Tag Archives: manga

Twilight & the Plight of the Female Fan

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When Noah first asked me if I’d like to write a guest post for The Hooded Utilitarian, he mentioned that he’d be especially interested in something about Twilight. I admit I originally balked at the idea. Though I’ve vocally defended the series’ fans, I haven’t read the novels, and my only significant reaction to the first volume of Yen Press’ graphic novel adaptation was that it was more readable than I expected.

That last statement should not be taken as a condemnation of Twilight by any means. The truth is, I’m simply not its audience. I like a good romance as much as the next middle-aged married lady, but even those who dismiss the genre would be foolish to assume that all romances are created equal. Simply put, I’m too old for Twilight. While my teenaged self might not have fully comprehended Stephanie Meyer’s bloodlust = regular ol’ lust metaphor (not that it’s especially subtle), she would have felt it in a profound way. It would have resonated with her on a deeply personal level. I was pretty innocent as a teen, and the concept of even kissing a boy was both enticing and mind-blowingly terrifying, much like Bella’s first kiss with her sparkly, bloodthirsty suitor, deep in the secluded woods.

Now in my forties, I know all too well that sex is the least terrifying element of romance. Love’s true horrors prey on the heart and mind, and there’s nothing you can buy at Walgreens to help protect them. Looking in at Twilight from the reality of weary adulthood, it’s difficult to muster patience for Edward’s martyred bad-boy act (just as it’s difficult to stomach Bella’s fascination with it) but I can recognize it as something that, if it was written for me at all, was written for the me of a very different time and place.

A second read-through of the graphic novel has only cemented my original opinion of it, but even so, I feel a kind of kinship to the series’ young fans. Having spent my entire life obsessed with some kind of fiction or another–books, television, musicals, manga–I can appreciate their need to experience the series over and over again, to talk about it with friends, and to proselytize everyone they meet. Sure, it’s obnoxious, but how many long-time genre fans can honestly claim that’s never been them? I know I can’t.

Earlier this year, just before the first volume of the Twilight graphic novel was released, I made a post in my blog about the manga and anime fandom’s treatment of Twilight fans. In that post, I cited a few overtly misogynistic comments made by male fans, and proposed a theory that the real “problem” with Twilight fans in the eyes of fandom is that they are overwhelmingly girls. That’s a pretty easy accusation to make against nearly any genre fandom. We’ve all heard stories of women who’ve been ogled, condescended to, or otherwise mistreated in comic book shops, at conventions, in online forums and so on, and most of us have experienced this at some point or another ourselves.

What I think I missed back when I wrote that post, however, is something far sadder than a bunch of paranoid fanboys making an angry fuss on the internet. What’s more disturbing to me now–something I began to see bubbling up in comments and responses to that post–is a trend of women in manga and comics fandoms deliberately distancing themselves from other women (or from works created by/for women in the medium, teen romances or otherwise) as an apparent matter of pride. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that women have an obligation to like works created by other women, or even the women themselves. We like what we like, and there’s not a lot more to be said about that.

The thing is, we are saying more. We’re ranting and denying and over-explaining ourselves, all in an attempt to ensure that we can’t be associated with anything “girly.” Take, for instance, this recent post from Molly McIsaac at iFanboy.com, “Turning Japanese: A Starter Guide to (Shoujo) Manga” (and let me apologize to her now for choosing her as my example). In this post, Ms. McIsaac strives to cut through all the girly stuff and point readers to some shoujo manga with “good, solid stories and strong characters.”

We’ll gloss over the fact that she likens shoujo manga to Craig Thompson’s Blankets (which, as a story of one man’s coming to terms with his spirituality, most closely resembles a particular brand of seinen, if anything at all), and that none of her shoujo “staples” goes back any further than 1996. All any of this indicates is that she’s fairly new to the medium and has yet to really experience its breadth (and hell, some of that older shoujo is pretty hard to find in print). None of this has anything to do with my problem.

What I’m getting around to here is the fact that Ms. McIsaac seems to feel that she has to offer up disclaimers for reading shoujo manga at all. I’m also bothered by the strong implication that manga for girls is antithetic to solid stories and strong characters. “However, do not allow shoujo manga to intimidate you,” she says. “Although it is aimed primarily at young women, there are plenty of good, solid stories that are considered shoujo that I believe most people can enjoy.” If even women feel they need to make these kinds of excuses while recommending manga written for (and primarily by) women and girls, how can we expect any of that work or the fans who read it to be respected by the larger fandom?

Again, I’d like to apologize to Molly McIsaac. This attitude about girls’ comics has most likely been passed down to her by scores of female fans who came before, shuttling around borrowed volumes of Boys Over Flowers to each other with quiet embarrassment, wishing they looked just a little less sweet and sparkly.

Honestly, I’ve done this myself. How many times have I complained about the hot pink Shojo Beat branding on the outside of Viz’s editions of NANA, claiming that it trivializes the series and makes it embarrassing to read on the plane? (The answer is, “Many, many times.”) Yet I can think of several pink, sparkly, decidedly “girly” manga (at least one of which is written for little girls) that are more well-constructed, deftly plotted, and philosophically-minded than many of the comics I’ve seen published for, say, boys or adult males. Though these manga are certainly girly, they’re hardly lightweight. Even so, just two years ago, I sat in on a convention panel at a nearby women’s college, where one of the pro panelists (a female sci-fi writer) told the entire room full of young women that all shoujo manga was plotless high school romance and that whenever she saw girls looking in the manga section at her local comic shop, she’d direct them towards “more interesting things like Bone.”

