This sounds like a high-concept contemporary U.S. Hollywood mainstream rom-com. I’ll start writing the screenplay now!

As Johanna Draper Carlson pointed out a few weeks ago, as a critic, because she so often reviews comics Not Meant for Her, one of the first things she asks herself is, “who is this comic meant for?” And I found myself nodding in agreement: I do the same thing.

I say this to contextualize: sometimes, it’s just a relief to read comics meant for me, which is much more likely to happen in manga than in U.S. comics, mainstream or otherwise. This doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy things that aren’t, or see the merit in things that aren’t, but sometimes it’s just relaxing (and I say this as someone who tends to hate straight-up soaps or romance; I can much more easily watch J-horror or ’70s exploitation films than contemporary U.S. Hollywood mainstream “romantic comedies,” which I find highly offensive. For example, “Prison Pit,” on the other hand, I finally had to stop talking about in my personal time because my SO didn’t want to hear about it anymore).

What this all boils down to, as a critic, I try to be aware of what pushes my buttons, and why, and if it has objective qualities beyond that (for example, I love “Tramps Like Us,” because it pushes exactly the right buttons for me; though, I would have a hard time defending it objectively. However, something like Moyocco Anno’s “Hataraki Man” also pushes my buttons, but I could wax on its objective qualities, such as its sharp art and incisive, savage observations, all day).

Don’t even get me started on the Hernandez Bros (whose work I love with the passion of a thousand fiery suns) and Austen (ditto, and I’m always kind of weirded out when people emphasize the romance in her stories, because they’re so often bald-facedly making fun of Romantic conventions).

[And I wouldn't know about Twilight since I've only watched the movies. That was enough for me.]

See, I’m happy enough to use the same standards. I just don’t feel that literary fiction, in its various guises, comes out better. Twilight is not ideal, but it’s better than Kavalier and Clay.

“There are just as many useless shojo manga out there as there are superhero comics.”

I think this sort of “pox on both their houses” thinking can be a little too easy. Super-hero comics right now are particularly awful — I mean, they’re really, really bad. The genre is at a terrible place, coaxing crappy work from even some of its most skilled creators. From what i can tell, shojo is much better off. (Though you may have been speaking historically, I suppose, in which case the calculus would be more complicated.)

I’m not asking for the same standards to be leveled at both lit and girls comics. There are however specific standards by which we can judge shojo or more romantically inclined material. Some of these standards may seem somewhat subjective since they deal more with personal connections to the work – these are after all stories which bring emotions to the fore.

But there are objective criteria which can be applied to shojo as well: whether the situations depicted conform to some form of reality, their novelty and intellectual content, the quality of the dialogue, drawings and pacing etc. As with any genre, one is likely to get increasingly fussy the more one reads and absorbs, and I’m pretty particular when it comes to the romance genre in manga/anime. There are just as many useless shojo manga out there as there are superhero comics. Suffice to say a romantic manga/drama won’t make it to the top of my reading/viewing pile unless it moves me deeply (even to the level of tears) and that depends a lot on all the factors above.

[And, like Matthias, I don’t find Ware or the Hernandez Bros to be completely emotionally stunted. There are some pretty emotional moments in Ghost of Hoppers for example. It should be clear, however, that the emotions elicited by their works vary somewhat from those produced by shojo or more romantic manga. This does not make these emotions any less worthwhile.]

Eric: I agree wholeheartedly with almost everything you say there, and I also have that lingering interest in superheroes that I probably wouldn’t have had, had I not read them when I was younger.

Shaenon’s point is also a good one, and I agree to an extent — it is a both exhilarating and fascinating aspect of much manga. On the other hand, I don’t think Western comics necessarily *lack* emotion as much as they treat it differently, due both to cultural and gender factors, I guess. Schulz, Kirby and Crumb, to mention but some of the greatest, are strong on it. And I realise I’m in the minority here, but I find rich emotional experience in the work of Clowes the Hernandez Brothers, or even Ware.