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Monday, October 16, 2006
Will no one buy my copy of Yotsuba&?
In the October 12th edition of Journalista! Dirk Deppey goes over the professional resentment to manga by Westerners. I will now look at the personal side, how readers resist one of the most vibrant, if not the most vibrant, aspect of comics culture today.
But first let me tell you how I see books.
I see most books like pistachio nuts. I read them from cover to cover. I digest the content and mix it with my own interpretations. I feel a work isn't truly complete until it resides in a reader's subjective memory. Once I have fully absorbed a book's innards, the nut, I no longer have any use for the shell. There are books that I come back to because I think they are so good they offer multiple and varied reading experiences. I find re-reading Black Hole and Daredevil: Born Again was rewarding as it was when I first read those books. Yet most books I read give me a singular reading pleasure (or displeasure as the case may be) and never go beyond that. The next step is heading to one of San Francisco's fine used bookstores. I make good use of these stores because I find that it is much more important for me to have a few dollars for lunch than it is to have Batman and the Monster Men, as much as I enjoyed, staring back at me from the bookshelf.
Many manga titles are amongst the books I read. I've enjoyed Anne Freaks, MBQ, Dragon Head and Golgo 13. As much as I enjoyed them I need to pay for my groceries on a college student/freelance writer's budget and that means some lucky shopper at Green Apple Books is going to read about the world's greatest assassin in space or Japanese schoolchildren driven to mania trapped in a subway tunnel. Or they would if these bookstores bought manga. They don't, at least not for the most part. They'll buy the trades of superhero books, classic comic strips, alternative works and seemingly anything else (believe me, I've spent plenty of times in many store's graphic novel sections) but, as I've been told by a book buyer, these stores are very particular about what manga they will buy. The Golgo stuff barely got through, Star Trek manga got sold just through the sheer novelty of the product but all the other books I've been trying to get rid of are rejected. Manga doesn't sell to these used bookstore customers. Which is odd because in the chain bookstores I go to, and I'm sure you've found this to be true as well, manga makes up the majority of the shelf space.
I wonder where this difference comes from. My mind races back to the 2005 San Diego Comic-Con. The Shoujo issue of The Comics Journal had been released early for the convention. I had contributed an article and a review, honored to be listed alongside Jog, Johanna Draper-Carlson, Steven Grant and many of the issue's fine contributors. Dirk told me that manga fans he would show the issue to loved it. The reaction from other comic fans was quite different. Many of those shopping at Fantagraphics' table, who you would think would have a fine and eclectic taste in comics given the company's output, were off-put by the Moto Hagio cover (for the record A, A' is another book I am not willing to part with). I've seen it happened many times. Readers I know who read and enjoy many types of comics are repelled by their superficial impressions of manga. From the art to the size of the books manga is "other." Some misguided comic pundits have even declared that manga is "not comics." I fear it is this type of reader who makes up most of the clientele of the used bookstores I sell to.
I will admit that I felt the same way in my teen years when I started to refine my taste in comics. I thought I was ready for everything but something about seeing Oh! My Goddess, one of Dark Horse's most popular titles at the time, just seemed like something worlds away from me. It wasn't until I read Fredrick Schodt's excellent Dreamland Japan after seeing Paul Pope recommend it in an issue of 100% did I really immerse myself in manga. Now I can't imagine not exploring the works of Osamu Tezuka, Junko Mizuno and Naoki Urasawa, whose Monster is my favorite continuing series second only to Casanova.
I can't expect anyone to shake up their taste in comics or anything else for anyone's reason expect their own. Still, I think it is important as a reader to go towards that which you first resist. I didn't wait for a manga title that was compatible with the Western comics I was reading (some of them, like Pope's work, already bore a manga influence). I surveyed what was out there and found myself attracted to the books that in one manner contained features I look for in most of what I read but also contained ideas I had never seen before.
I don't expect the comic reading intelligentsia of the Bay Area to go from enjoying Chris Ware's 826 Valencia mural to savoring Tokyo Tribes (although speaking as a "protege" of some kind of McSweeney's I can assure you the leap can be made safely). Still, I wish people wouldn't count an entire countries vast history of comics out. There are plenty of great books out there. Believe me, I've got a few I could get rid off.
Permanent Link: 9:36 PM |
6 comments
Comments:
Change coasts! The used book shops around here on the EC seem to carry manga (or at least the fantastic one that I frequent most).
# posted by Kitty : 6:45 PM
Um. I live in Torrance, CA and mine take them too.
# posted by : 7:25 AM
I think it's odd that you believe people are avoiding manga because it's "different" or "other". I don't read manga because I don't enjoy it, despite reading many fine (and not so fine) comic book type stories. Manga is different to western comics, in the stories it chooses to tell, but also stylistically in how it chooses to tell them. Then again, I don't like the majority of Fantagraphics' output either, so maybe I'm just a philistine.
# posted by : 7:59 AM
A few months ago, I ruthlessly pruned my manga collection by half, and sold them all - about a hundred books - to my local Half-Price bookstore here in North Texas, and not only did they take them all, they gave me twice the going rate at which they usually buy books. I'm sure it all depends on the local market.
# posted by telophase : 9:05 AM
I used to work at a used bookstore in California, and one reason why we didn't sell that much manga wasn't because we didn't want to. But most people weren't selling their manga. We'd see manga coming in very rarely, maybe once every other week or so in one buy, which was very rare, given that we would usually see about 200 people every weekend.
Another factor may be because the buyers of the bookstores are from a different generation; it took a while for my bookstore to start buying manga, just because the old buyers didn't know the market and didn't know what titles were popular or not.
# posted by oyceter : 10:55 AM
Here in Virginia, I know of at least one store that takes them. But I think the owner's gotten a little wary that they may be flavor-of-the-month, as she's gotten a little pickier about what she buys. At one point she even compared manga volumes to "Sweet Valley High" books.
# posted by Mason : 1:08 PM
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