There is, of course, a lotta formulaic crap out there – this is, after all, largely a commercial enterprise – and sometimes sifting through book upon book with large-eyed winsome heroines, androgynous young boys or sword-wielding tuff guys on the cover can be a bit much. But as web-based manga fandom has grown, it's become easier for the canny neophyte to pick out titles that'll meet his or her entertainment needs. Another selling point: unlike most successful American comics series, many manga series actually end (among the series I've enjoyed that have concluded: Royale and Planetes) instead of carrying on long past their freshness date. There's a lot to be said for knowing when to gracefully call it quits.
For many older comics fans (like myself), learning how to read manga required a different set of mental and aesthetic muscles than we were accustomed to flexing. Japanese comic artists have developed a different set of visual conventions than their Western counterparts (though many of these have also carried through into animé), while the "pure manga" format of laying out comics so that they read from right to left can require some concerted retraining for a Western reader. My own admittedly half-baked theory is that reading manga like this re-stimulates brain cells in a way that’s healthy for one's long-term mental acuity. (I eagerly await the first published neuro-psych study supporting this theory.) Just think of it: a study which actually proved that reading monthly Shonen Jump magazine was healthy! The mind truly boggles.
Article comments
1 - Katie McNeill
My husband and I are both huge fans of manga and anime. We have a huge collection that covers too much wall space. For the most part the art work is fantastic, and like you said if your willing to look there are some GREAT stories out there. The myths are so diffrent from our own (american myths)... it's just a nice slice of somewhere else.
Vampire Princess Myiu (I love vampire stuff) and this one is pretty good.
2 - Katie McNeill
*Vampire Princess Miyu
3 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States. Nice work!
4 - kl
I honostly do not understandt Manga. I work in a bookstore and it is not uncommon to see a fan spend HOURS reading multiple books in a sitting. The artwork is admirable, sure, but the plots rarely go beyong anything I see on television reality shows. teenage girls and erotic love scenes seem to dominate the comics on our shelves, and I am happy to avoid the Manga sensation
5 - Bill Sherman
While there is a lot of manga material devoted to young girl romance stories, one reason I suspect that subject appears so dominent on American bookstore shelves is the fact that Western comics so infrequently broach the same subject matter.
But there's plenty of other material being released: of the five titles I mentioned in my article above, only one fits under the categories you mention. Planetes is a sci-fiction series with moments of Ray Bradbury-styled poetry; Battle Royale is a hard-&-violent blending of Lord of the Flies and The Running Man; Kindaichi Case Files is an old-fashioned murder-in-the-mansion mystery series; while Iron Wok Jan is about cooking competitions. If you look, the genre options are much more varied than you might think at first glance . . .