MangaBlog

PW Comics Week has an article on manga-ka Kiriko Nananan, who creates josei manga (manga aimed at young women). Her books look lovely and moody:

Set in modern-day Tokyo, Sweet Cream and Red Strawberries is a series of vignettes, presented as episodes in the lives of four women. Touko and Chihiro are roommates in a one-bedroom apartment. Akiyo pines after her college friend while making a living as a prostitute. Suzuki lives alone and wanders through her daily routine wondering about love. Except for Touko and Chihiro, the characters in these stories don’t intersect. Instead, their lives unravel independent from one another in isolated sections of the city. Themes like emotional strength reoccur throughout the book as the women suffer from jealousy, loneliness and unrequited love.

Nananan is also the creator of Blue, which recently appeared on the shelves of my local Borders. I picked it up but quickly put it down when I saw the $23.95 price tag. That’s a lot for a book that I’m probably not going to let my kids read. Apparently Chris Butcher of comics.212.net has been hearing similar comments:

most Fanfare/Ponent Mon titles command hefty prices, and at $23.99, Butcher says Blue’s pricing is “prohibitive,” perhaps explaining why Nananan’s work is still largely unknown among most mainstream manga readers. “It’s as expensive as three Shojo Beat books,” Butcher says. “So far, Blue has done well, but it would do so much better at $10.”

So I’m happy that CPM is pricing Sweet Cream and Red Strawberries at $9.99. That’s the good news. The bad news is that they’re having a bit of a problem marketing it:

“The challenge has been how to position it within the manga category,” says Kokmen. “It’s still a manga, but its appeal is different from traditional shojo.”

I would love to see both Nananan’s books, along with some of the other Ponent Mon titles I’ve been lusting after, in my public library system. At $9.99, I probably will buy Sweet Cream, but at $23.95 I’m not likely to buy many Ponent Mon titles. On the other hand, I know those high prices support good production values and authors who don’t reach as broad an audience as Naruto and Fruits Basket. As the manga market matures, I think we’ll see more of these carefully produced books that appeal to a relatively small audience.

So what I would like is for libraries to start recognizing these more sophisticated books as being in a different category from shoujo and shonen. These are important books that libraries should be buying, but after the recent kerfuffles, librarians may shy away from acquiring them because they don’t belong in the YA section. I’m not even thinking about sexual content here—I have no idea what’s in these books—but their more sophisticated approach. The answer is to shelve them differently, not to avoid them altogether. Adults are much more likely to find them if they are shelved with fiction in the adult section rather than among the manga in the YA section (which few grownups even glance at).

Nananan’s work looks appealing enough that a display of her books placed strategically near the fiction and literature section of a bookstore might do well too, the way they sometimes do with chick lit or other genre books. It might bring in a new audience for josei and yuri manga, which could only be a good thing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 25th, 2006 at 7:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.