For fans of manga, it’s more than a comic
By ELIZABETH LARGE
The Baltimore Sun
03/27/2006
When the teenage daughter on NBC’s now-canceled “The Book of Daniel” turned out to be a talented manga artist selling drugs to pay for her software, adults may have said, “Huh?” But their teenage daughters probably knew exactly what manga was.
These black-and-white comics, translated from Japanese best-sellers and meant to be read back to front and right to left, are a huge hit with American teens and tweens. They can find manga (pronounced mahn-ga, with a hard G as in “girl”) in the popular teen magazine Cosmo Girl or they wait impatiently for the next book in a series to be translated and brought to a nearby Barnes & Noble or Waldenbooks.
Once publishers persuaded chain bookstores (as opposed to comics shop) to carry their manga girls could find it easily.
Cori Kasura, a 13-year-old who describes herself as “a very large fan,” discovered her first manga two years ago at the public library.
“A lot of people brush them off as just a comic, and they shouldn’t,” she says. “They deal with real-world problems, and I guess I kind of like that. Of course, some of them have a magical spin.”
The plots of manga specifically written for girls, called shojo, come in two subgenres: magical girl stories, in which a Bambi-eyed heroine with a superpower saves the world, and ones with more realistic plots about unrequited love, relationships and high school angst.
But to call them realistic in the way, say, a Judy Blume novel is realistic, would be stretching it. One of Cori’s current favorite series is “W Juliet,” a bestseller published by Viz Media about a tomboy who makes friends with a beautiful newcomer to her high school only to find that he’s a boy disguised as a girl (to prove to his father that he has the talent to become an actor). Romance blossoms and complications ensue, and it takes 14 volumes to sort it all out.
At $10 a volume, that’s a lot of baby-sitting money.
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