Robots in Tutus

novicomics: Critiquing Impressions of Feminine Storytelling: In...

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 11:50:49 +0100

Critiquing Impressions of Feminine Storytelling: In Defense of Moto Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas

Part One: Feminine Media & A Girls’ Comics World

This article is part one of a two-part series reviewing the reception to the English translation of Moto Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas and its English-language reviews in Western comics culture. Part One of this series concerns the cross-cultural influences of Japan’s shoujo industry, while Part 2 discusses reviews to the Heart of Thomas translation and what this reception reflects as a barrier to a Western girls’ comics industry.

While Moto Hagio’s classic shoujo manga (girls’ comic) The Heart of Thomas was released originally in Japan in 1974 and has long been heralded a classic shoujo story, the English-language translation, released on January 2^nd of 2013, drew criticism from popular reviewers for the very stylistic and narrative elements that drew Thomas’ original audience of Japanese girls and women and lack insight and context into the depths of the story that Hagio built. The very issues that reviewers critiqued Thomas for, namely, the dramatic plots, the delicate, overtly feminine visual touches, and the complex mechanisms of gender within the story, are all cornerstones of shoujo storytelling and are all very obviously coded as feminine storytelling elements. While Thomas depicts male characters, Hagio codes femininity into every element of the story, with every effort towards drawing in her assumedly female audience.

Thomas’ translation occupies a unique space in English-language comics as a beloved, popular work created by a woman for an explicitly female audience. The western-comics popular culture sphere has been crowded by male creators and stories for so long that a work as explicitly feminine as Thomas struggles to find a wide readership in English-language comics, as readers lack the tools to conceptualize such a feminine work. However, reception to Thomas illustrates the ways the explicitly feminine is undervalued and unappreciated in the mainstream Western comics world. By examining Thomas and its English-language reviews alongside literary and cultural motivations for Hagio’s storytelling styles, we can not only trace the greater significance of this landmark story, but we can also understand the barriers to bringing explicitly feminine comics to the mainstream comics world.

What is feminine media and why does it matter in respect to comics?

For the purposes of this essay, I will borrow from Sue Thornham’s description of media oriented towards women and define feminine media as “mainstream narratives which claim to speak to and about women, to inhabit a ‘women’s world’ and to offer positions of identification for their female consumers….across a number of media forms.” While femininity is a varied identity and experienced differently from individual to individual, “feminine” media is that which is obviously visually and stylistically geared towards women and girls. While gender is a purely constructed identity, women’s acceptance or preferences for overtly “feminine” media is not a biological result of their gender, but, as Lana Rakow explains in Rethinking Gender Research in Communication, due to “our gender system, which locates some people as women in a particular organization of social life, making that location appear natural and the result of biology and psychology rather than culture and politics.”

Not all women enjoy or consume this targeted feminine media, and outlets such as women’s magazines, romance novels, and soap operas face considerable criticism from feminist media scholars for their emphasis on consumerism, their reinforcement of traditional gender roles, their heterosexism and their racism. In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf writes that triggered advertising in women’s magazines keeps women “in the self-hating, ever-failing, hungry, and sexually insecure state of being aspiring ‘beauties.’” Contemporary analysis of “empowering” girl-oriented magazines finds that even when their emphasis on beauty remains about self-expression in healthy ways, “girls’ agency is often presented as explicitly tied to buying things with the promise that these goods will give them social power and independence.” Romance novels, an especially gendered genre of fiction, face considerable criticism for promoting conservative and outdated views on women in the world.

However, as Thornham writes, they also provide “pleasures of self-recognition, of finding women placed centre-stage in a ‘woman’s genre,’ of participation in a shared women’s culture.” Such fiction empowers readers through independence and identification. Similarly, soap opera, another female-targeted genre, “provides space for the creation and expression of a specific women’s culture, constructed in the spaces between, but also in opposition to, dominant or official culture.” Media created for women specifically has a reputation for having little aesthetic or intellectual value. In her discussion about soap operas, Thornham writes, “like in romance fiction, [soap operas are] regarded as trash by the dominant value system. Its fans, however, choose it in defiance of these values—as their cultural capital, and in doing so, constitute themselves as a site of opposition to dominant and official culture.” Even Wolf, in her criticism of women’s magazines, acknowledges that they have the power to bring feminist messages to ordinary women who may not be steeped in academic feminism. She states that “women’s media are the only products of popular culture that…change with women’s reality, are mostly written by women for women about women’s issues, and take women’s concerns seriously.” Women’s media provides a space for women to tell their own stories and voice their own desires in their own voices.

