I finally got around to reading the New York Times piece on shojo (free registration required), and it’s fun to count the talking points that seem to be essential parts of any “manga for girls” story. Many of them are there, including a new theme that gives me pause:
“Publishers say they encounter the most resistance to manga not from parents but from independent booksellers, like JoAnn Fruchtman, owner of the Children’s Bookstore in Baltimore, which does not stock any manga. ‘I feel most of it is quite violent and the outcome is not necessarily as uplifting as I think literature should be,’ she says. “
… and…
“‘I’m constantly amazed at what I see. Books that appear appropriate for little girls all of a sudden have a girl and boy in bed together,’ Betsy Mitchell, vice president and editor in chief of Del Rey, says of Japanese shojo that she declines to publish here.”
Well, it isn’t like Del Rey avoids shojo with dark themes, is it?
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Over at Irresponsible Pictures, Pata shares the secret origin of OEL (the term).
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At comics.212.com, Christopher Butcher notes what might be one of the more fundamental differences between manga-inspired comics and comics from Japan: the role of the editor, which is quite substantial in Japanese comics publishing according to just about every source I’ve seen.
“A journalist I know has complained that there are no real editors in comics, just continuity cops and spell-checkers. I don’t agree with that, but I do think there are very few actual editors working at any company. I don’t know that there’s even blame to lay here, the creative community has been more-or-less trained to expect a complete hands-off on their precious little creative baby (unless they’re doing WFH and then it’s just ‘Yes, sir!’) and most editors really aren’t interested in being editors at all. They’re writers or marketers, working outside of their preferred field of interest. Anyway, Bizenghast should have been sent back for re-write and for corrections quite a few times.”
From what I’ve read (Paul Gravett’s book, for example), editors at manga publishing houses are very hands-on, creatively speaking. I wonder how interactive the editor/creator dynamic is on the OEL end?
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And it’s Monday, so there’s a new Flipped. I should warn you that this was written without the benefit of air conditioning, so it might be a bit crankier than normal.