also comics are not as expressive as manga in character expressions.. often comic book artist are more interested in creating tight and highly rendered professional drawings than telling a story thru simple stylization of characters.

Well, MOST comics. Folks like R. Crumb or Humberto Ramos are more expressive/cartoony and many of my favorite artists (Dave Sim, Jaime Hernandez, Chynna Clugston Major) switch back and forth between realistic and cartoony in the same story.

Although you're mostly right about the predominant style in mainstream, superhero-y comics.

i'm an avid manga readers. i think it's true alto of manga has big eyes etc. but big eyes or not. the most important thing i love about manga is the fact the character's outter and inner emotions are expressed shown. And big eyes, SD(super-deform), or other stylized exaggerated expressions/poses are all part of achiving this expressiveness. it makes the overrall effect funnier, more exaggerated, or more heartfelt or more extreme. this is one of the good points of manga. character emotions are expressively delineated.

another thing that differentiates manga is the pacing and the complex visual story-telling style. manga is creaetd more like a story board. rather than a static narrative style. in most cases the dialogues are short. a tankuban with 200 pages sometimes can be finished in 30 min. but you're flipping thru the pictures as fast as watching a movie.. it makes for compelling story-telling.

so, along the same line. alot of american comics are very simple in visual story telling. each panel is about the same size and sometimes the words in bubbles are extremly long.. it's more linear in story telling and not alot of attention is paid to pacing.

there are exceptions to the rule, ie.frank miller. i own a few of his GNs. but this is a general impression i ahve after flipping thru alot of comics over the years.

also comics are not as expressive as manga in character expressions.. often comic book artist are more interested in creating tight and highly rendered professional drawings than telling a story thru simple stylization of characters. you don't get to see the character's inner emotions. i dont' feel as much for the character as i would reading manga.

and superhero comics pretty much i just stay away from. partly b/c first of all, as a girl, superhero plots just dont' interest me. also most superhero are masked. . and the most expressive part of a person, the face, is hidden away. i donno.. i just kinda don't want to read a book where the main charcter will be expressionless thru out.. just doesn't make me want to read it...it's kinda boring..

i think as an art form, for comics/or manga, exaggerattion and stylized expressions are really one of the biggest selling point. If youre just trying to portray ppl's face/expression as they are realistically in life. then as an artform it wouldn't be very successful b/c nothing can compete with teh complexity and subtities of human face. so maybe it's better to watch a film? but b/c manga often has alot of exaggerated expressions and it often shows the characters's inner emotions alot(you can't see this in real life!) so it makes it very interesting to read. cuz it provides this other dimension that real life doesn/t

i do used to read soem comics and actually own a huge collection of underground comics from the 90's which is what i used to read in high school and college. but after i got into manga it's just really hard to go back to regular comics..

also though male is the more targeted reader for manga/anime but relaly part of the sucess for the proliferation of manga is also it fulfill a gap in the market--female readers. this used to baffle me alot.. girls in general read more than boys. yet there's no comics created for girls until manga came to US. ppl used to say there's no market.. but now we all know it's a chicken and egg thing if you flood the market they'll come and also girls prefer to shop at regular bookstores, etc..

any way, i hope i'm not offending any one just want to say why i prefer manga more.. i think its not a manga vs comics thing. it's more like there's certain elements in manga that makes me like it. the plots i like(more of interest to female readers) , the expressiveness, the pacing, etc.

That said, I do share the desire to introduce to friends and strangers many, many powerful manga and gekiga titles that had lit up mental nova inside my head (Tomorrow Joe, Ron, Pheonix, Touch, Black Jack, Human Crossroad, Berserk, Yawara, Legend of Bari Bari, Slam Dunk, Dragon Head, Dr. Slump .... the list goes on and on). It's only human nature to try to influence others. But paradoxically, I have little inclination to "convert" those who despise manga. May be they had already made up their mind, or may be they tried it and still found it lacking... afterall, there have been just as many sad manga titles I still lament for my lost innocence and the murdered trees... either way, how these comic fans came to their conlusion is unimportant. In the end, each individual manga title, or gekiga, manhwa, manhua, bande dessinée, or comic book, stands on its own merit, and no amount of vituperation, or popularity for that matter, will change that.

People, like me, who translate full time need to show they can cut it before getting work. The publishers I have worked with solicit from a pool of talent, and shoddy work isn't tolerated.

Of the handful of J-E translators I have met and talk to regularly, all are college graduates, several have passed JLP-1 and none of them are "in-college" or "otaku". Most of us like translating manga and fiction not because we are otaku, but because it's a lot more fun and intereting than cell phone manuals and city government homepages.

I've been beating this drum all over the place, but I think one barrier to increasing sales of manga to adults is the wretched quality of translations today. Publishers initially started hiring still-in-college otaku (manga/anime geeks) with little qualification because they would work for peanuts, and it was another way to cut prices and thereby reach younger readers. (Most manga translators these days get paid a third or less what I was paid Back In The Day.) Today they have big enough print runs that they don't need to do this sort of corner-cutting, but they continue to anyway because few readers complain, and, well, they're greedy and stingy. But they've painted themselves into a corner. While teens don't care if the translations are well-done (or even reasonably accurate), adults, whether they are conscious of it or not, are going to be turned off by a poor translation. So, brilliant adult-oriented manga, such as _Nodame Cantabile_, don't sell nearly as well as they should, because they've been ruined by horrible translators.