What does any of this have to do with Twilight? Well, nothing and everything, I suppose. If female manga and comics fans have any hope of adjusting men’s attitudes about our presence in “their” fandom, we really need to start by adjusting our own. I’m probably never going to really like Twilight (in graphic novel form or otherwise)… or Black Bird, or Make Love and Peace, or any number of particular girls’ and women’s comics I’ve picked up and discarded for various reasons.

I’m also never going to like Mao Chan, KimiKiss, Toriko, the Color trilogy, or any number of other comics I’ve rejected that were written for boys or men. Yet the existence of these boys’ and men’s series I don’t like has never made me feel like I have to apologize for or explain why I still read things like Fullmetal Alchemist, Children of the Sea, or Black Jack. “Well, it’s written for guys, but it’s still good, I swear!” That’s a sentiment I have yet to see expressed by comics fans on the internet, female or otherwise.

So what is it about “girly” comics that puts us so on the defensive? Are we seeking approval from male fans? Do we believe we have to publicly reject all things stereotypically feminine in order to obtain (or maintain) credibility in fandom? If so, I submit that we’re actually playing right into the attitudes that kept us alienated in the first place. And if we’re doing it to establish credibility amongst ourselves, we’ve lost to them completely.

– Read Melinda’s reviews and discussion of manga, manhwa, and other East Asian-influenced comics at her blog, Manga Bookshelf.

What Do I Do With Those Damn Anime Kids?

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ink drawing- pile of stylized bodies

Keira Lozeau- age 17

 

My first meeting as a high school teacher was almost five years ago to this date, mid-August, on a hot Washington afternoon.  I was a new hire at a school district to the north of Seattle, and I was young at twenty five, still idealistic despite a rough student teacher period.

The room was spacious and beautiful, with large open windows and large group seating.  The entire district’s staff of visual art teachers was present, and they were in the midst of a casual discussion as I entered, five minutes late.

“I mean, what do I do with those damn anime kids anyway?” the silver-haired teacher said slowly, shaking her head.    The others laughed and sighed in sympathy.

“What do you mean?” I asked, before I realized I was drawing attention to myself, something I had vowed not to do anymore after my last educational employment experience.

 

Nicole Ham, age 17

Introductions were made, and more chitchat was had about the problem at hand, namely, the Damn Anime Kid.  “They just wanna draw the same stuff over and over again.  The big eyes, the tiny chins, pointy hair.  Whatever.”  Others commiserated.  “I can’t tell when they’re copying other stuff or when it’s their own characters or what.  And even if they say it’s their own characters, all of it looks the same anyway.  It’s all virtually identical.  So even if it’s technically original, they’re not learning anything anyway.”

At the time I just sat back and took it in, unbelieving.  What do you do with those damn anime kids, huh?  You mean, the kids that are interested in drawing?  The ones that are interested in learning concrete skills that will help them tell stories, with an interest in the human body, in posture and proportion?  Gosh, what is an art teacher to do with such challenging students?

As a half-baked cartoonist I had an advantage over my colleagues, and fortunately for me I was not above using this with my students.  It was easy to see after even a few weeks of classes that many of the students that were dedicated to various manga, or just drew Yugioh over and over again, were also students that many times had difficult home lives.  It isn’t difficult to imagine that a teenager with real problems at home would find refuge in fiction, and fiction inaccessible to their parents or less-dedicated peers would naturally have an even greater cachet.

girls on the playground. "Eww, is that a Get Smart lunch box?"

M.A., age 18

 

Nikyla McLain- age 16

I found this perception of the of the manga or anime enthusiast as social leper simultaneously the closest to the truth and the least useful of the clichés surrounding these students.  This was also the cliché most likely to be common knowledge, as evidenced by one teacher I knew who once explained to me the lineage of the otaku.  “No, these kids have been around for a while.  They just used to draw super heroes or whatever.  Or sports cars.  We still have some of those–the kid that just wants to draw the one view of the same race car over and over again.  Then there were the dragon kids before that.  Of course, we still have some of them too.”

After a few years of working with these students, both as a teacher and as adviser to the school’s Anime and Manga Club, I had the opportunity to give some presentations at state and other regional conferences, and I used it to talk about these students, whom I identified with and had a genuine desire to advocate for.  I titled my presentation after that first teacher’s comment regarding these students–What Do I Do With Those Darn Anime Kids? The title was, in addition to being catchy, also ambiguous enough that I had a wide range of teachers attend, ranging from other club advisers that were looking for suggestions on what to do with their programs, to teachers that had a genuine hostility towards these students and their interests.  And the ensuing discussions provided me with a broader perspective on secondary art school opinions regarding anime and manga, and more broadly, on sequential art in general.

