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Manga taking over USA one bookstore at a time Date: 3/13/2005 |
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By Nathan Smith The Daily News Published March 13, 2005 On a good night, the Waldenbooks store at Baybrook Mall pulls in more than 20 young people, all congregating around the same section. Mostly aged between the early teens and early 20s, they arrive to read and buy comic books featuring drawings of large-eyed schoolgirls and white-knuckled killers. The comics they?re interested in don?t detail the latest exploits of Batman or Captain America. They aren?t even from America. These customers are drawn to the store by their love of manga, a genre of Japanese comics nearly omnipresent in the land of the rising sun that have in recent decades begun their creep over to American shores. ?We started out a couple years ago with just a little section, and now we have more than eight bays of manga,? said store manager Martha McLeod. ?It just grew bigger and bigger from the demand we were getting for the books.? But it isn?t just books. McLeod also stocks manga T-shirts, posters, stuffed animals, DVDs and figurines. And the manga fanatics that gather in the store in the evenings are always on the lookout for more. ?I started out reading a couple after I saw the cartoons,? said League City manga fan Patrick Rena, 19. ?I always really liked the art and I guess I just got hooked. Now it?s turned into a collection.? +++ From Humor To Tragedy The word manga means ?whimsical pictures.? The stories feature themes ranging from humor to tragedy aimed at juvenile and adult audiences of both sexes. Paneled in a style influenced heavily by cinema, manga covers a range of literary themes more common in Hollywood than the pages of ?The Uncanny X-Men.? Though many unfamiliar with the books have a difficult time understanding their appeal, the genre?s fans say they read manga for the same reasons all literature is treasured. ?I had read Spider-Man and X-Men, but a lot of manga is more real-to-life,? said Brenda Woods, the overseer of Waldenbooks? ever-expanding manga section. ?There is a lot of modern-day stuff. There?s a lot of sci-fi, there is a lot of it with romance, but a lot of it has a lot of violence in it, lots of swordplay and gunplay. You get into the stories and the artwork is great, too. It?s just some really good stuff.? +++ From Right To Left Most manga found on American shelves are originally published as serialized stories in Japanese magazines that are later collected in book form and translated into English. In true Japanese fashion, these books are read from right to left. ?We even sell some titles that are printed in Japanese,? said McLeod. ?Then we have books you can buy that teach you how to translate it.? Nevertheless, the Japanese sense of storytelling is quite the same, which is one reason why manga has found such a ready following overseas. Popular series like ?InuYasha,? ?Love Hina? and ?Hot Gimmick? seem to literally fly off the shelves. Sometimes manga?s popularity and diversity can make it difficult for librarians to know what to acquire on a budget, as many series can run as long as dozens of volumes. The question is complicated by the fact that in addition to fantasy stories involving demons and swordplay, many manga titles include unabashed violence and pornography in their story arcs. ?Every once in a while, I?ll buy the first three volumes of a series, and by Volume 8 it?s getting a little more risqu?, so I have to re-evaluate the series and decide what to do with it,? said Jeannie Kunzinger, youth services coordinator and teen librarian with the Helen Hall Library in League City. But whatever she decides about any given series, Kunzinger says that she knows exactly what the library?s young adults want out of the manga section: More. ?The demand is there, big time,? she said. ?The library has 232 graphic novels, both manga and American, but I probably never have more than 50 or 60 on the shelf at any one time; they are in high demand.? +++ The Rise Of Japanese Comics While the majority of comics produced in the United States are typically confined to the narrow superhero genre and marketed nearly exclusively toward boys, manga has established itself as an extraordinarily broad and diverse medium in Japan. Its rise in Japan was inspired by and mirrored the growth of the American comics medium before totally outstripping its U.S. counterpart after the 1960s. By the 17th and 18th centuries, Japanese artists were already grouping text with illustrations to create visual stories for popular consumption. The rise of newspaper comic strips in America heavily influenced the same trend in Japan and serialized manga stories began appearing in Japanese magazines by World War II. During the war, manga comics were used not only for humor and comedy, but also utilized during the war effort as part of the propaganda and satire, much in the same way that American comics like ?Captain America? and ?Wonder Woman? were. After the war, many manga artists were censored by the victorious Allies and the medium badly stagnated until the 1960s. It was then that an artist named Osamu Tezuka nearly single-handedly shaped the course of modern manga by implementing a visual style heavily influenced by Disney animation and incorporating more sophisticated storytelling. With Tezuka leading the charge, manga exploded and the post-war generations, unlike their forebears, grew more and more reluctant to toss the medium aside as they grew into maturity. By the end of the 20th century, manga had grown from being considered ?kid stuff? into a serious literary medium, free from the government regulation that all but crippled the growth of the American comics industry in the 1930s. Today, subway trains in Tokyo are filled with passengers reading manga, and the form has outgrown its island nation and has expanded to foreign shores, as well. |
| Source: The Galveston County Daily News |