The lack of a visible women’s culture in mainstream comics misses an opportunity to draw a large female readership to our medium. While comics created specifically for girls in the early period of the medium’s history tried to reflect the desires and fantasies of young women, as time went by, mainstream comics presented a dominant ideology that reinforced stereotypes about women told by men. As romance comics dwindled in the 1970s, publishers told stories that, “no matter how well-drawn, read as though they were written by clueless forty-five-year-old-men—which they were.” While the bold underground wimmin’s comix creators told overtly feminist stories, a lack of mainstream stories told in the sequential form targeted towards young women and girls led to the incredibly gendered medium we know today.

The popularity of manga, and of shoujo titles in particular, amongst young people in the late 90s and early 2000s inspired many young artists who may not have been interested in the dominant comics culture to start writing and drawing within the medium. While comics like Womanthology, the revolutionary crowd-funded comics project that drew over $105,000 dollars to produce an anthology of female-created works, help galvanize a base of female creators, they are still the outlier. In fact, in a reader survey that accompanied the launch of DC’s New 52, a reboot of their comics continuity, only 7% of readers identified themselves as female. In 2012, the highest selling comic distributed by Diamond, the main publisher to all comic book stores, that was created by a women for a specifically female audience was the new reprinting of volume three of Kondansha’s shoujo Sailor Moon series as the 145^th bestselling graphic novel of the year (by contrast, in 2011, the first volume of Kodansha’s Sailor Moon rerelease ranked 91^st for its year). Fortunately, on Amazon, a number of English-language comics created by women for girls rank between the 40s-50s on Amazon’s list of bestselling comics, though the lack of visibility or promotional news about these titles is still a problem. While comics created with both genders in mind have risen in recent years, and while many if not most comics by independent publishers like Oni, Fantagraphics, and Top Shelf create works that take both genders in mind, few comics created for a specifically female audience, let alone an audience of young girls, exist in Western comics. The influence of shoujo and manga in general has in turn shaped the western comics world. Renowned contemporary American and Canadian comics and cartoon artists draw inspiration from shoujo titles. Brian Lee O’Malley, Hope Larson, and Adventure Time artist Natasha Allegri all cite shoujo series Sailor Moon as an influence on their art. Other creators, like Josh Tierney, the writer behind Archaia Press’ Spera, or Faith Erin Hicks of Friends with Boys, have cited other shoujo series’ as influences on their love of comics.

Shoujo stories have the advantage of a large, female-driven comics industry backed by the most powerful publishing companies in Japan, where deciphering the interests and desires of girls shapes the entire industry. Publishers, editors, and artists rely on the concept of ningen kankei (human relations) to construct comics for young women. Ningen kankei, as defined by Jennifer Prough in Straight from the Heart: Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shoujo Manga, is concerned with “person-to-person association or interaction with society” as well as “Relations between individuals including correspondence of emotions.” These relationships not only shape characters within girls’ stories, but also “holds fast the structures of economics, relativity, authenticity, and ideology within the shoujo manga industry.” These definitions rely on gendered assumptions about what women want, but they also are a powerful tool for introducing young women to comics. In 2008, the Mainichi Newspaper in Japan conducted a survey about reading practices, and of the 4800 men and women polled, 47% of late teenage women reported reading manga magazines, with 42% of women in their twenties reporting in. Seventy-three percent (73%) of teenaged women reported reading at least one manga book per month, while 53% of women in their twenties reported reading manga. Shoujo stories, once drawn by men and concerned with romance and perpetuating a male-formed feminine ideal, shifted thanks to a group of revolutionary group that decided to reclaim girls’ comics. These creators in turn inspired a host of creators that expanded the genre’s popularity both in Japan and abroad. Hagio, a member of this group, is inextricably tied to the popularity of shoujo in her role as an iconic visionary in girl’s comics.

