also betrays Japan’s conflicted identity, its longstanding feelings of superiority toward Asia and of inferiority toward the West. The Japanese characters in the book are drawn with big eyes, blond hair and Caucasian features; the Koreans are drawn with black hair, narrow eyes and very Asian features.

That peculiar aesthetic, so entrenched in pop culture that most Japanese nowadays are unaware of it, has its roots in the Meiji Restoration of the late 19th century, when Japanese leaders decided the best way to stop Western imperialists from reaching here was to emulate them.

As those sentiments took root, the Japanese began acquiring Caucasian features in popular drawing.

For a different viewpoint on this issue, see Matt Thorn’s essay, The Face of the Other.

(I’m linking to the International Herald Tribune version to avoid the tiresome New York Times registration process, but the NYT story had some art that made the point crystal clear.)

I’ve mentioned the shoujo manga show at Chico State a couple of times, and it seems to be generating some interesting articles. Art professor Masami Toku, who is definitely enjoying her 15 minutes of fame, provides some interesting historical perspective for the Chico News and Review. Fun manga fact: the word “manga” was coined by the Japanese printmaker Hokkusai. And here’s Toku’s description of how manga evolved, and the influence of circumstances on style:

After the war, there were no toys, nothing. No entertainment for kids. After World War II, we were so decimated. No reading, no movies. Modern manga was developed to entertain the kids.

Most pages [in manga books] were black-and-white, on cheap paper. Maybe only the cover and the first two pages were in color. Artists had to develop a style with limitations. The “black-out” of hair signified Asian people; the “white-out” hair meant Western people. The “huge eye” of modern manga came about because they had no color [to use] and the artists had to enlarge the eye to depict beauty. Kids learned to read these visual images.

It’s often interesting to see how the limitations of a medium shape its content. In this case, the style has lingered even though the technology has improved.

Well, comfortable maybe, if this article from INQ7 is to be believed. The story is about the opportunities created by businesses that outsource work to the Philippines. It seems that one group of potential employees is doing particularly well: People who speak a foreign language other than English. Such as, say, Japanese.

Nakamura is optimistic that Philippine outsource service providers would eventually grow enough to accommodate more Japanese clients, not just because of the presence of many Japanese in the Philippines but because of many Filipinos’ obsession with Japanese animé culture.

“It’s a fact that many young Filipinos are learning Japanese because they want to understand Japanese animé and read manga (Japanese comic books). These people could start turning their language obsession into something financially productive,” Nakamura said.

Yeah, and then maybe they could also pick their laundry up off the floor and call their mother once in a while.