J.J.- age 17

These opinions seemed to have less to do with the students and their interests than the teacher’s own art backgrounds.    For teachers who had their formative art experiences in the art education system, representational art in general and any type of cartooning specifically didn’t address enough what they might consider to be “personal expression,” i.e. the idea of art as therapy or release.  For these teachers, of which there are still a great deal, art is what happens without instruction, without stricture, and concerns with form, style or narrative are distractions from the true art experience.

There seemed to be just as many teachers whose formative art experiences took place in a more formal academic art background, and whether that background was based out of the studio or out of the art history classroom, it was very easy for them to dismiss budding cartoonists in their classrooms.  After all, any comic is by nature illustration, and therefore not art.  (I once walked into an upper-level high school art classroom where a well-meaning and very knowledgeable teacher was leading an oral dissection of the Andrew Wyeth painting “Christina’s World.”  “So,” she said to them as I walked into the room, “Is Wyeth an illustrator?  Or is he an artist?”)  Having survived several years of fine arts training myself, this was not an unfamiliar attitude to me, but I was continually surprised to find it in the secondary school environment, especially considering the broad nature of the students we teachers were supposed to be serving.

 

Katelynn Orellana- age 17

Of course, there was a lot for me to be frustrated with too.  Much of this was part of learning to readjust my expectations, realizing, for instance, that just because students are interested in reading comics, and say that they’re interested in making comics of their own, doesn’t necessarily mean that they will go through all of the necessary skill building and labor necessary to do so.  The first year I was adviser to the club we barely managed to scrape together a publication, and it was a compromise in every way–padded with pin-ups and work with which the artists themselves were not satisfied.  From the second year on I concentrated more on skills building and low-risk activities that had a high likelihood of success–the Scott McCloud-adapted “four hour comic” was among the most popular.  (Four pages in four hours, with music and pizza and soda, and many kudos for those who crossed the finish line.  Sometimes we tried a variation on this, dividing up into teams for the duration, with each team member having a clearly-defined role in the production.  These usually turned out a little less crazed, but a little more visually punchy and thus more likely to be included in future publications.)

 

Five years and several hundred pages of student comics

But it’s not frustration that I remember now, looking back on my five years of working with art students, the club members, or members of the cartooning class I taught my last two years.  It’s a feeling of real accomplishment–of having met students at their own level, at their own interests, and helping turn those interests inwards,  helping identify and eventually obtain the skills that will bring them an outlet for their own stories, for their own burgeoning creativity.  I remember lunches in my classroom, inking tutorials and jam comics.  I remember watching four of the club members whipping out a twenty page comic in four days, each one of them taking on a different task.  I remember how proud they were giving out copies of their comic anthology at an event at the Seattle Public Library, and the genuine enthusiasm the other cartoonists and comic fans had for their book.  I remember when I finally realized how much I had learned from them, from their love and their interest, their tenacity and their promise. I remember when I realized that all the practice helping other people with their drawing had finally affected me as well.  When I realized I was no longer an interested amateur, but a cartoonist capable of producing work I could be proud of.

So, what does one do with those damn anime kids?  How about recognize that, as students that already have an interest and a passion, they’re several steps ahead of many of their peers.  How about meeting them at their level.  How about showing them how the skills you can teach them connect to their interests.  How about remembering that the impulse to make art is always with us, and that things grow in the places that we cultivate.

 

Andie Sellers + Xochitl Briones – age 15 and 16

Bound Beauty by Mick Takeuchi

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Bound Beauty, vol 1, by Mich Takeuchi. This manga made me sad.  In fact, it’s fair to say that I’m pouty about it.  The mangaka, Mick Takeuchi, also did Her Majesty’s Dog, which I loved.  This is her new series, and it looked so good.  In fact, it is pretty good, from an objective standpoint, I think.  The art is well done, the composition lovely, the faces and eyes expressive, the humor funny, and the story complex and multi-layered.

And yet, I did not like it.  At all.

The cover is delightful and looks like just my sort of thing.  In fact, I bought a couple volumes in one swoop.  (Oops, but manga have been going out of print like mad recently.  You pays your money and takes your chances, I guess.)

So I thought I was getting a story about a brash high school girl and a hot, angsty tough guy with tats.  Mmmmmm.

Which it is, kind of.  But not really.

See, the heroine, who is a teenager in high school, is in love with one of her teachers, an older man who is handsome and reminds her of a boy who rescued her from a fire.  This, by the way, is a trope I really hate.  I do not buy school teacher / teenager romances, period (and I can’t even watch Card Captor Sakura for that reason).  So she’s got a crush on this guy, which is bad enough, but for magical reasons wot I will not bother to explain in detail, she gets de-aged into the body of a child.  As in like a kindergartener.  Naked.  Yes, naked, because her adult clothes fall off.

They give her very frilly loli style clothes to put on, by the way, which gives me an eye twitch.

There’s kind of a love triangle with her, the teacher, and the angsty cover guy.  There’s romantical stuff sometimes while she looks like a kindergartner, sometimes while she is naked or only covered up by a kimono or sheet, and sometimes when she is a teenager.

I found the snark between her and the angsty guy, when she was in a teenager body, both hot and funny.  Everything else left me kind of squicked out.

