Plenty of good stuff to read on the web today!
At Precocious Curmudgeon, David Welsh gives his take on Erik Larson’s recent manga vs. American comics column. I’m glad David spoke up, because while the article gave me plenty of food for thought, I ended up wondering if I’d missed the conclusion. I guess I was expecting Erik to end up voting for one or the other.
Besides offering his own insights, David links to two articles worth reading for their own sake. One is Keith Giles’ interview with Dreamland Japan author Frederik L. Schodt and American manga artist Tony Leonard Tamai at Slushfactory.com The other is an introduction to manga by Paul Gravett (yes, that Paul Gravett). So get comfy and settle in.
Broken Frontier has an article with the ever-likeable Tania del Rio about the challenges of re-creating Sabrina and Spiderman as manga. Here’s what she did with Sabrina:
I made the stories focus more on character relationships and growth and less on slapstick hijinks. Also, rather than have there be 3-4 short stories per issue, each issue is now a complete story. Each story stands alone, yet they also piece together to create a larger whole. The overall appearance of the book has also changed from the traditional Archie house style to my own shoujo-influenced manga style.
And because Sabrina is squeaky-clean, albeit “a bit darker” than her counterparts Betty and Veronica, wary parents can regard Sabrina as a “starter manga,” she says.
As always, there is a Sunday newspaper story about manga, but this one is a cut above the rest. It’s about a high school art class in Paterson, New Jersey, in which the students are drawing their own manga. Bored yet? Don’t be. Writer Tim Norris finds all kinds of interesting angles to this story and ties them together with good writing that’s a cut above community newspaper standards. The story-within-the-story is that the students ended up teaching the teacher, who found that her students were doing their best work, not on her assignments, but on their own manga. Now they will be printing their completed books and displaying them in a show in Passaic next May. Drawing manga has not only given the kids more freedom to be creative, because it is not bound by standard categories, it has helped motivate them to do better in other classes and perhaps to stay in school. And their teacher spent two months in Japan last year studying manga, with the help of a Fulbright grant.