Hagio and the Year 24 Group

The English translation boys’ love comic The Heart of Thomas was released by indie comics publisher Fantagraphics on January 2, 2013 after months of delays. Heart of Thomas follows Fantagraphics’ 2010 release of A Drunken Dream and Other Stories, a collection compiling several of Hagio’s other notable short works. Hagio heralds from a group informally known as the Year 24 Group, one of the most successful movements of women in comics the world has ever seen. The Year 24 Group, or, to some, the Magnificent 49ers, were a group of Japanese female shoujo artists born on or around 1949 (or, the 24^th year of the Showa period in Japan). The Year 24 Group included such artists as Keiko Takemiya, Moto Hagio, Riyoko Ikeda, Yasuko Aoike, and a handful or two of other female artists. Hagio and Takemiya were roommates, and many of the other creators in the group would go to their apartment to work and collaborate. At the time they were working, girl’s comics followed a lot of the same conventions as they did in the US—most were romantic, and nearly all of them were written by men and enforced severe gender roles. The women of the Year 24 Group wanted to write comics for women by women, and pioneered many of the shoujo manga conventions that are commonplace now. The creators within the group explored genres as diverse as science fiction, fantasy, romance, slice-of-life, mystery, and action comics, all aimed at capturing the imaginations of young women. The works they created, like Ikeda’s Rose of Versailles, or Hagio’s Heart of Thomas all influenced all of the manga that would come later. They infused the shoujo manga genre with a real concern for the inner lives of women and girls, as perceived by real women and girls. They also paved the way for later female creators like Rumiko Takahashi, (Inu Yasha, Ranma ½), the ladies of CLAMP (Card Captor Sakura, Chobits, X1999), or Naoko Takeuchi (Sailor Moon), among others.

Works Cited:

Thornham, Sue, “Narrating Femininity.” Women, Feminism and Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. 55-83

Wolf, Naomi: From The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women: NY: Doubleday, 1991. Pp 58-85

Keller, Jessalynn. “Feminist Editors and the New Girl Glossies: Fashionable Feminism or Just Another Sexist Rag?” Women’s Studies International Forum 34 (2011) I-12.

Rakow, Lana F. “Rethinking Gender Research in Communication,” Journal of Communication, 36, no. 4 (August 1986), 11-26.

Wolf, Naomi: From The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women: NY: Doubleday, 1991. Pp 58-85

Keller, Jessalynn. “Feminist Editors and the New Girl Glossies: Fashionable Feminism or Just Another Sexist Rag?” Women’s Studies International Forum 34 (2011) I-12.

Rakow, Lana F. “Rethinking Gender Research in Communication,” Journal of Communication, 36, no. 4 (August 1986), 11-26.

Prough, Jennifer. Straight from the Heart: Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shojo Manga. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011.

Robbins, Trina. From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Women’s Comics from Teens to Zines. 1999. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999.

Web Citations

Fantagraphics’ Heart of Thomas Release Information

Womanthology Sales

2012 Sailor Moon Sales via Diamond

2011 Sailor Moon Sales via Diamond

Amazon Comics Sales

New 52 Survey Results

Mainichi Newspaper survey results

Bryan Lee O’Malley Sailor Moon Fanart

Hope Larson Sailor Moon Fanart

Faith Erin Hicks Shoujo Influences

I can’t wait for part 2 of this essay ^__^

ccwasfone: bizcochowar: Last issue of Flowers magazine came...

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 09:51:57 +0100

ccwasfone:

bizcochowar:

Last issue of Flowers magazine came with this awesome Rumiko Takahashi meets Moto Hagio feature.

SWAG.

AAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!

"And for some, images of male homosexuality - both “real” and fantastic - helped them to..."

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 15:29:28 +0100

“And for some, images of male homosexuality - both “real” and fantastic - helped them to understand and validate their own same-sex desire or nonnormative gender identification.”

- from Flower Tribes and Female Desire: Complicating Early Female Consumption of Male Homosexuality in Shojo Manga by James Welker

"… it is only a person’s mind, which is bound by the gender dichotomy, that mistakes that..."

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 14:39:56 +0100

“… it is only a person’s mind, which is bound by the gender dichotomy, that mistakes that which is not a girl for a boy”

- Ueno Chizuko on the beautiful boy in early shounen-ai.

Flower Tribes and Female Desire: Complicating Early Female Consumption of Male Homosexuality in Shojo Manga by James Welker

Suggested activities for genderqueer robots, when not consuming...

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 19:09:00 +0100

Suggested activities for genderqueer robots, when not consuming vast amounts of pop culture: a nice relaxing tea bath.

New blog post: The continuing adventures of Robots in Tutus

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 19:12:06 +0100

New blog post: The continuing adventures of Robots in Tutus:

The english-language manga boom is over, they said. You would honestly never know from the size of our reading list.

angelfishing: Classy tennis grunts!

