Manga Mania

What is Manga (Mahn-ga)?
If you’re a parent of a certain age, “Japanese cartoon characters with big eyes” or “Japanese animation with lots of violence” might be your description of manga. You can be forgiven for thinking that it’s not on your radar. But it is on your kids’ radar, even if they don’t know it. Manga has influenced everything from Ninja Turtles to Yu-Gi-Oh! card and video games, cell phone charms, teen fashion, and Pokemon. But there’s a whole lot more that you and your kids can—and should—mine from this long and storied tradition of Japanese storytelling that is finally exploding in popularity in America.

A Brief History and Definition
Manga first appeared in Japan in the 1800s. According to Manga: The Complete Guide by Jason Thompson, a San Francisco–based manga expert, the term was coined by artist Hokusai for the doodles in his sketchbook. Manga is Japanese for “comics,” so it refers specifically to the printed form. An animated Japanese cartoon may have the same style as manga or be adapted from manga storylines, but it’s technically called anime.

In post-WWII Japan, the medium flourished, producing manga for 
children, housewives, sci-fi and romance lovers—in short, on every topic under the sun, aimed to hook any kind of reader. “It’s the latest version of a long history of text-and-image storytelling that has always been there,” explains Frenchy Lunning, a professor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design who studies manga and anime. “When you go to Japan you realize we have the thinnest sliver of this massive output that is available everywhere there—in many different genres. Everyone reads it.”

Broadly, manga are categorized into four types—shonen (boys’), shojo (girls’), seinen (men’s) and josei (women’s), with subgenres in each 
category, such as horror, sports, romance, special effects, crime, games, hobbies, history, and cooking. In America, manga can be found in 
versions that read left-to-right or (in the Japanese style) right-to-left.

Manga are usually black-and-white, and many weekly and monthly serials are bound into collections or graphic novels. Some series run for decades, producing encyclopedic volumes.

Manga in America
Manga first arrived in America in the 1960s as the adapted Astro Boy anime. More manga followed throughout the sixties, seventies, and eighties aimed at guys. Then the first English 
translations of Sailor Moon, a story about a fourteen-year-old female superhero, became the first shojo series. Shojo’s popularity proved that manga could appeal to a much wider audience than U.S. comic book fans.

“More than anything, the 
introduction of shojo manga changed the makeup of manga fans and the audience for manga,” Thompson says. “Before that, there were a lot of robot, sci-fi, and action stories. One of the ways manga has expanded the 
audience so much is by focusing on stuff that hadn’t been available in American comics up until then, like slice-of-life stories, love stories, and sports stories.”

Why So Popular?
From Lone Wolf and Cub, a 1970s classic about a samurai-turned-
assassin to Iron Wok Jan, a tale of dueling chefs, the best manga pull readers in with compelling stories and characters and, of course, eye-popping art.

“The medium is restricted, with no movement, no sound, and, in most of manga, no color,” says Paul Gravett, London-based author of Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics, “And yet those very restrictions make it more powerful because the reader has to bring it to life in their heads—it is truly interactive.”

Lunning points to the complexity of manga and the willingness of its authors to allow unresolved darkness or sadness into their stories as powerful draws for 
readers of all ages. “The storylines are not 
predictable, the characters are not good or bad, and there is a lot of 
layering,” she says. “It calls on students to 
participate more intellectually than what we tend to think of as stories for children. Kids want that complexity.”

But Really, Why So Popular?
Manga has inspired trenchant 
subcultures for teens and tweens experimenting with who they want to be. In Japan, girls and boys 
regularly dress up like their favorite manga characters (called cosplay, for costume play) or in a style inspired by the genre they read.

Schoolgirls and Mobilesuits, the name of the annual workshop on manga and anime that the Minneapolis College of Art and Design has hosted since 2001, is actually shorthand for the 
two defining shojo and shonen 
character types. “Schoolgirls” represent the empowering young feminine superhero. “She uses her cuteness and innocence as a sword,” Lunning says. “Mobilesuits” references the large mechanized robot suits that young boys control in many storylines.

Fruits Basket, a popular manga (and anime) series about an orphaned girl who joins up with a family of boys (think Peter Pan and Wendy), helped spawn the Fruits Basket Fashion Show at the Schoolgirls and Mobilesuits event. Chronicled by the popular Japanese magazine Fruits that tracks street fashions, the so-called fruits style mixes traditional Japanese ​
clothing with homemade, punk, and thrift finds. The look can be ultra-feminine and even Victorian, with lots of lace, frills, and bows.

Also known as Harajuku style, after a high-fashion square in Tokyo where dressed-up teens like to parade for each other, it has been picked up by the designer Betsey Johnson and by singer Gwen Stefani through her Harajuku Lovers clothing line. “It’s become a cultural phenomenon that changes very quickly,” Lunning says.

How to Choose?
Manga is so vast that your best bet might be picking up Manga: The Complete Guide, which offers a handy rating system, or Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics, which delves into the classics with oversized, full-page artwork. Thompson recommends the websites Comics in the Classroom 
(comicsintheclassroom.net/) and MangaBlog (mangablog.net). You can also find content descriptions, 
warnings, and age ratings on most manga. Bookstore clerks and librarians can help, too.

The best advice? Read what your kids like to read because you’ll 
probably be pulled in yourself and it’s something you can share. “It gives you something to talk about that’s not about picking up their clothes or their grades,” Lunning says. “It can foster strong relationships.”