The popularity of manga, I believe, is best explained by Philip Pullman in his Carnegie Medal speech. It's about telling stories, he says, character and plot working within the traditional narrative framework, where "events matter" and the results are "works of literary art where the writers have used all the resources of their craft."
Pullman isn't addressing manga per se, but young adult and children's literature. For the sake of argument, though, the one can be fairly substituted for the other. In fact, Pullman has written a Victorian-era superhero comic, Spring-Heeled Jack, and the His Dark Materials trilogy can be compared on many levels to Kaori Yuki's Angel Sanctuary.
Manga is a thriving expression of the serial novel, very much the form that Dickens left it, with authors similarly sweating under the pressure of constant deadlines. In Japan, more than other artistic mass medium, manga provides its artists a meritocratic path of upward mobility (in terms of political editorial content, something the blog has accomplished as a medium).
The anime series Comic Party documents this path very well, emphasizing the importance of the audience as well as the pure, creative impulse. A more relevant analogy in the U.S. is television, with its entertainment products filling hundreds of channels and attempting to appeal to every possible viewer in every possible genre. If Joss Whedon had been born Japanese, there's no doubt that Buffy would have started out as a manga.
Like television (NTSC), manga is low-resolution, with even lower budgets and created by even smaller production teams, giving individual producers considerable latitude within the structure of the medium. This kind of scale attracts talent, observes Whedon of television, because writers and producers "can control their product. They're given something resembling respect."
At the same time, television (especially the fund-drive driven PBS), like manga, must maximize its audience. It lives or dies according to what the viewers thinks, not the critics, and massaging the viewer's ego isn't enough: it must entertain. It is episodic, and at the beginning of every episode, it has a limited time in which to ensnare the audience in the unfolding narrative. As Pullman warns fellow writers,
[Y]ou can't put the plot on hold while you cut artistic capers for the amusement of your sophisticated readers, because, thank God, your readers are not sophisticated. They've got more important things in mind than your dazzling skill with wordplay. They want to know what happens next.
Nevertheless, the directness of this demand--fans who know what they like and don't mind saying so--does not make consumers of the popular narrative genres "supernaturally wise little angels gifted with the power of seeing the truth that the dull eyes of adults miss." Concludes Pullman, they are simply more honest about that inherent need in all of us for good stories, unlike "those limp and jaded creatures who think it more important to seem sophisticated."
Or as Stephen King scolded his audience at the 2003 National Book Awards, "What do you think? You get social or academic brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own [popular] culture?"
What King is describing also unfortunately applies to the evolution of the comic book into the "graphic novel" in the U.S. market over the past quarter century. Although some writers like Frank Miller and Neil Gaiman have taken the traditional audience along with them for the ride, too many American comic writers instead tag after their "literary fiction" cousins (epitomized by Jonathan Franzen's horror of being read by Oprah), in pursuit of critical "respectability" rather than artistic reach.
Far more that the American comic then or now, or even anime--the more famous child it spawned (and whose voracious appetite it continually feeds)--manga covers a quality of technique, a reach, an inventiveness, a response to and respect for its audience, and a spectrum of genres as wide (and as high and low) as to match, or exceed, that of any "legitimate" school of literature. It is what you would expect of a mature artistic medium.
Boy heroes vs. Girl heroes
When it comes to melodrama and romantic comedy, at least, I lean towards the shoujo (
) genres. (1) At an aesthetic level, my impression of much of shounen (
) manga is that, to quote from Spinal Tap, the volume is always turned up to "eleven." It's a style that works better in the "cooler" medium of anime, but still has the effect of WRITING IN ALL CAPS.
An exception is Kosuke Fujishima, whose manga and anime, such as Oh My Goddess and You're Under Arrest, is often taken for shoujo, as is Katsura Masakazu's Video Girl Ai. Kou Fumizuki's Aoi Yori Aoshi starts out as shoujo melodrama, and then abruptly--and regrettably--jumps the tracks and careens into the low-brow shounen camp. The distinguishing characteristics here are a male point-of-view and an unwillingness to move the relationship forward (at least with hentai, relationships are being consummated).
But you do end up with something of a duck problem when it comes to categorization.
Shoujo manga of course falls into its own thematic ruts, "dreadlit" on one hand, fluffy light romance on the other. But even romance is a more compelling human challenge than that which faces the average surburban boy--sans extraterrestrial invasions and pending apocalypses. Which is why they so often invade and are so often pending. If a man of action can't shoot it or pummel it or otherwise triumph over it, things tend to grind to a standstill.
Even for the brooding Hamlet, the inner struggled is inevitably externalized in swordplay. It is nobler, the prince concludes, "to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them." Not necessarily so with women. As Hayao Miyazaki acknowledges, his heroine Nausicaa is mostly unconcerned with avenging her father's death, something that would be impossible for a man of any cultural background to ignore.
Yet the appeal of such characters need not be gender-specific. As Gerard Jones argues in Killing Monsters, "girls have long been able to identify with male characters to experience courage, calm and mastery in fantasy. Now boys are showing themselves able to identify with female characters to experience other parts of the human spectrum, without feeling that they're sacrificing their [masculinity]."