And, yeah, the idea that manga are waning because magazine sales, which were absurdly high in the early 1990s, are now floundering is just wishful thinking on the part of those who just wish manga would "get off their lawn" and disappear. Manga magazines and books continue to account for a third of all commercial publications in Japan (excluding newspapers, which are floundering even more), and this in a country where per capita sales of print publications remain extraordinarily high. American comic book publishers break out the champagne when a title sells 100,000 copies. Manga publishers begin to *panic* when sales of a magazine *fall below* 100,000, and a handful of manga magazines continue to sell well over a million copies per issue. (_Shonen Jump_ and _Shonen Magazine_ are still in the four million range.)

http://shuchaku-east.blogspot.com/2008/02/just-come-down-off-horse-and-we-can.html

I meant to leave you a comment on your first blog entry because your teenage Sailor Moon to manga experience was very similar to my teenage American superhero cartoons (mainly Batman:TAS, X-Men and Superman:TAS) to comics experience. But I always knew something was lacking because there weren't nearly enough Cyclops/Jean/Wolverine-like angsty stories to keep me a fully content superhero fan. Anyway, welcome! I'm very much enjoyed your first two entries.

In regards to this current column: It's funny, just today I was speaking with a coworker who has a 13 year-old daughter who's been getting into manga pretty heavily lately. My co-worker doesn't know much about these comics or their genres, but she does monitor what her daughter is reading because I suspect, from what she describes, that her daughter is getting her hands on some more adult-oriented manga. I described to her the very little I knew about manga and its various genres, but I don't think I explained it very well. But yay, fortunately I have this column to share with her tomorrow.

I'm also one of those almost exclusive U.S. comics readers who's become more curious about manga due to some of the discussions of fellow CBR posters. So, this column of yours is perfect. I look forward to what you have to say next week.

There are really so many good titles that can be considered for "adults" that this may turn into a three part column....which is not at all a bad thing as far as I'm concerned!

And just to add some recommendation's to John's list of great stuff for grown-ups:

SEXY VOICE AND ROBO (Viz): A phone-book sized collection of terrific stories about a girl who uses her considerable smarts to meddle in the lives of strangers, sometimes at the request of a retired yakuza.

ANTIQUE BAKERY (DMP): Gorgeous stuff about the lives and loves of the employees of an upscale pastry shop and their customers.

THE KUROSAGI CORPSE DELIVERY SERVICE (Dark Horse): Unemployable students from a Buddhist college help the deceased reach their final resting places. Episodic and wonderfully creepy/funny.

OHIKKOSHI (Dark Horse): A varied collection of short stories in a decidedly altcomix vein.

TANPENSHU (Dark Horse): Another varied collection of short stories, this one by the creator of EDEN. I can only really recommend the first volume. The second is eaten up by a long mobster story, and I don't think those are anywhere near the creator's strong suit.

NANA (Viz): Sexy soap opera about artsy twenty-somethings, beautifully drawn but still crudely funny.

I'd also recommend just about anything published by Fanfare/Ponent Mon, though it's difficult to find. THE WALKING MAN, KINDERBOOK and JAPAN AS VIEWED BY 17 CREATORS are my particular favorites.

What I have enjoyed recently are the large-volume one-shots we have been seeing more of in the last year. I think these are great intros to great comics that don't ask for a lifetime commitment. TEKKON KINKREET, MW, APOLLO'S SONG, ODE TO KIRIHITO are all 400+ page volumes are reletively reasonable prices and are all excellent adult-oriented stories.

BATTLE ROYALE is being rereleased in a similar format, and is a violent psychological tale asking "Could you kill your best friend?"

The aforementioned EDEN is a serious post-apoc take that is beautifully done and markedly adult.

MPD-PSYCHO is an uncensored riddle of an enigma about a killer cop with a nose for finding the bad guys...though sometimes it's his reflection.

TRANSLUCENT looks like a shojo-romance title, but it centainly has adult appeal in it's humor and honesty.

PARASYTE's 80s stylings make its horror (and humor) that much creepier...

GYO is a two-volume beach-based horror thriller where the rotting stink-lines seem to come right off the page.

UZAMAKI's three volume re-release wraps up this week, and is one of the most original horror titles ever. Imagine being freaked out by...spirals. A small coastal town in Japan experiences it.

And those are just a few adult-oriented manga off the top of my head...

Manga and comics don't need to be like Republicans vs Democrats. You CAN enjoy both (I do!) without betraying the other.

I would like to quote Harvey Pekar from Our Movie Year, though (p. 160-161): "I was under the impression that Japanese comics, or manga, were about a vast range of subjects and that a lot of them were aimed at adults, but when we were in a comic store I said...
'Just about all of these books look like they're aimed at kids, where is the alternative or adult stuff?'
'There's practically none of it. In fact there's only one book in this entire store I'd recommend you get. It's about the only underground comic in the place.'
'Wow. That's a bummer. I had been led to believe that Japan was a comicbook fan's heaven, that there was a great variety of stuff done here.'
'No, just about all of this stuff is meant for kids.'
Later she introduced me to one of the relatively few alternative comic book artists in Japan and he corroborated what she'd told me.
'I have a hard time getting published here.'"