MangaBlog

Manga maniacs practice art of glint is yet another news story, this one from Eugene, Oregon, about why the kids are so crazy about this manga stuff. I’m linking to it because it includes a point of view that I see pretty often in manga discussions:

“The animes you see from Japan, they have real plot lines and they have characters that have depth,” she said. “The stories you get from Japan are very, very involved. The characters have a lot of depth and they tend to cover topics you don’t tend to find in general Western media.”

I think that’s exactly right. Serious comic critics and bloggers often object to the point of view that comics encourage “reluctant readers” to read. I think that happens sometimes, but my two avid readers read manga for the same reason they read Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s “The Girls Against the Boys” books, and the same reason I devoured Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden: it’s a good story. Comics aren’t what you read instead of books. They are books.

I’m reading as fast as I can, but I can’t cover every manga that’s out there, and anyway, it’s good to see different takes on a book. Here are a couple of other sites worth taking a look at.
Comics4LibrariesWiki: Manga and Manhwa collects reviews and publisher’s websites for a variety of manga for kids and adults.
All Ages is a chatty blog with news and commentary on kids comics, manga and otherwise. Highly recommended!
Laura “Tegan” Gjovaag is a comic fan who has just started reading manga, based on suggestions from readers of her blog, Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog. She’s posting rapid reviews of some of the same manga that are in my “to-read” pile.
I’ve already mentioned The Librarian’s Guide to Anime and Manga, which has a great primer on anime and manga and a list of recommended titles that hasn’t turned up a dud yet.

Here is an event for those who are really serious about learning Japanese from manga—and are going to be in San Francisco in May. It’s a talk by the author of a book called Japanese the Manga Way.
There are several books on the market on how to learn Japanese using manga. I think it’s a good idea. When I first moved to a French-speaking area of Switzerland, over a decade ago, I found that my college French wasn’t up to the challenge of actually living in the language. I started reading a local paper that had lots of lurid crimes and juicy scandals, and I found it was a great textbook, for two reasons: 1. It was written in the local vernacular, not academic French, and 2. When you’re in the middle of a story about a murderous customs agent or the latest meusli scandal (yes they had them!), and you find a word you don’t know, you’re likely to go look it up right away. Reading a foreign language is hard enough; reading something boring in a foreign language is excruciating. So I like the idea of using something inherently interesting as a learning tool.
That shouldn’t be a great revelation, really. Maybe my French would be better if we had been reading Asterix in college instead of the little canned articles in our textbooks.

One obvious way to convert the manga habit into Something Worthwhile is to encourage your kids to learn a bit of Japanese.
Or maybe not. Japanese is not an easy language to learn; for starters, it has three different alphabets.
Helping to demystify this is Jimi’s Book of Japanese, which is actually two books, one on Katakana and one on Hiragana. Katakana is a phonetic script used for sound effects and for foreign-derived words like intanetto (internet) and risaikuru (recycle). Hiragana is another phonetic alphabet used for Japanese words. The Jimi books present both using kid-friendly examples from the worlds of fashion, fast food, and TV. They also discuss some oddities of Japanese culture such as schoolgirls in loose socks, salarymen, and robot pets.
I picked up these two books at a Japanese bookstore outside of Chicago, and at the same time we bought some girls’ magazines. The magazines were utterly impenetrable, but with the help of the Jimi books we were able to pick out a few words from one of the picture stories. I also translated everyone’s names into katakana. The kids loved it and couldn’t get enough. I’m not kidding myself that this will make my kids fluent in Japanese, but at least it’s a little less mysterious to all of us.

My husband and I have really been enjoying “Iron Wok Jan,” which manages to have plenty of laughs for kids and adults. I am hooked on “The Kindaichi Case Files,” which isn’t really a kid’s series (too gruesome) but is great reading for teens and up. My kids are running through the “Ranma 1/2” series, but I haven’t been able to read any because they are hogging the books. Thanks to The Librarian’s Guide to Anime and Manga for turning us on to all these series.
“Oh My Goddess!” is one of the first manga titles my kids read, and they loved it. I have finally gotten around to reading the first volume—the story is good, although the art is weak in spots. I’ll be posting my review later today.
I’ve been focusing on getting a variety of titles up, so parents can have a good sampler. That means I’ve done volume 1 of a lot of series but haven’t gone farther. Now I’m going to try to add depth by reviewing subsequent volumes. I’ll be starting with “Fruits Basket,” which is much beloved in my house. Volume 8 is coming out in a few weeks, so this seems like a good time to catch up on the whole series.

California kids take it to the next level in this exhibit. I’m very impressed by the sophistication of the teachers, who had each class study a different artist. All the artists were influenced by comics and cartoons, which makes for a rich mix: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring, and Takashi Murakami, a comic artist. Then the kids created their own versions of the work. Imagine your first-grader doing a Warhol-type portrait of SpongeBob Squarepants!
A lot of kids who read comics like to do their own drawings, starting by copying and tracing and hopefully going on to their own creations. What I like about this project is that the teachers took that natural tendency and encouraged kids to push it a little farther.