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 11:59:10 +0100

angelfishing:

Classy tennis grunts!

Viki streams Oniisama e

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 08:59:30 +0100

Viki streams Oniisama e:

Viki streams Oniisama e (Brother dear brother) legally. OMG.

she observed, in a strictly heterosexual manner suitable for...

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 18:45:52 +0100

she observed, in a strictly heterosexual manner suitable for conservative audiences and not in the slightest because the general rampant lesbianism of 70s shojo was getting to her.

No, wait.

novicomics: CONSUMPTION JUNCTION: SHOJO EDITION Yup, that’s...

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 12:00:06 +0100

novicomics:

CONSUMPTION JUNCTION: SHOJO EDITION

Yup, that’s what we’re calling it now. We’ve decided to switch things up here at Novi and do one more detailed consumption post every week. This week we bring you CC and all the fantastic things that didn’t make it into her month of shoujo articles.

Shoujo Manga Month is going to be over in a few hours, so I want to look back over some of the things that didn’t make it into my articles in this week’s consumption post: CC Edition. Here is an image-based consumption post of all the cool stuff I had to throw on the scrap heap due to time constraints.

This is the giant stash of shoujo books that somehow influenced me during my research through the month of February. And this isn’t even everything, either, it’s just most of it.

Continuing on, here are a few clips from the stack of volume 1s I had laying around my apartment, just to give you a sample of what I’ve been looking at all month.

But first let’s talk about From Eroica With Love, the story of a dashing thief, a handsome nerd, and a cantankerous army dude. Also boners. Check out this man sandwich over here.

I have never read a manga that was as gleeful about dick jokes until this moment and it is absolutely glorious.

The creator, Yasuko Aoike, was among the renowned 24 Year Group. (If you would like to learn more about them, please check out this post I made on the subject a few weeks ago or this amazing tumblr.

So many of the landmark features of the 24 Year Group are on display here and I am absolutely giddy about it.

Elegant fashion:

(I am seriously freaking out here guys, how am I going to find a v-necked jumpsuit this fierce?? The answer is that I can’t, because there’s no way something this amazing exists in real life)

Also, sweet, elegant panel structure

From Eroica With Love is pretty obviously a boys love comic. I didn’t have much time to talk about the history and importance of boys-love comics on shoujo manga this time around, and while I wasn’t super well versed in the genre before Shoujo Manga Month started, I can appreciate how fun and ridiculous this story was.

I mean really, it’s beautiful. Also v-necks.

Best panel:

I tried to locate this book on amazon, but the results were pretty lacking.

Now let’s talk about Kodocha, which was this cute and amazing story of a child star and her annoying classmate. At this point three weeks later, there are only two things I strongly remember from this series:

1.) Sana gives absolutely 0 fucks

2.) Akito’s creepy-looking dad is the steward of all of my future nightmares.

3.) SANA’S MOM HAS A SQUIRREL LIVING IN HER HAIR.

Finally, there was Marmalade Boy, which was cute but made me a bit uncomfortable what with the polyamorous parents and step-sibling romances.

On an unrelated note, I give this hot teacher 4/5 Tuxedo Masks.

Look at this sweater. Look at these glasses. Look at this man. How am I supposed to pay attention to the cutesy not-actually-incestuous, slightly-awkward romance with this guy’s dreamboatiness getting all up in the way??

I don’t know if you can tell from the pages and pages of articles here, but I think SHOUJO MANGA IS THE FUCKING BOMB. This stuff is almost everything that I’ve read this month, and I just want you to appreciate the IRREVERSABLE DAMAGE this research will probably do to my romantic expectation in my everyday life. All in all, I read a lot of really cute stories with interesting characters, but a lot of the titles here that I didn’t cover were left out due to a lack of time or a lack of imagination on my part. Regardless, thanks for following along with me.

This series of shojo-posts only lack one very important element of shojo: lesbians.

novicomics: SHOUJO MANGA MONTH: INTRO AND A BIT ON WEDDING...

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 12:00:05 +0100

novicomics:

SHOUJO MANGA MONTH: INTRO AND A BIT ON WEDDING PEACH

Hey NOVI readers, are you ready to ogle some hunky dreamboats, receive heartfelt confessions of undying love, and witness a couple of sexual assaults? If you answered yes to at least one of the above, you’re in luck because it’s SHOUJO MANGA MONTH with CC.

