|
Thursday, November 03, 2005
What the Hell am I doing here?
I covered the Yaoi-Con 2005 over this weekend (sign-up for Publisher’s Weekly Comics Week to see it). I’ve been reading comics since I was grade school and have been covering it since 2004 but this was a unique experience for me. It was the first time I got a taste of what it is like to be completely on the outside of a genre’s scope. I did have a good time at the convention and met a lot of nice, smart people but I also came away wondering what makes up a comic fan.
I’m no stranger to manga so I was all set to enjoy a popular title like FAKE. Reading over some of that book and others I kept thinking the same thing: “I can see why people like it and I can recognize the artistic merit but this just isn’t for me.” I’m a straight American male so there’s no way I’m the target audience. I wondered if that something about me that halted the power of these books from seeping in was either nature, nurture or both.
I was reminded of Lea Hernandez’s excellent article in The Comics Journal #269 where she praised shoujo manga for finally producing works where really spoke to her as a woman. She praised such aspects like “internal emotions expressed visually,” the concentration on costuming and the “visual flash” of “feathers, swirls, plus speedlines, bubbles, flowers, a shot of landscape or other setting.” At the convention, yaoi was described to me as “post-shoujo” and it was Kristy L. Valenti’s article on yaoi in the same issue that helped me leading up to the convention.
Am I in the opposite position of Hernandez? Am I just hardwired to prefer Tokyo Tribes (my favorite on-going manga title) over Gravitation? Certainly it’s not as simple as what gender you are born as (Hernandez doesn’t make it as simple as that in her article) but maybe all the deciding factors concerning what art we gravitate to (no pun intended) are already made by those influential years of birth to three-years-old. I like to examine all aspects of comics in my role as critic (I give Tramps Like Us Vol. 1 a mostly positive review in that same issue of TCJ) but when it comes to reading for entrainment perhaps I’m always drawn to the outlandish grotesque-as-beauty style found in the works of Jack Kirby, Taiyo Matsumoto, Charles Burns and others for some psychological reason.
If that is so, and yet again I must state I’m not sure it’s that simple, I’m glad that there is a bigger selection for everyone, no matter what you are into. When almost every other aspect of popular culture is aimed at my demographic (did I mention I’m in that precious 18-34 range?) seeing a growing convention giving women, as well as a growing number of male readers, a reason to celebrate a genre created by women was a great thing to see.
Of course I still had to bring it all back to me, didn’t I? That’s being part of the problem for you.
Permanent Link: 2:33 PM |
0 comments
Comments:
-- Home
|