In purely structural terms, shoujo (and yuri) manga are better able to meet the demands of substantive plot and character development, rather than simply Xeroxing the Campbellian monomyth. Unlike boys, girls face a more uncertain future in the modern world, higher hurdles, but also a greater range of potential and possible options, presenting a richer palette of choices to the dramaticist. This leads in turn to more interesting conflict, grist for the demanding and insatiable mills of storytelling.
Ultimately, though, distinguishing between the two can end up being an exercise in nuance. For example, Kei Toume's Lament of the Lamb and Sing Yesterday have male protagonists but themes more common to shoujo manga. Kaori Yuki's Angel Sanctuary incorporates elements of the shounen, shoujo, yaoi and bishonen genres simultaneously. So the final (rather prosaic) word in this regard belongs to Matt Thorn:
[S]houjo manga are manga published in shoujo magazines (as defined by their publishers), and shounen manga are manga published in shounen manga magazines (likewise defined by publishers).
Reaching New Readers
Manga first appear as fortnightly installments in the ubiquitous phonebook-sized magazines. Successful runs are collected into tankoubon editions, with higher-quality printing and binding. Despite suffering recently from market saturation and a flattening of sales, especially in the shounen genres (the perennial challenge of publishers in any medium), manga continue to dominate the trade paperback publishing industry in Japan.
One paradoxically welcome response to slipping shares in its home market has been for manga publishers to push into markets overseas, with publishing powerhouses Kodansha and Viz Communications (the American subsidary of Shueisha), along with importers such as Tokyo Pop (which is getting into original production as well), and most established anime distributors.
Like anime a decade before, publishers and distributors woke up one day, saw there was money to be made and scampered after it. As Cynthia Ward observes in Locus Online, "when there's $5 billion lying on the table, new players enter the game." In 2004 alone American publishers were planning to issue over
1,000 English language manga volumes . . . [and] USA Today reports manga is 'the fastest-growing segment of the [US] publishing industry.'" In terms of sales, nothing illustrates this better than the American edition of Shonen Jump manga magazine, "which is already selling more than 300,000 copies per issue, with a 60+ percent increase (from 190,000 to 305,000) in the second half of 2003.
By 2005, according to Japanese Ambassador Ryozo Kato, royalties and merchandising for anime alone had reached $4.35 billion. Despite this, the large number of still-active "scanlation" sites proves that samizdat demand continues to outpace the slowly growing (legitimate) supply. An impressive number of titles are available from scanlation (2) sites. Manga News has links to just about every scanlation project out there.
Nevertheless, staring at a computer monitor is never the same as holding a real book in your hands. Internet bookstores can bring any in-print manga title to your front door. Unlike imported CDs and DVDs, Japanese manga cost less than the English versions. Emily's Random Shoujo Manga Page provides good titles and authors to choose from, as do Okazu and Girls' Horror Comics.
Leveraging the success of anime and manga, publishing giants Shogakukan and Shueisha launched the wildly successful American edition of Shonen Jump. Unfortunately, so far only manga has managed to leap the literary gap with enough forward momentum to make it commercially viable. Narrative fiction lags far behind.
When it comes to English translations, start as always with Amazon, though Just Manga provides far more information and is often competitive on price as well. 
My online Japanese retailer of choice is Book1, which has been following the lead of Amazon/Japan, and has done a few things better, such as grouping manga by series. Amazon/Japan does have the benefit of including some help and ordering pages in English, but its higher overseas shipping costs (3) make it hard to recommend over Book1.
See this blog entry for more ordering options.
1. For similar reasons female protagonists also predominate in young adult fiction. L.M. Montgomery's classic Anne of Green Gables, for example, features a smart, funny, level-headed protagonist who is remarkably progressive for her time. Also true of historical Y/A novels such Catherine Called Birdy by Karen Cushman and Witch Child by Celia Rees.
Moving into the Victorian era, there's Philip Pullman's "Sally Lockhart" series, starting with Ruby in the Smoke. Lois Lowry's contemporary Anastasia series I consider superior to her Newbery-winning books, Number the Stars and The Giver. E.L. Konigsburg's From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler well deserved its Newbery, along with Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth. Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy and the overlooked The Long Secret both deserved Newberys (what's wrong with these people, you wonder sometimes).
In the fantasy genre, moving from past to present, consider The Liveship Traders by Robin Hobb, Robin McKinley's Beauty and The Silver Sword, Patrice Kindl's Owl in Love, and Annette Curtis Klause's remarkable pair of modern gothics, Silver Kiss and Blood and Chocolate. Lynne Ewing's The Daughters of the Moon series owes a lot to Joss Whedon (Buffy), and that's nothing she need apologize for. [return]
2. Also scanslation. A contraction of scan and translation, digital scans of manga that are then translated and captioned in English using image editing software, and posted as web pages. [return]
3. When ordering books from Book1--they weigh a lot more than CDs, remember--it pays to plan ahead and select SAL. Shipping time is about three weeks. [return]