About Shoujo Manga

In A Sociology of Japanese Ladies’ Comics, Kinko Ito categorizes love and human emotion as the eternal themes found in shoujo manga.

Other themes:

Elegant clothing

Rich character interaction

A long look into the inner lives of girls

I don’t feel entirely comfortable calling “shoujo” a genre because shoujo manga groups many genres together, mainly drawing from the magical girl, boys-love, slice-of-life, romance, and fantasy stories. The name “shoujo manga” more closely describes the audience of the titles rather than the story itself.

Female protagonists must be somehow unreal, but relatable enough that young women can live through their experiences. The most fun elements of shoujo manga are the larger-than-life, extravagant ones: Magical princes from outer space. Hidden powers locked inside of your makeup compact. Cat dance instructors.

I remember putting up with some absolutely terrible shoujo manga simply becausethe female characters seemed a lot more well-rounded than ones in books aimed at boys ever did. There are not a lot of comics made for women, period. Even fewer are created by women, or lack some sort of condescending merchandizing tie-in. Every time a girl speaks up and says, “Hey, if you want us to read comics, you should make a space for us,” the replies are always the same dismissive bullshit we comics ladies are pretty used to by now. Male comics fans: talking about the intersection of comics and gender isn’t played out just because you can’t see how it affects you. Shoujo manga provided a space for us to exist and while it was a foreign space for us English-language readers, it seemed a lot more respectful than most of our other options at the time.

A lot of women in comics look like this:

And a lot of women in “normal” manga looks like this:

And these are a far cry from the worst examples I could find. I mean for godssake, ignoring the fact that her top must also function as a bra, I still can’t understand how on earth you can you can see her buttcrack through her undershirt, sweatervest and skirt.

Yes, I know about Ghost World, Blankets, and The Runaways…now. I didn’t back then, and even still, all of these titles are written by guys.

Why Shoujo Manga?

Shoujo manga exposed a lot of young North American girls to comics for the first time back in the mid-to-late ‘90s and early 2000s. It showed us that sequential art can exist for us too, and we can fill roles other than that of the hyper-sexualized vixen or the woman in the refrigerator. Our experiences and obsessions are valid and magical and worth exploring, and somebody out there cared enough to explore them. Yeah, I realize that shoujo manga is just as chock-full of gang-rape and unrealistic depictions of enduring romance as it is filled with beautiful, finely-inked panels and nuanced emotional depth. But for me, as a young girl who had eschewed superhero titles, this space was perfectly safe and welcoming. It appealed to me and pandered shamelessly to everything I was obsessed with. Though I can recognize the tropes a mile away, I’m still exceptionally fond of these fun, occasionally gimmicky stories.

Units of Measurement

I am going to rate all of the shoujo stuff I talk about on three scales:

1) Hunkasaurus-o-meter:

Because what would a shoujo manga be without studly dudes? It’s like 1/3^rd of the attraction (the other 2/3rds are, in this order: pretty clothes, and cat dance instructors). This scale is rated between 1 to 5 Tuxedo Masks. Why Tuxedo Mask? Because he is the hunky shoujo manga boyfriend of all hunky shoujo manga boyfriends, obviously.

2) Unfortunate Implications-o-meter:

A lot of shoujo manga romances are pretty unsettling. Sometimes a sweep of the hand can explain away a sexual assault or an incestuous relationship. Yuu Watase can’t even write a simple slice-of-life school comedy without gang rape and pregnancy drama. Masami Tsuda’s Kare Kano, a sweet, humorous coming-of-age tale about two competitive students in love concluded with [SPOILER ALERT! CLICK IF YOU DARE]. The Unfortunate Implications-o-meter is where I’ll talk about all that weird shit that comes standard with shoujo love stories. Girls doing stupid things for love, marrying their (step???) brothers and getting raped by their boyfriends “in a good way” will be evaluated in this category. This grouping is rated between 1 to 5 Soichiro Arimas, because fuck that guy.

3) Overall score. This is just how readable the book is, on a scale of 1 to 10. Anything rated as a 1 is likely to bum you out so badly that you run head-first into a train, while something rated around a 10 is a glorious, godly beacon of pure cherry blossoms raining upon us from above.