There’s a scene where the heroine uses her magical powers to fight some demons, and the Master (that’s the hot older teacher dude) rescues her.  He wraps her injured child body into his arms, and holds her.  She feels warm and safe and loved, and he reminds her that for him, she’s still the same person (still the teenage girl), and that’s the end of the volume.  And you know, some people enjoy that kind of thing, but I am just not one of them.

The main external plot concerns the magical threads of fate, which come in various types (related to the elements, colors, and other complexities I won’t get into here) and how the tyers (the heroine, the teacher, the angsty guy, and another guy in glasses) all manipulate, or tie, the threads.  And of course, they fight crime.  Or magical problems, which amounts to the same thing.

That part was really interesting, and I was starting to get over my utterly squicked outedness when I hit the incest plot.  I know that cultures are different, and I’m cool with that, and I know that there’s plenty of folks who enjoy the occasional brother-sister goings on in comicbook story form, but I am not one of them.  At all.  I find it icky.

I may have said Ewwwwwwwww at full volume at what was supposed to be a heartwarming resolution to the subplot.  *sigh*

I really wanted to read this manga for HU because I love this mangaka so much and her inking is lovely, but this just did not work out.  I am not the reader for this comic.  At all.  Not even a little.

I’m going to admit upfront that I have very, very mixed feelings about just saying that this comic sucks.  It obviously didn’t work for me, and I’m cool with saying that.  What I don’t want to say is that it’s wrong, because I don’t think that the de-aging stories (which I’ve run into before, see also Meri-Puri) are necessarily wrong and sometimes they’re done well.  This is certainly beautifully drawn and well-told.  It just hits a big bunch of cultural walls that I think don’t necessarily translate.  Or maybe they’re story-kinks I don’t share, which can also happen.  *frowns*  But for me, and only me, this comic really squicked me the heck out.  Your mileage may definitely vary.

Empty Head

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In his review of Monster, Noah advises us that he would “rather pursue the trashier Gantz, which manages to be a lot more thoughtful and truthful about morality by the simple expedient of not idolizing its central characters.” Having read a few more volumes of the series, I would suggest that Noah mistakes base instincts, unfiltered onanism and self-indulgent stupidity for those more virtuous attributes.

That’s Suat, suggesting, in his sweetly understated way that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

So after reading the first 20 or so volumes of Hiroya Oku’s Gantz, have I seen the error of my ways? Well, not exactly.

Suat argues in his review that Gantz is bargain-basement wank material for clueless adolescents, composed of little more than pallid violence, pallid titillation, and pallid nihilism.

It would be easy to imagine this manga being put together by a bunch of sexually deprived nerds huddled around a computer screen but, no, I’m going to be kind here and just call them a group of over-sexed wankers. Gantz is clearly aimed at young males with a history of gaming, buying gravure idol magazines and indulging in H games. Nothing particularly unusual or pathetic here. Everyone can do with a bit of interactive porn now and then, but let’s not mistake this for great entertainment much less great art.

I wouldn’t call Gantz great art necessarily — I think I’m somewhat less interested in that kind of ranking than Suat is in any case. But at least in its early volumes, Gants does have a sense of pacing and atmosphere which I found compelling.

Tucker Stone gets at the book’s appeal a bit when he notes that:

Gantz is the true heir to Peter Parker, and… this–sleazy violence in Matrix jumpsuits–is where you turn if you’re looking for a contemporary Spider-Man comic. It’s 2010, and responsibility is an advertising tagline. Nowadays, a fresh-from-puberty kid with great power would use it to kill anybody that messed with him (every volume so far) and fuck Angelina Jolie (which he did in volume 8.)

For Tucker, this is, like Spider-Man and super-hero comics in general, a power fantasy — but a power fantasy pushed somewhere different than you usually find in super-hero comics. Tucker argues that the difference is one of exploitation: Gantz has more explicit sex and more explicit violence than Spider-Man does. This is true — but I don’t know that that’s especially interesting in itself. After all, most super-hero comics these days are dripping with explicit sex, explicit violence, and various other fluids. Fine-tuning the power fantasy for older, more decadent readers is a tried and true strategy at this point.

What’s different about Gantz is not that the power fantasy is nastier, but that it exists in a kind of blank fugue. You see this from the manga’s first scene — which is also probably the best sequence in the series. High-school student Kei, the book’s hero, is standing on a train platform reading a girly mag and sneering internally at his fellow commuters. Suddenly he notices that a childhood friend, the extremely tall Masuru, is standing next to him. Kei doesn’t speak to his former friend…and then a bum falls off the platform and onto the tracks. Masuru leaps down to help him, but can’t lift him by himself. He looks up, notices Kei, and calls him by name. Kei, who doesn’t like Masuru, finds himself crawling down to aid him almost despite himself — because he likes Masuru more than he thinks? Because he feels like the other commuters expect it of him? It’s entirely unclear even to him — and then the train comes and he and Masuru are hit and die. And then they wake up in an apartment with a bunch of random other people and a dog sitting around a black sphere.

