Yes, i got started on Shuriken as much as Ben Dunn’s stuph. The key events for me were Dark Horse translating Outlanders! and Anime Eigo releasing Vampire Princess Miyu. I bought an LD player just to watch the Miyu LD, because i liked the first VHS tape so much. I still like LD better than DVD…

Do i hope girls’ comics and boys’ comics prosper alike? Well, i guess i’m prejudiced. Boys’ comics in Japan tend to be more combat oriented (not that shoujo can’t have combat), and women draw women prettier than men do. But you are of course right; AMG is a great read. It was even before it was translated…

Can comics bridge the literacy gap? When i was growing up, we had Classics Illustrated, which had old, well known, not copyrighted stories in US comic form. I enjoyed it, but it never inspired me to read Ivanhoe, or anything else for that matter.

It did not work as well as an equivalent manga series would have worked, because it was inspired by the work of DC, while manga tended to be inspired by cinema. There is a very different pacing in these two orientations, and Tezuka-sama is not the only example. Even Takahashi Rumiko and Watase Yuu tend to have larger panels with more detail and / or closeups as the action abates and you move to interior monologue and small groups conversing. Kouga Yun, Kakinouchi Narumi, Adachi, Clamp and Takemiya Keiko are even clearer examples, though not as readily available in English.

But even with the more cinematic style, literature oriented works like Tezuka Osamu’s Faust were not exactly commercial successes. I don’t know that i think this is a route to literacy.

Matya no baka (Mark the Idiot) is a name i tagged myself with in the ancient days, the before time, when i collected manga in Japanese without being able to read any of it. The owners of Sasuga found the name quite humorous. But not as amazing as the group of MIT Anime folk who regularly bought their takoban just because the art was stunning. Or as amazing as some of us actually starting to memorize kanji to be able to follow the stories, not just follow the drawing.

mata ne,
Matya no baka

OTOH, even if this were the case there is still considerable support for your contention of traditional European thought remaining predominant by virtue of the fact that Manga/Anime from the time of Osamu Tazuka to the present day has been openly and cheerfully influenced by ours as well. “Licensed by Royalty” is an anime that’s a good example of this – in the course of the series it pays tribute to just about every spy show of the 60s that you could name and the show’s initial format was not unlike that of “Man From Uncle” or “The Avengers”. So it may be that our fascination with manga is not *entirely* innocent of our enjoyment of our own culture and cultural values. ^_~

Matt,
Zak’s post was interesting but unpersuasive. He sounds too much like someone who would hate any place that wasn’t the neighborhood where he grew up. My feeling is that if you hate a culture merely because it doesn’t require everyone in it to think the way you do then you aren’t going like your own very much either. Still that was Zak’s opinion. Why not form one of your own instead of just adapting his? Is disliking a culture merely because he told you to what to think really all that clever? o_O

Maty.
15 years? I’m impressed. I fell into the Pool of the Drowned Manga Addict in 1997 when I encountered AMG so I’m definitely a neofan compared to you. ^_^

You’re very right about the storyline angle. Based on what I read in the CBG, as well as the comix of the day, it seems to me that one weakness of our own comics is that anything that wasn’t superheroes was dropped which limited the storylines and then, by the late 1970s and 80s, too many of the superhero comics were written by people who hated superheros which took the number of possible plots (& the quality) down even further. >_

Well, i find it encouraging any who.

torchpraise: GAACK! You mean someone else on this list has watched Toy-a???? How did you like it?

Matt: Yes, i admit it… i don’t know Japan, not really. Not after reading manga and translated literature for years, not after listening to J-Pop as my primary audio wallpaper, not after my visit. To me, Japan’s pop culture is still The Hobby.

Maty no baka

Top Ten Rankings – The rankings are at the bottom of the page.

1) Grand Theft Auto San Andreas [PS2] (USA)
2) Halo 2 [Xbox] (USA)
3) Need for Speed Underground [PS2] (Canada)
4) Metal Gear Solid 3 [PS2] (Japan)
5) Madden NFL 2005 [PS2] (USA)
6) Need for Speed Underground [Xbox] (Canada)
7) Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 3 [PS2] (Japan)
8) Ghost Recon 2 [Xbox] (USA)
9) Call of Duty: Finest Hour [PS2] (USA)
10) Metroid Prime 2 [GameCube] (USA)

The nationality is that of the development company, not the distributor. While Metroid is a Nintendo IP, the Metroid Prime games were written by Retro Studios in Austin.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (USA)
Halo 2 (USA)
Need for Speed: Underground (Canada)
[Appears twice for different platforms]
Call of Duty: Finest Hour (USA)
[Appears twice for different platforms]
Metal Gear Solid 3 (Japan)
WWE Smackdown vs. Raw (Japan)
Dragonball Z Budokai 3 (Japan)
Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 (USA)

These are console game rankings – the PC market is almost completely dominated by US and some Canadian developers. Japan may produce a greater number of console games, but I’d bet American developers have a majority of the market share in North America.

Uuuuuurgh… urge to kill all pretentious little otaku… rising…

A Japanophile is someone who doesn’t really know Japan.

Rots of Ruck, Lound-eye!

We still read or reenact Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Every child knows the stories, even if they’re not aware they are Grimm’s tales. The same can be said for Aesop’s Fables and Biblical parables. These stories form the themes of many movies, even if they’re carefully hidden. Dickens ‘A Christmas Carol’ is still being retold in various and tangled forms.

European philosophy, from the Greeks onward, is still the basis for the Western Cannon.