I visited my local Austin Books and Comics Sidekick Store and picked up volume 1 of several titles. Today, we’re just going to start with the first thing I found and branch out from there—HERE WE GO:

WEDDING PEACH

Publisher in the US: Viz: 2004

Years Published in Japan: 1994-1996

Year Sailor Moon was Published in Japan: 1991-1997

Hunkasaurus-o-meter

out of 5

The romantic lead isn’t really all that great. It’s pretty much your basic shoujo love story: two people are just shitheads to each other until they fall in love. I mean, he’s not horrible, but considering that almost everything about this manga is a poor imitation of Sailor Moon, he is no Tuxedo Mask.

It could really be worse I guess. YAWN.

Unfortunate Implications-o-meter

½ an Arima. Thankfully, nobody gets raped but I really hate the “let’s just be shitheads until we fall in love” approach to romance.

Wedding Peach: An Overview

The absolute worst thing a shoujo manga can be is mediocre. A good shoujo title is either moving with its believable characterization or so horrible that you can’t get through it without crying through your laughter. Wedding Peach tries so hard to be Sailor Moon that it fails utterly in both categories. It’s too derivative to be any good, and considering that it’s basing itself on something super solid, it’s not really all that bad either (which somehow just makes everything much, much worse).

Wedding Peach reads like it’s working through a checklist. The story doesn’t have the decency of being over-the-top and the art isn’t charming enough to keep me reading. There are some cute reaction faces. That’s pretty much it.

We start off with Momoko, the ditzy heroine, learning that she is actually the valiant warrior of love Wedding Peach.

In contrast, here is a panel from Volume 1 of Sailor Moon:

Some super bad dudes are going to ruin newlyweds’ happiness by poisoning their hearts. They are also after an arbitrary number of magical artifacts which will help them take over the world. The bad guys are so poorly ominous and accidentally goofy that it just makes sense that Wedding Peach and her dippy friends are the greatest threat to their evil plan. There’s some mumbo jumbo about dark powers but I’m still confused about their end goal here. The villains are apparently demons and their plan is to I guess ruin everybody’s honeymoon happiness by cockblocking them in the most bizarre way possible.

I’d be pretty pissed off too if somebody replaced my uterus with a creepy, defective furby. The Token Shoujo Animal Mascot is a bad guy, in case you hadn’t noticed. This would be an interesting twist on the usual formula if only 1) he wasn’t such an annoying little butthole and 2) it wasn’t obvious that he is going to switch sides eventually over the course of the story.

Luckily Wedding Peach, and her gratingly irritating friends Stupid Flower Names 1 and 2 defeat evil and the day is won.

I’m still holding out for HOLY EYELASH CURLER PEONY GRADIENT or MYSTICAL TAMPON HYRDANGEA KALEIDOSCOPE myself.

FINAL SCORE: 3/10

It’s pretty lame but there are definitely worse things out there. On the other hand, Sailor Moon or Magic Knight Rayearth are stronger magical girl titles. Wedding Peach, or at least Volume 1 of Wedding Peach, lacks the two things a shoujo manga needs to achieve real memorability: stupidly extravagant elegance, or warm-hearted sincerity. The whole endeavor reads like a merchandizing cash-in designed to rake in money from Sailor Moon fans. Magical girl manga usually follows the same few plot points. Transformation sequences and derpy romance are a part of the package and readers of the genre know that the important part is how these things happen rather than that they do. However, for a manga about bliss and happiness, Wedding Peach manages to blunder through the usual magical girl cornerstones joylessly and mechanically without really endearing you to anybody.

The other thing that bothered me about Wedding Peach was the way the female characters tear each other down. Pre-transformation, Momoko’s friends pick at her self-esteem and insult everything she does, but once they all transform suddenly they’re ready to throw themselves into harm’s way for her. If I wanted to watch a bunch of shitty people who are supposedly friends belittle each other, I’d watch Glee. Wedding Peach was derivative and uninteresting, and I don’t plan on finishing out the series.

novicomics: SHOUJO MANGA MONTH: MOTO HAGIO DOES EVERYTHING...

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:00:05 +0100

novicomics:

SHOUJO MANGA MONTH: MOTO HAGIO DOES EVERYTHING RIGHT

Last week we began our elegant, stylish voyage through shoujo manga, or Japanese girls’ comics. This week we’re going to go a bit further. If you want to get some background on what shoujo manga is and why it’s so important, please check out last week’s article.