The appeal of the opening is that the sci-fi elements — the transportation after death, the mysterious black sphere — are exactly as inexplicable as the inside of Kei’s own skull. Kei really doesn’t understand himself anymore than he understands how he ended up in that room. He’s dislocated both internally and externally. Peter Parker’s life was transformed when he was bitten by that spider — but Kei? Who was he before he died? Where was he going? Who was he connected to? Nothing, nowhere, no one. This is adolescence as a transition from emptiness to emptiness, growing out of the aphasia of childhood into the aphasia of adulthood.

The series is unsettling, then, not because it’s especially brutal or sexually explicit, but because the brutality and exploitation take place in a kind of contextless void. For example, Kei, Matsuro, and the others gathered together by the sphere are all issued futuristic guns and ordered to go out and shoot various aliens. But the guns work on a delay; you pull the trigger and nothing happens for a few seconds, and then (sometimes) your target blows up. The violence here is just standard movie violence…but the time lapse is weird. It gives the battles a slowed-down, dreamlike feel, like the rules of physics have been changed and the characters are sitting staring at their navels as they drift off into space.

Kei’s sexual relationships work in a similarly disjointed way. Soon after he finds himself in the room with the sphere a naked girl appears literally out of thin air and falls into his lap; soon thereafter a dog licks her pussy; then sometime later she moves in with Kei and let him feel up her tits for reasons which are really unclear; somewhere in there he falls in love with her; she announces that she loves Matsuro; then at one point the two of them are walking down the street and they run into her exact double. Then later he asks a girl who looks like Angelina Jolie to have sex with him and she does.

Reading the first volumes maybe makes this a little more coherent, but not much. Emotional declarations and sex acts wander out of the blue and then wander back into it, like someone forgot to write random bits of the narrative and then was too lazy to go back and fix it. Oku’s insistent breast fetish becomes, in this context, just another way in which sex is severed from actual interaction — the gratuitous T&A pin ups sprinkled liberally throughout aren’t any more of a non sequitor than most of the events of the story itself. The overall effect is of a pulpier, clumsier Philip K. Dick or Murakami — and the pulp and the clumsiness make it in some ways more odd, not less.

Gantz doesn’t just feel like careless writing, but like a view of reality as carelessly written, in which people’s motivations and even their selves are incoherent. The way the sphere reconstructs the characters — building them up plane by plane so you can see their innards forming as they corporate — is a metaphor for how the book treats people in general — as weird shells built from blood out of nothing. The computer enhanced art only adds to the effect; the characters look too smooth, uncannily isolated from their backgrounds and each other, like they all exist completely independently, never touching either each other or their world.

If Gantz had ended after a couple of arcs — even (especially?) if it had just been cancelled in the middle of a storyline — it would be perfect in its disassociative imperfection. Alas, the remorseless grinding of the plot turns the protagonist from a confused and ineffectual cipher into a standard issue hero, blasting the bad guys, wowing the girls, and generally behaving like Spider-Man with a little more sex and violence. He gets a boring girlfriend who loves him, forms emotional connections, learns the virtues of self-sacrifice and leadership, and generally adopts a persona which is hollow in a much more predictable way. There is a certain poetic logic to having Kei mature from a vacuous nobody into an anonymous trope — but poetic or not, once the anonymous trope is firmly established (certainly by volume 9) there ceases to be much reason to continue to read.

Ignorant and Mean

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David P. Welsh responds to my post about lit comics snobbery and the perils thereof, in a very manga-crit way. That is, instead of taking sides, he opens the floor for discussion:

It’s sent me off on a mental tangent, and I wonder how people would define their comics reading tastes if circumstances forced them to do so? I would categorize mine as eclectic, though I would be extremely reluctant to do so precisely because that adjective, neutral as it should read, feels somehow like I’m congratulating myself for liking more than one kind of thing. So I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on categorizing their tastes and the potential pitfalls and moral implications of doing so.

So since David kindly asks: I wouldn’t call myself eclectic (nor omnivorous, as Melinda Beasi does in comments. That’s not because I read only one thing — in fact, I read various sorts of things, whether comics or manga or books.

But eclecticism is a relative term. And however widely I cast my net, there’s lots more stuff I haven’t looked at, and even more I haven’t heard of. I see the stuff Domingos Isabelinho talks about for example…mostly European art comics…and I don’t even know the titles. For that matter, unlike Domingos or Matthias or Suat or Erica, I’m a monoglot, which really restricts what I’m able to process. And there’s whole swathes of comicdom I’m not that interested in (early proto-comics tend to bore me for example; I’m not especially interested in most yaoi, etc. etc.)

I got really into Thai pop music recently, and came out of that experience not feeling like I was especially eclectic or omnivorous, but instead feeling like I didn’t know anything. Entire giant stretches of the globe producing mounds of cultural products, and I can’t even get through the to-read stacks in my house. I know there’s a giant Mexican comics scene for example, of which I have read exactly nothing. I think (though I don’t know) that there’s a fairly large Indian comics scene too, and all I’ve seen of that is a crappy online porn comic that Dirk linked to once.

So if I were going to characterize my tastes, I would have to describe them as “ignorant.” Also as “mean” — because while I don’t know much, I can at least be nasty about what I do know, damn it.

