I’m always glad to see shôjo titles rank in the manga section of The New York Times Graphic Book Best Sellers list. After a fairly long period where Natsuki Takaya’s near-perfect Fruits Basket (Tokyopop) seemed to carry that banner alone, other series have made regular appearances on the roster. And if they’re not precisely the titles I would wish were leading the sales pack, well, I’m glad all the same.

Still, if I had my way, Hinako Ashihara’s Sand Chronicles (Viz) would be earning sales that match its quality. It’s about a girl named Ann who moves to a small town with her unstable mother at the age of 12, then follows Ann and her friends through happiness, tears and all of the stuff in between those two extremes. It’s both precisely observed and effectively melodramatic, and the characters are wonderfully sympathetic, largely because Ashihara respects them enough to let them be jerks from time to time.

It was serialized in Viz’s late, lamented Shojo Beat, and its first three volumes were included in last year’s list of Great Graphic Novels for Teens, even earning a spot among the Top Ten. So it’s obviously well regarded. I mean, look at these reviews:

“Manga-ka Hinako Ashihara dares to believe that even children and teens have complicated lives that are riddled with anxiety as much as, if not more than, it is filled with carefree fun. Anything but a downer, however, Sand Chronicles is rich storytelling about the drama of life.” Leroy Douresseaux at Comic Book Bin

“Sand Chronicles continues to be a very strong story, showing off both the simplicity and complexity of ordinary teenagers trying to find their places in the world. It’s still one of the best titles I’ve read this year.” Ysabet Reinhardt MacFarlane at Manga Life

“Sand Chronicles isn’t about saving the world…or destroying it. These teenagers don’t have superpowers; their adolescent angst isn’t going to knock the planet from its orbit or reshape the destiny of humanity. That is not the sort of story Hinako Ashihara won a Shogakukan Manga Award for. No, rather, she was recognized for writing an affective story about realistic teenaged troubles and triumphs. In their little world of Tokyo and Shimane, what happens matters—it matters a lot—and best of all, it will matter to this series’ faithful readers as well.” Casey Brienza at Anime News Network

“Oh, the emotional turmoil is so hard-hitting! This series has gone from a wonderful bit of recognition at the complexities of relationships to a painful observation of the things people do that can hurt themselves and others when they aren’t willing to move on from traumatic moments.” Matthew Brady at Warren Peace Sings the Blues

“Granted, the usual romantic ups and downs provide plenty of tears and jeers, but the thoughtful slice-of-life framing and an eye for humanistic details floats this series to the top of the shojo tank. No one feels overly like a character trope, and Ashihara’s sense for the minute highs and lows of adolescence is a blessing in a series that could have been destined for average shelf status.” Chloe Ferguson at Manga Recon

If you like comics about real people with real problems that are executed with tremendous skill and sensitivity, you should give Sand Chronicles a try.

(Got a book you feel deserves some audience development? Like to write a guest column about it? E-mail me and we’ll see what we can do.)

Welcome to another new, hopefully semi-regular feature where I hope to highlight some really good comics that you probably aren’t reading. Let’s start with Takehiko Inoue’s Real (Viz). As I see it, there are two main reasons Real might not have found the audience it deserves.

The first may be the fact that Real is perceived as sports manga, which seems to be right up there with josei in terms of stateside salability. Sports manga partisans are devoted, but they are not numerous. Now, I have a theory as to why this category might be significantly less popular in the United States than it is in Japan. It involves a fair amount of stereotyping, so I apologize in advance if this reasoning doesn’t apply to you, and I acknowledge that there will certainly be exceptions, possibly numerous.

Now, we all know that a much larger percentage of Japanese kids read comics than kids in the United States do. It’s a much more normalized activity for kids there. And, in my experience, comics are one of the things American kids enjoy instead of sports. With a much larger population of comics-reading kids in Japan, it seems much more likely that a healthy percentage of them enjoy comics in addition to sports and consequently enjoy seeing one of their hobbies dramatized in that format. Speaking only for myself, I already feel like competitive athletics are sufficiently glamorized in more than enough venues, so I would much prefer if they kept their muddy cleat prints off of my comics, thank you very much.

But Real isn’t actually a sports manga. It’s a character-driven drama. There’s certainly athletic activity being portrayed, and some characters are motivated by their desire to excel in competitive sports, but that’s really just one color in the book’s spectrum of aspirations. It’s much more about achieving independence and respect, which are much more universal.

This brings me to the second possible hurdle to wanting to read Real: the fact that most of its protagonists are coping with a disability. Works that dramatize the experience of overcoming a disability struggle with some unfortunate (and often accurate) preconceptions: that they are mawkish in their attempts to uplift or self-righteous in their attempts to educate.

Real suffers from neither of those failings. It’s gritty and funny and, as I noted before, driven by complex characters. There are no plaster saints in Inoue’s cast. That’s not to say that they’re unsympathetic, and I think the fact that they can be obnoxious or alienating makes the audience’s sympathetic reaction more genuine. Their flaws negate the potentially queasy feeling of abstract pity in favor of actual identification.

Real is also magnificently drawn, as I’ve noted previously. That never hurts, especially when an artist folds as much emotion and subtext into his or her illustrations as Inoue does here. So, honestly, if you’re avoiding Real because it’s about sports or because you fear movie-of-the-week moralizing about the resilient disabled, I can assure you that you’ve nothing to fear. It’s a great comic with engrossing characters, and it deserves a larger readership. Five volumes are currently available in English, so you aren’t even really that far behind, as these things go.

(Got a book you feel deserves some audience development? Like to write a guest column about it? E-mail me and we’ll see what we can do.)