The New York Times has an article on manga’s female audience (free registration required), and it’s not half bad. Some bits stand out:
- I think Trina Robbins is being a bit generous when she says, “The girls (in manga) are cute, they’re never insulting, and they never have big breasts.” There are plenty of titles where that’s true, but the term “fan service” wasn’t coined out of thin air. Heck, one of the titles listed in the latest Previews actually listed “fan service” as a marketing point. Perhaps it was a quote specifically about shojo that got truncated or improperly contextualized.
- I’ll be interested to see the line of titles selected by Penguin Group USA for its manga launch this spring. (Here’s the press release from Penguin’s partner in the effort, Digital Manga, Inc.)
- I’m very happy to see Imadoki! name-checked as an example of good shojo.
- Because schadenfreude is my drug, I can’t help but picture a rictus smile on the face of Marvel’s Dan Buckley as he talks about how happy he is that girls are gobbling up manga. (And I note that the two Marvel digest experiments cited in the article, Emma Frost and Mary Jane, have gotten the axe.) “Girls love comics! Just not ours.”
- Apparently, Swan did for ballet what Hikaru No Go has done for go.
- Schadenfreude, part 2, courtesy of DC VP John Nee: “”I think the most appealing thing for DC with manga is that it’s been decades since comics have been a meaningful medium for females.” All credit to DC for its very promising CMX line, but was DC just an innocent bystander as comics were alienating female readers?
All in all, it’s an interesting read. It sure beats the hell out of another “comics aren’t just for kids” piece.