And since meanness is in my portfolio, I might as well sum up by using this post to once again bash all and sundry. Obviously, I’m arguing here that, in terms of cultural consumption in particular, as well as perhaps more generally, we’re all fairly ignorant, from the mouth-breathing superhero fan all the way up to masters of cultural wu-tang like Terry Eagleton or Kim Thompson. Which is why lambasting others for not reading what you think they should read is such an empty exercise…and why even calling oneself eclectic is maybe a little presumptuous (a fact which David basically points out himself.) Event the most cosmopolitan of us are really just provincial hicks. Which is nice actually; it means there’s always some city we can wander into, looking about in wonder.

Komikusu, Selling Awesome Manga: Belated Conclusion

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I was originally not going to write a conclusion for last week’s Komikusu discussion. But then I was chatting to Tucker Stone, and he mentioned that he’d enjoyed reading the roundtable.

This took me a little aback, because Tucker’s come out fairly strongly in the past against the “we must read more lit comics!” meme as it applies to Western comics. In an interview with Tom Spurgeon, for example, Tucker said:

There’s a temptation to label mainstream fans as being lazy for not caring about Swallow Me Whole or Blankets, to call them “bone-ignorant” — that’s just a bunch of horseshit. It’s an attempt by boring assholes to assign an overall meaning to a bunch of personal choices made by a group of people that those boring assholes don’t know anything about. On an individual level, I’ve heard a couple of people say they don’t want to read comics that focus on the mundanities of regular life, but I’m more often exposed to people who just like what they like because it’s what they fucking like.

I actually agree with that. Yet, at the same time, I’d like to see some more interesting manga titles succeed in the U.S. So…what’s my problem? Why does the push for more interesting comics make me itch in a Western context and not in a manga one?

Perhaps the answer is simply that I’m inconsistent. But, appealing as that solution is, I think there’s actually something else going on. Specifically, the way the debate is framed in a Western context tends to be different than the way the folks on this roundtable framed it. As an example, here’s Sean T. Collins discussing his wish that there was more discussion of western lit comics in the blogosphere.

I’ll tell you what my big question is: Why do superheroes dominate the online conversation the way they do? Last week saw the release of Jim Woodring’s Weathercraft and Tim Hensley’s Wally Gropius, two gorgeous and weird books that truly make use of the stuff of comics and contain the kind of material you can mentally gnaw on for days on end, but I guarantee you that no matter which comics blogs you read, you read more about Paul Levitz’s return to the Legion of Superheroes. And chances are good that if you’ve read about Daniel Clowes’s Wilson, what you read prominently featured that page where the character makes fun of The Dark Knight. What gives? If you want to make the argument that sheer numbers justify the choice of what bloggers and comics sites cover, I suppose that’s your prerogative. And don’t get me wrong — I read and enjoy multiple superhero comics every single week, and have lots to say about a lot of them. I also understand the need to make a living, which in Internet terms means unique pageviews.

But so much of the comics Internet consists of individual or group blogs where, presumably, there’s no editorial mandate to maximize hits. Indeed, the major selling point of the blogosphere is its lack of the traditional gatekeepers and incentive structures that bedevil mainstream journalism. Meanwhile, even the big group blogs owned by major communications corporations tend to be personality-driven, reflecting the interests and styles of their writers to a refreshing degree — and those writers tend to be interested in all sorts of comics, in their spare time at least. So yes, the nature of the coverage is often idiosyncratic, which is great. But why is that the comics being covered differ so little from what you’d read about on Marvel.com or The Source? Should those of us in the position to do so make an effort to broaden the scope of what we’re presenting to our readers as the comics worth buying, reading, and talking about?

And here’s Kate Dacey responding to Sean in that comments thread.

There’s a similar divide in the mangasphere as well: a lot of sites focus on mainstream shonen and shojo titles (the manga equivalent to tights and capes, I guess) while neglecting the quirkier stuff. To be sure, there are many sites that cover the full spectrum of titles, or focus on a niche, but the pressure to stay current with new releases and draw traffic discourages a lot of folks from waxing poetic about the stuff at the fringes. Looking at my own site stats, for example, a review of Black Bird or My Girlfriend’s A Geek will attract a much bigger readership than, say, The Times of Botchan.

Which brings me to the argument I’d like to see explored somewhere: how do we interest older readers in manga that’s written just for them? What kind of marketing support would, say, the VIZ Signature line need in order for some of those titles to crack the Bookscan Top 750 Graphic Novel list? Are there genres or artists we should be licensing for this readership, but aren’t?

Kate’s post there is what inspired me to organize this roundtable. And obviously there are close analogies between what she’s saying and what Sean is saying. But I think there are important differences as well. Mainly — Sean makes the dissemination of lit comics into a moral issue. “Should those of us in the position to do so make an effort to broaden the scope of what we’re presenting to our readers as the comics worth buying, reading, and talking about?” he asks, and the answer is obviously that yes, we should. The problem for Sean is that super-hero comics are taking up too much space because the people in the blogosphere aren’t doing their job in educating their readers about better fare.

Kate starts from the same place — how do we get more better manga out there? But she doesn’t bother with the moral question at all; instead she goes right to logistics. Not “you people should be doing more!” but, “presuming there are people who would like to read different kinds of manga out there, how do you reach them?”

