I just have a few election-related things to get off of my chest before I return to the much more important field of comics.

First, I’m thrilled that I can type “President Elect Obama.” I’m thrilled by the scenes of international delight and celebration after eight years of criticism and anxiety, which I shared completely. I hope the Democrat leadership in the legislature takes the opportunity to be gracious and bipartisan, because it’s just time. Because that’s the equivalent of separately burying the head of Rove-style political divisiveness now that a stake has been driven through its cold, shriveled heart.

Second, I’m depressed by the apparent success of gay-marriage bans in California, Florida and Arizona. I hope the couples that missed the very tiny window of equality sue everyone they reasonably can, and I’ll happily donate to whatever legal support organization will help them. (Edited this to reflect Lori Henderson’s note that the measure isn’t retroactive.)

But I’m even more depressed by the passage of the adoption ban in Arkansas, designed to prevent gay couples from adopting or fostering a child but also excluding heterosexual couples who, for whatever reason, decided not to marry. (I can’t quite tell if it excludes single people from adopting or fostering.) The only outcome I can see from this is that it will become that much harder to place kids in loving homes. (Speaking of adoption, I was happy to see a clip where the Obamas said they would be selecting a rescue dog as payoff puppy for their kids. Many purebred dogs are adorable, but I really want to see a First Mutt in the White House.)

And I remember being barely out of the closet in any meaningful way and being horrified that the citizens of Colorado had successfully passed a horrible piece of anti-gay legislation, Amendment 2. It was subsequently overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, and now the citizens Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District has elected a gay man to represent them.

Because the alternative is listening to my retirement plan gurgle feebly, and because I can watch anything on television for five minutes, I offer the following: my dream cast for Dancing With the Manga Stars!

It seems to me that there are certain types that must be included in every season of Dancing With the Stars: the athlete, the contestant with a potentially dramatic physical disability, the codger of either gender, at least one tertiary celebrity from a popular property, one hunky boy, and several air-quote stars, whose celebrity was either long in the past or of questionable provenance even at its peak. There must also be contestants who are engaging in career rehabilitation, and perhaps one that makes you think, “Surely he/she has better things to do with his/her time.”

After this week’s Flipped, I think I’ve got the shôjo love out of my system for a while. Well, at least in terms of columns for The Comics Reporter. That kind of love can never really go dormant.

This is really awkward for me for a number of reasons, but I feel like I need to do it, so here goes.

My Mom passed away on Monday after a long illness. I have a big family, and everyone pulled together, so we’re all doing okay. We were able to move Mom to a hospice before the end, and it was a tremendously comforting place staffed by wonderful people.

If you’re making decisions about charitable donations and there’s a hospice care agency in your area, you might give it a look. It was a real haven for us. And if you haven’t thought about end-of-life care and talked about it with your loved ones, please do. Having your wishes known can really make a difference and add some measure of peace to a tumultuous situation.

http://mangacurmudgeon.mangabookshelf.com/2008/09/20/1691/

I’m not saying I would ever, ever vote for her under any circumstances, but I have to admit that I kind of love Sarah Palin. And I kind of love her in exactly the same way I love emotionally unbalanced soap opera characters that scheme their way through every station on the soap-opera cross twice, maybe three times, and still end up pillars of their fictional communities. They steal, kill, kidnap, covet, wreck marriages, switch babies, plot corporate takeovers, and drug the punch at the annual Founders Day Festival with hallucinogenic aphrodisiacs, and still get elected Woman of the Year by the very people they’ve dedicated their adult lives to recklessly screwing.

Now, I’m not saying that anything Palin has done in her bizarre public life reaches that level, but her resume is absolutely packed with eyebrow-raising moments. And while somewhere, Holly Hunter is probably composing her Emmy acceptance speech for the inevitable HBO original movie that will be based on Palin’s life, if there were any justice, Palin would be transplanted wholesale into Pine Valley or Lllanview, and she would be played by Robin Mattson.

For a change of pace, I thought I’d devote this week’s Flipped (over at The Comics Reporter) to commercially successful manga. Short version: Fruits Basket isn’t selling boatloads of copies because it’s without artistic merit, y’know.

There’s been lots of interesting conversation about the first issue of Yen Plus and it’s cast-a-wide-net content. Now, Deb Aoki has set up a poll at About.Com, inviting readers to pick their hits and misses.

I thought Tom Spurgeon had covered the latest Bookscan numbers quite nicely, until I saw the latest responses to Heidi MacDonald’s summary at The Beat:

“My headline would simply be ‘DC Comics Triumphant in GN Sales’ rather than using national/area/linguistic categories.”

