Anime News

Local librarian helps form clubs

By Christine Wallgren, Globe Correspondent | May 25, 2006

Manga and anime , Japanese print comics and cartoon animation, have been around for more than 50 years , but it’s only in the last five that they have made it big time into the American mainstream, particularly among teenagers. They seem to be the rage south of Boston as well.

Librarians in Duxbury and Norwell have responded to public demand by establishing manga and anime clubs that meet regularly. Others in Weymouth , Whitman, and West Bridgewater are building up their graphics collections, including manga comics and anime DVDs, and looking into establishing clubs of their own.

The local interest is likely to peak when Anime Boston 2006 , the fourth annual anime convention in Boston, is held over the Memorial Day weekend.

For a long time, interest in manga and anime “was more of an underground movement,” said Lexington librarian Robin Brenner , who has made manga and anime her area of expertise. She has created a website called noflyingnotights.com and is writing a book. She frequently visits libraries to give presentations and help get new clubs off the ground.

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Japanese-style comic books, animated films a hit among the young
By Matt O’Brien, STAFF WRITER

HAYWARD — Dallas Marshall is the sort of customer local libraries are trying to lure, and it appears to be working.

The 18-year-old South Hayward resident devours manga and anime — Japanese-style comic books and animated films.

He is an enthusiast of Japanese movies, television series and pop music. All can be bought at stores, but are increasingly lent free of charge by local libraries.

Anthony Dos Santos, director of the San Lorenzo Public Library, said his library’s growing manga and anime collection has turned into one of its biggest draws.

“It brings more kids into the library,” Dos Santos said. “We can’t keep it on the shelf. All of it’s always checked out.”

Dos Santos, who grew up reading classic American comics, said he has only read a few manga but found them more sophisticated than the traditional comics he read as a kid.

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Anime has become a phenomena. More and more Anime series and movies come out each year and the population of Anime fans around the world keeps on increasing as well. Also, the popularity of a particular Anime title that became a hit TV series usually lasts for years. Eventhough the show has ended on the TV station where it was aired, fans will search for their own copies of the series and watch it over and over. One might be wondering: What’s the secret behind Anime’s success? What does Anime have that often cannot be found in its Western counterparts? In this article, I’ll try to point out some of the key factors behind the success of Anime.

Exciting action and complexity draws out a wider range of viewers. While cartoons, that were made in Western countries mainly targets children as its main audience, Anime, on the other hand, targets a wider range of viewers. As a matter of fact, a big part of the die-hard Anime fan population are teenagers and people in their early to mid 20’s. In most cases, while children enjoy the spectacular actions and fight scenes, adults and young adults appreciate the complexity of the story and its emotional content. Most Anime series are mixes of comedy, action, and drama.

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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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