Kate’s pragmatic approach was absolutely the one adopted by the roundtable. Erica Friedman tried to figure out how scanlations could be used legitimately to make more and different kinds of niche mangas available. Brigid Alverson, Deb Aoki and Kate herself talked about practical marketing steps that could be taken to reach new audiences. Peggy Burns pointed out some strategies that have worked for Drawn and Quarterly in the past. Ryan Sands and Ed Chavez tried to map out the historical lay of the land, explaining how manga has been categorized and sold in different ways at different times in both the U.S. and Japan. And Shaenon Garrity offered some more possible solutions, while also pointing out some possible pitfalls.

If you read through these pieces, though, what’s almost as noticeable as what is said is what isn’t. Nobody in the roundtable says that the problem is that readers’ tastes suck. Nobody says the problem is that bloggers aren’t doing enough to promote the right kind of manga. Both Shaenon and Deb mention Naruto in a “yep, the manga we’re talking about aren’t going to sell like that” kind of way — but they don’t seem resentful of Naruto’s success, the way Sean Collins seems resentful of superheroes (despite the fact that he reads them himself). In fact, unless I’m missing something, nobody in the roundtable says anything mean about mainstream, successful genre manga at all.

And why should they? The success of mainstream genre manga doesn’t hurt sales of To Terra or A Drifting Life or Travel or what have you. Because, as everybody in the roundtable seems to realize, the people who are buying Naruto — they aren’t the audience for Emma or Tramps Like Us. Not that nobody could possibly read or like all of those series, but simply that the demographic is different. If you want to increase sales of Oishinbo, the way you do that is not to go after readers of Gantz. The way to do it, as Shaenon says, is to get it into cooking stores.

Lit comics have had a lot of success in the U.S. precisely by finding different audiences. But the comics scene here is still so small, and still so defensive, that its vision still seems to be defined to a surprising degree by the mainstream. It’s not just Sean by any means — super-hero crap is, in general, seen as not just bad, but oppressive. There’s only room for so many comics, and the bad forces out the good. It therefore becomes every intellectuals duty to battle against the filth.

I don’t know that the manga scene in the U.S. is bigger than the Western comics scene. But it’s more demographically diverse, and it always has before it a pretty compelling vision of a possible world in which there are no mainstream comics, because comics themselves are mainstream. As a result, manga critics seem to have figured out what Western comics critics still have some trouble with. Namely, improved morals don’t sell comics; better marketing does.

Of course, just because manga folks have figured this out doesn’t mean that there will ever be more awesome manga available on these shores. But it seems like a good first step.
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The entire Komikusu roundtable is here.

Visual Languages of Manga and Comics

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Hello!  I’m known as Telophase in various places online, and when I dropped a couple of comments about the visual language of manga on a post a couple of weeks month or so back, Noah asked me to make a guest post (originally during the time that HU was down, and rescheduled for today).  So here I am! My day job is an academic librarian, but I wrote a few posts on manga layout back in 2005-2006, when I was trying to figure out how to improve my own comics, and served as Tokyopop’s manga columnist for a while back in the day.

As a convenience, I’m going to use the shorthand of “comics” to refer to American comics, and “manga” to refer to Japanese comics, although there’s a strong argument to be made that “comics” is just “manga” in English translation. (What do Japanese call Spider-Man?  Manga!) It just means fewer chances for me to typo “American” and “Japanese.”

I also want to stress that I don’t consider either of the trends I’m going to discuss to be better or worse than the other – they’re both effective ways of telling a story, depending on the needs of the story, the audience, and the industry.

Usually when discussing the visual language differences between manga and comics, manga is discussed in terms of higgledy-piggledy shoujo panels, speedline overload, sweatdrops, and nosebleeds, and nobody pays attention to the way the art elements and speech balloons are structured to steer your gaze through the page, but I think this may be a more defining characteristic of manga than all the sweatdrops and nosebleeds in the world.

Comics appear to have a much less obvious push through the page, often relying on American readers’ style of reading left to right first, then, if needed, secondarily directing the reader’s gaze through the page by use of action lines and other cues in the art.

I think these differences, more than the art styles, form the core of the two visual languages of manga and comics.

Let me see if I can simplify these to some guidelines:

Japan: First, follow where the art and speech balloons are pointing you. If that fails, read right to left, then up to down.

U.S. First, read left to right and then up to down.  If that fails, follow where the art and speech bubbles are pointing you.

This is not to say that these guidelines are slavishly adhered to! There are many examples of the rules being broken, but I think they represent a general trend (and, perhaps, fundamental difference) in each industry.

How did this come about?  I think the structure of the manga industry is a major factor.  Many of the most popular (and thus influential) manga are published weekly in chapters of 15-30 pages, collected with other manga into phone book-sized anthologies called tankoubon. (Edit: I misremembered – tankoubon are the books the chapters get collected into later. Zasshi are the magazines.) Shounen Jump is one you’ve probably heard of if you’ve paid any attention to manga being translated and published in the States.  The publishers of tankoubon have an economic motive to get you to consume as much manga as possible as fast as possible, because they want you invested enough in the stories to purchase next week’s tankoubon. Because of this, there’s often strong editorial control over each manga, leading to more uniform layout techniques (and possibly even house styles, although I haven’t done any comparison between publishers).