Mine would be “Other media drive Bookscan bestsellers.” (I’m a whore for subdued alliteration.) What with a blockbuster movie, a not-quite-blockbuster movie that has Angelina Jolie in it, a blockbuster movie trailer (what the hell is that about?), several popular anime, a bestselling series of novels, and a video game that features Disney characters, there aren’t many properties that didn’t get a boost from outside of the field of graphic novels. And two of those have zombies in them.

By the way, does the All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder collection include the words “From the creator of Sin City and The 300” anywhere on the cover?

Man, there’s some major gloom in the air regarding the state of the manga audience. I’m not going to disagree with the assessments floating around, but one recurring element does strike me as a little out of scale.

A cornerstone of the recent wariness seems to be that manga’s primary demographic has stagnated at a certain age group, which is true. Booksellers are reluctant to shelve titles that don’t promise immediate returns (i.e. anything outside of the shônen and shôjo categories), and publishers are less likely to license titles for older readers as a result. Borders, the earliest and most enthusiastic retail adopter of the category, is on shaky financial ground, the nation’s economy is in the toilet, and everyone is being cautious. Those are facts, and I’m not trying to minimize them.

At the same time, I’m detecting a tendency to expect the U.S. audience for comics from Japan to evolve at a geometrically faster rate than the Japanese audience for comics from Japan did. I mean, how long has what might be considered the mainstream North American market for manga been in place? (Del Rey is just about to turn five years old, and Japan’s third-largest manga publisher is just now taking the bull by the horns and opening its own stateside initiative.) How long did it take Osamu Tezuka to realize his dream of comics for everyone across the lifespan, and how does the adult audience for comics in Japan compare to the younger audience for comics in Japan? Were I to hazard a guess, based on casual observation and reading accounts from people who are a lot better informed than I am, I’d say the majority of the indigenous manga market is still geared towards kids, and that a healthy chunk of the people who enjoy it as kids leave it behind as they get older.

So I guess I’m spotting an uneven set of expectations in play. Didn’t it take decades for a healthy market of comics for grown-ups to evolve in Japan? And is there a comparably healthy market of comics for grown-ups – not “babymen” or anything, but a casual reading audience that isn’t dedicated to the medium exclusively – in the United States? If there was such a market, I’d think there’d be less shock when a book like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home gets mainstream acclaim, or when Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings gets a serious review in The New York Times.

So why expect the English-reading audience for comics from Japan to mature faster than the Japanese audience did? There are still plenty of people who love comics top to bottom who won’t touch manga with a ten-foot pole, no matter how similar a lot of it is to what they’re already enjoying. And most days, it seems like the North American comic industry can’t even decide which underserved age group, kids or grown-ups, it’s trying to reach. In an average week, you’ll see pieces bemoaning the lack of options for both demographics, or pieces bemoaning the neglect endured by the properties that do try and serve them. (I mean, I’ve written those kinds of pieces over and over again.)

I guess I’m also hard-pressed to spot a particular tipping point where the current generation of kids in the United States and Canada who are manga’s primary consumers are revealed to be the only generation of kids who consume manga ever to reside in North America. Or the evidence that everyone in these generations will simply stop reading comics when they take the SAT. Most of them probably won’t ever pick up a comic again after the last volume of Fruits Basket comes out (though I’m not ready to picture that day too clearly), but some of them surely will, and as new generations of manga readers enter the audience, some of them will surely keep reading too, and they’ll tell two friends, and so on. It’s not likely to be a fast process, but I don’t think that kind of audience development has ever been speedy, has it?

Listen, I used to watch soap operas, so I’ve heard the old saw that “It takes a while to turn an ocean liner” before, used by producers and executives when asked when a given show would stop sucking. As a fan, I hated that argument, but I recognized the truth of it. Maybe the meteoric early rise of the shônen-shôjo market has created unrealistic expectations for the seinen-josei phase, but I can’t help but believe that the two periods aren’t entirely comparable, and I don’t think the latter will happen nearly as quickly as the former.

I love manga targeted at grown-ups, and I’m tremendously grateful to the publishers to provide it to audiences. I wish mainstream booksellers would consider the possibilities and be less frightened of shrink-wrap, but I can abstractly understand where they’re coming from in an economic climate that doesn’t encourage risk or expansion. I think they will consider those possibilities eventually, I really do, but I don’t think it will happen as quickly as I would like. At the same time, I don’t think that promises an eternity of super-teens and spunky heroines. I’m not an optimist by nature, but I do believe in the incremental growth of an audience for mature works.

I’m not much of a con-goer myself, but I like reading updates from folks like Deb Aoki, because sometimes I learn that very cool things are coming.

Oh my GOD, a food manga that’s been running for 102 volumes? About traveling reporters with a culinary obsession? Oh, Viz, you DO love me!

(Also, Deb was kind enough to actually send me est em’s Seduce Me After the Show, published by Aurora, and it is really, really good, but more about that later. Aurora has more em on the way.)