Last week we discussed the most egregious type of shoujo manga: the painfully boring, derivative cash cow. This week we’re going to talk about a thoroughly good collection of shoujo stories, why these stories are so essential to girl comics as a whole, and why all this gabbing about feelings and emotions is actually pretty cool stuff. Please check your cynicism at the door because this is gonna be some earnest real talk.

As always with manga, please remember to read the clips from “A Drunken Dream” from right to left.

The Magnificent 24 Year Group / The Magnificent Forty Niners

Moto Hagio belonged to a group of manga artists called the Magnificent 24 Year Group, or the Magnificent Forty Niners. This group of artists all hung out together and made awesome, mind blowing comics in the early ‘70s. You like good shoujo manga? Thank them for it. Are you into sweet, beautiful dude on dude lovin’? Yeah, these guys pretty much started that trend too. The Forty Niners themselves say that critics and fans made up the nickname, but they never thought of themselves that way. The name itself refers to the fact that most of the members were born around 1949, the 24^th year of the Showa Period in Japan. Some argue that the only members of the 24 Year Group were those that hung around the apartment shared by Moto Hagio and Keiko Takemiya between 1970 to 1972.

Before the 24 Year Group, girls’ comics were mostly drawn by dudes and didn’t properly address the actual thoughts and feelings of girls—unless they were talking about love and romance. (Sound familiar?) It took the mad creativity of the Magnificent Forty Niners to really turn all of that on its head. The Forty Niners pushed the conversation in girls’ comics from the default I-want-a-boyfriend talk to self-actualization through emotional journeys. They tackled themes such as “science fiction, rock and roll music, horror, homosexuality, gender, identity, and fantasy” and weaved stories about “sportswomen, epics, love between boys, and history or social problems.”

So why does this matter? For essentially the first time, shoujo manga was made by women for girls and was real live arts. That’s really something we’ve never mimicked over here in America Comics Land, on any significant scale. This was a group of badass ladies saying badass things and changing the conversation about women and comics completely.

There isn’t a lot of further reading, aside from, say, Wikipedia, but I highly recommend this amazing tumblr.

The translator of this volume, Matt Thorn, is also a huge resource for learning more about the Twenty Four Year Group. The 2003 interview with Moto Hagio from the back of the collection can be found here and his website covers a lot of interesting stuff about shoujo manga overall.

Making Something Beautiful and Real

I believe that the “Drunken Dream” collection of stories lays the groundwork for measuring all of the wonderful components of girls’ comics. It’s a heck of a yardstick, I’ll tell you that. While some stories are weaker than others, as a whole, “A Drunken Dream And Other Stories” spans the breadth of what makes shoujo manga great.

Borrowing from Kinko Ito’s work A Sociology of Japanese Ladies’ Comics and my own observations from last week, here is my rubric for measuring what makes up a real, excellent shoujo manga:

Similar stylistic elements—commonly including large eyes, lack of or reduced secondary sex characteristics (such as breasts), elegant clothing and rich, luxurious environments.

Focus on character development, interaction, and feelings above action and plot.

Female characters are multidimensional, having non-romantic goals, desires, thoughts, and experiences.

The “Drunken Dream” collection isn’t just a beautiful compellation of good comics. It’s a good collection that is so essentially shoujo, that it’s good because it’s shoujo. These elements—the stylistic elegance, the connectedness to human emotion, that’s what’s great here.

Some US reviewers take issue with the “melodrama” of Hagio’s work in this collection, deploring that the characters and plot points are too simple and obvious to challenge readers. I think those simple plot elements give the comics their emotional charge!

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud talked about how simple character designs allow readers to infuse the character in question with their own personality—and by projecting ourselves in, we’re making the act of reading comics a bigger emotional investment. This is because we can anthropomorphize anything and make it our own.

The simple plot devices in Hagio’s works act a lot like the simple character designs in some other comics. We see our own loneliness echoed back in her characters, the same spark of life. Hagio gives us stories we can relate to, and in their simple structure we see our own lives.

The obvious symbols don’t really matter that much. They’re just points to keep you moving on your way. The experiences of the characters are much more important than any mind-blowing realization at the end of the story—so pretty much, Inception this is not. In Iguana Girl, you find out that the main character is a human being and not actually an iguana like she is drawn. Her iguana face is a metaphor for the low self-esteem her mother passed down to her. Iguana Girl doesn’t have any real “big reveal moment” hinged on that mindfuck moment where you realize that she’s really a person. You learn about that incredibly early in the story. The comic is really about one girl’s struggle with low self-esteem. Isn’t that incredibly powerful in its own right?