Here’s an example, a spread from Bleach, one of the Shounen Jump properties and one of the most popular manga in Japan. The first image has the spread itself, while the second traces the action lines through the page, the path your eyes take as you read.  Note how every important facial expression and image is included in that line.

Bi-weekly and monthly manga are not as subject to this editorial control, and the mangaka have a greater degree of freedom to diverge from the standard and to experiment. I still see similarity to the weekly manga layouts, though – the biggest of which is that the main action lines through a page tend to steer your gaze across characters’ faces, or across important items or spaces in the art.

You can see this in the following spreads from a manga about ekiben otaku (ekiben = regional specialty bento [boxed meals] you can get in train stations; otaku = obsessive fans). I’m not sure of the title because I don’t read Japanese, but a friend thinks it translates to The Solitary Love of Ekiben.  I want you to note how the speech balloons often frame the character who’s speaking, or the piece of food being discussed.  (Also note the speedlines of AWESOME surrounding the bento in the second spread. The entire manga is nothing but ekiben porn, train porn, and landscape porn. It is the geekiest and yet best thing ever. And there are four volumes of it!)

Something in manga layout that I have yet to find in comics is the action line forcing you to read backwards through part of a page.  Note this spread from Fruits Basket.  At first glance it’s chaotic and if you’re not well-versed in the visual language required to read this, you may get lost.

But if you look carefully, you’ll notice that not only are the speech balloons positioned to pull you through the page, often the characters themselves are pointing you at the next stop on the journey through the page.  The characters’ bodies and speech balloons break panel boundaries deliberately, not randomly, and drag your eye across the portions of the art that emphasize the characters’ emotions or tell you what is going on.  In the third panel of both pages, you even read backwards – left to right – through the panel.

(As an aside: now that more and more Japanese are reading manga on their phones, I expect the layouts are changing to fit the new medium. I visited Japan in 2007 and a Japanese woman showed me a yaoi manga she had on her phone.  When you paged to the bondage scene, the phone vibrated.)

In the U.S., until the recent Graphic Novel Revolution the most common way to get comics was by purchasing individual monthly chapters (I am not familiar enough with older comic practices to know what the usual release schedule was before the 1970s and 1980s).  There’s no economic motive to push the reader through the book as fast as possible, so the layout doesn’t need to focus on reader speed and the artist can do other things with page composition and action lines.  I might even be able to make an argument that there’s a motive to slow reading down a bit, so that the reader feels she got her money’s worth. (That would be one reason I cut down my comics reading when I had to start paying my student loans back after grad school – I couldn’t justify $2.99 for ten minutes’ entertainment!)

Here’s a couple of examples from Whiteout and V For Vendetta. I acknowledge that these aren’t quite comparable to Bleach – I should be using a current bestselling comic for a true comparison, but I’m stuck with what’s on our shelves at the moment.  I think the general idea will hold, though.

In Whiteout, the speech balloons tend to float to the top of the panels as if they’re filled with helium.  In most of them, the reader is expected to read the narration or dialogue and then look at the art in the panel before going on to the next panel.  It reads in a more staccato way than the easy flow through Bleach, or even the less-easy but still flowing line through the panels in The Solitary Love of Ekiben.  V For Vendetta bookends many of the panels with speech balloons, but the action lines that draw your attention to the important bits in the art are subtle, and the pages as a whole are subsumed to the rhythm of the grid that the panels are based on. In neither of the comics are the faces of the characters or specific pieces of the action deliberately highlighted in the way speech balloons frame characters and items in the manga examples I’ve shown you (forgive my wonky scanning: I’d rather not break the spines of the books).

This isn’t to say that comics don’t use dynamic action lines at all!  Witness this spread in Kingdom Come:

There’s a strong zig-zag action line in the artwork on the left-hand page that swings your gaze across and up directly into the splash-page layout of the right-hand page. The only sour note I detect is the placement of the tiny “Indeed,” speech balloon on the right-hand page. I believe it’s supposed to be right in your path as you read through the bottom panel on the left and scan over the faces, but the superhero splash page is so strong that you tend to skip it. (I didn’t even notice it was there until I drew the redline!)

In Transmetropolitan, I often find that cigarette smoke is used to highlight action lines or characters’ faces and emotions, as in this spread.  There’s an action line anchored by speech balloons, smoke, and white highlights that drags your view across Spider’s face several times in the left-hand page, but the action line through the right-hand page is not as active, even causing confusion in the transition from panel 1 to panel 2, because the figures in panel 3 are pasted on top of panels 1 and 2.  This is a perfect example of “read from left to right first, then read following the cues in the art,” because if you followed the cues in the art, you’d read panel 1, then panel 3, then panel 2.   (I  like how Spider’s and Yelena’s smoke trails flow off the page.  If you look closely, your mind connects them into one flowing line off-page.)

I think that’s a reasonably good illustration of what I see as the core of the different visual languages of manga and comics, and how if a reader is used to one language, it may take a little bit to get into the mindset of the other.

Thanks for letting me blather here!