Manga for Girls (original) (raw)
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THE BOOK BUSINESS
- Sept. 18, 2005
Walk into almost any chain bookstore and you're likely to find a teenage girl sprawled on the floor reading manga -- thick black-and-white comic books by Japanese authors. Graphic novels, including manga, have been popular with American boys for years now. But, to the surprise of publishers, "shojo" comics (or manga for girls) have become one of the hottest markets in the book business. Two publishers -- Viz Media, which is Japanese-owned, and Tokyopop, an American company -- have been the leaders in the American manga market, which has more than doubled since 2002, helped along by a $5 billion business in related animated films, TV series and licensed products like dolls and action figures. Del Rey, in the Random House Publishing Group, has become the first New York publisher to enter the shojo market in a big way (in partnership with Kodansha in Japan). Last year, Del Rey sold a million copies of its first 16 releases combined. Next year, it plans to bring out close to 85 manga titles, most of them aimed at teenage girls.
Shojo -- the word means girl in Japanese -- frequently involves a lovelorn teenager seeking a boyfriend or dealing with situations like entering a new school, being bullied or trying to break away from a clique. There are also action stories featuring girls in strong roles as scientists and samurai warriors. (The shojo genre has been called "big eyes save the world," after the characteristic drawing style of girls with saucer-shaped eyes who are sometimes endowed with supernatural powers.)
But parents and teachers, who are sometimes happy to see teenagers reading just about anything, might be caught off guard by some of the content of the girls' favorite books. Among the best-selling shojo are stories that involve cross-dressing boys and characters who magically change sex, brother-sister romances and teenage girls falling in love with 10-year-old boys. Then there's a whole subgenre known as shonen ai, or boy's love, which usually features romances between two impossibly pretty young men.
Shonen ai themes are common in Japanese comics for girls (as they are in Japanese literature) but, intriguingly, they appear to be almost as popular with girls here. "Fake," a best-selling series from Tokyopop, the largest manga publisher in the United States, revolves around two New York City police officers who look more like male fashion models. The older, more experienced one surprises his novice partner with a French kiss halfway through Volume 1, complete with cinematic close-ups.
"Fake" is the No. 1 manga series requested by teenage girls in Glendale, Ariz., but Kristin Fletcher-Spear, a librarian who specializes in teenage services there, says she refuses to purchase it because of the graphic sex scenes in the last volume. That volume, the seventh, which finally lands the heroes in bed, is shrink-wrapped and stamped "Mature" for ages 18-plus by Tokyopop. (Volume 1 is rated for readers 13 and older.)
So far, publishers have been relying on their own age-rating schemes, and there's no central governing body enforcing a uniform rating system. While parents have campaigned against books by authors from Judy Blume to Roald Dahl, there have been few complaints about manga, according to a survey Fletcher-Spear conducted of 100 librarians around the country. That could be because most adults have never even heard of it. (More than 40 percent of the general population is still unfamiliar with the genre, according to market research released by Viz Media.) And manga is unlikely to catch the attention of the local P.T.A. because teachers don't typically assign comics as homework or accept them for book reports.
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