In this week’s Flipped column, David Welsh comments on the case in Victorville, California, where the local library banned Paul Gravett’s book Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics, and finds it rich in irony:
Gravett uses Tezuka’s ardent wish – that manga transform from a kiddie diversion to a medium that offers a rich diversity of material for readers across the lifespan – as a guiding principle and goes on to illustrate the ways that Tezuka’s dream came true.
And yes, one of the manifestations of that dream’s realization is manga that features energetic fairie-squirrel congress and the varied opportunities for men with two penises. But those manifestations also include heroic princesses, senior citizens enjoying their golden years, office workers rising through the ranks, and lengthy examinations of fishing and pachinko.
Of course, the mother who complained when her son took out the book wasn’t looking at the princesses or the pachinko. All she saw was sex. Context, or rather, the lack thereof, is key to this case.
David goes beyond the rest of the commentary on this subject by talking to an actual librarian about how the library staff could have defused the situation a bit, and he also interviews a librarian/book distributor about how libraries are trying harder to select graphic novels for a range of ages. Still, I worry a bit that the older readers get left out of this equation. There are a lot of high-quality manga out there, more than I can afford, that are far from kid stuff (Dark Horse, Fanfare/Ponent Mon, a lot of Del Rey’s line). I think they need a shelf of their own. Or perhaps they should be shelved, like Gravett’s book, in the appropriate section of the regular books—fiction, history, fishing, whatever.
In a final bit of irony, David speculates that this brouhaha may end up bringing more readers to Gravett’s book. He’s made at least one extra sale; I bought it, purely for research purposes of course, and I’m enjoying reading it. But it’s not going on the shelf with the kids’ manga; I’m keeping it up high until my kids are old enough to handle it.
Too bad that didn’t work in Victorville.
From the perspective of someone who works in libraries, another sad thing that I observe is that a big problem in the libraries themselves has been ignored in the whole discussion — the problem of an outdated cataloging system that puts books like this one in the same section with Calvin & Hobbes because it is recommended that they all be shelved in non-fiction under the comics and cartoon section.