Even the super simple “Girl With Puppy On Porch,” lays itself out on the table for you with its obviousness. After a few pages, you realize that the girl with her puppy is just a kid trying to keep the terrible world from destroying her beautiful imagination. No mystery, no suspense, just pretty much a message saying “the world sucks, but doesn’t it suck that things have to be this way?” Hagio is opening up some real genuine shoujo manga catharsis for all of us to share in the experience.

The “Drunken Dream” collection is a buffet of emotion.

Anger and helplessness.

Isolation.

Grief.

Forgiveness.

It’s impossible to read through these panels and not feel your own life in them—and that’s why Hagio is such a brilliant writer. Shoujo manga is all about feelings, and Hagio is the master of feelings. The Queen of Feelings. THE EMPRESS OF FEELINGS.

I think I’m getting ahead of myself.

I had never heard of the 24 Year Group before reading this anthology, but I feel like my life has been dramatically enriched by this collection. I want to buy three copies of it so that I can loan 2 to new people and have a back up loan copy for the eventual time when one of them gets stolen.

Fantagraphics will be putting out an English-language release of one of Moto Hagio’s most renowned works, Heart of Thomas, this summer. You can bet that you’ll be hearing from me about it as soon as it’s out.

I wish I could be this articulate about Hagio Moto. But she just makes me flail madly.

And every single time people talk about big eyes in manga in general and shojo in particular, I want to bring up Understanding comics.

150 dollars?! WHAT IS THIS FUCKERY? How will I get my girly...

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 09:45:46 +0100

150 dollars?! WHAT IS THIS FUCKERY? How will I get my girly manga academia fix now? D:

"Will you never get married?” he asked. “Who knows what might happen in life. An accident..."

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 13:31:40 +0100

“Will you never get married?” he asked.
“Who knows what might happen in life. An accident can happen,” I answered, “like the other day when a stone fell from a rooftop and killed a passerby.””

- Ada Nilsson, lesbian hero and sex educator, refuses an offer of marriage.

tentacle-chan: Oniisama E This show. omg. The ancient art...

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 22:05:05 +0100

tentacle-chan:

Oniisama E

This show. omg.

The ancient art of lesbian throwing

yomigaere: naranxas: utena butt IT SPARKLES.

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 15:07:21 +0100

yomigaere:

naranxas:

utena butt

IT SPARKLES.

I’ve been watching Legend of the Galactic Heroes! So...

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 19:15:56 +0100

I’ve been watching Legend of the Galactic Heroes! So let’s talk about characters and dynamics. HERE are a bunch of ~~complete bastards~~ military dudes. They come in pairs apparently. (Reinhard + Kircheis, Reuental + Mittenmeyer.) I really enjoy watching the dynamics here; the former has a kind of office/batman feel to it, and the latter is, I don’t even know, full of snarky comments and very deeply buried feelings. It’s a delight to watch, let me tell you: very hard characters with a bit of spark, something that comes out in their interaction, just barely.

But the thing is: I want these characters to be ladies. They are never ladies! Why are they never ladies? Yeah, I do know that one. But I want them to be ladies so badly. I want ladies to be allowed to interact like that. Don’t you think Reuental (FOR EXAMPLE) would make a delightful lady? But in general, these kinds of characters.

If anyone has some appropriate ladies for me they will be accepted with gratitude. Just sayin’. I know shonen sports series have a similar dynamic sometimes to these military settings, but do girl-focused sports shows do it as well?

Things that Sparkle in Oniisama e: Kaoru’s Righteous Fury

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:17:42 +0100

Things that Sparkle in Oniisama e: Kaoru’s Righteous Fury

Things that Sparkle in Oniisama e: evil spiky combs!

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:01:52 +0100

Things that Sparkle in Oniisama e: evil spiky combs!

Of course one of the big things about shojo manga and anime is...

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 19:40:26 +0100

Of course one of the big things about shojo manga and anime is clothes, and showing them off is a big part of a lot of series. It’s leaping out at me as especially obvious, though, in Oniisama e; more or less every time a character appears in a new outfit (once or twice an episode in the case of, for example, Nanako and Mariko) we get a pan shot of them to make sure we get the whole thing. Pan shots are also great for older anime since hoorah, saving money on animation; but it turns into a feature when it’s used like this.

(Shots pieced together from series of screencaps.)