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branchandroot) wrote2010-01-05 05:57 pm
branchandroot) wrote2010-01-05 05:57 pm
The difference between manga and comics
Actually, this is a lot broader than that, but that was one of the places this post started. The other was Rana's comment on a different post, words to the effect that the fan-cultures in question seem to divide themselves based only on some very fuzzy Orientalism.
I agree that fuzzy Orientalism is the most regrettably common way Western fans of similar media from different national/ethnic groups (eg comics and manga) express their differentiation. That particular expression is generally a lot of hot air, yes.
But I also think there are real fan-culture differences, touching on though not always rising directly from the mother-culture differences of the sources. This is my attempt to articulate the ones that I've seen. Warning: generalizations ahead, though not baseless ones.
ETA: To elaborate, this post is based on my own and my circle's experiences in various fandoms; unfortunately I managed to phrase things rather more generally and universally than I quite realized at the time. *rueful* None of the following is actually meant to be a Declaration Of How Fandom Is Everywhere. That said, the experience in question is not a narrow one, and I think the following is representative of a significant section of manga (and anime) fandom participants.
One major fan-culture difference is Japanophilia. Not the study of another culture, though it can in a few happy cases evolve into that, but the fad for and valorization of the surface and trappings of another culture. It makes me twitch, but there it is. However much some of us headdesk, this exoticization isn't going away anytime soon and it is a significant fan-culture difference.
Another is what we might call the discussion tropes of the fandoms. These tend to evolve from a handful of defining features in the sources where they cross with the developing tenor of the fandom culture. A recurring discussion in comic fandoms, for example, revolves around the hypersexualization of women, and how objectionable it is to reduce all the women to a set of tits and an ass. Manga fandoms do not have this discussion (ETA: I should have phrased this as something more like "this discussion or similar ones regarding the rendering of women as two-dimensional objects who exist for the benefit of men and not as fully realized characters"), not as a Known Issue, not in the open, despite an at least equal tendency to appalling objectification in the source material. Instead, the discussion usually gets pushed into private mode before it really gets going. See above, re: Japanophilia and valorization, also re: headdesking. On the other hand, the original language itself is a discussion point largely peculiar to Western manga fandoms, as will generally be the case with a translated source. It expresses as everything from language lessons to fights over transliteration systems to the eternal localization vs. "direct" translation battle, and knowledge of those debates acts as one of the shibboleths of manga fandoms.
Then there's actual style and content in the source. There has always been a certain give and take, between this particular two-set, of artistic style, and as US comics (the only ones I can speak to from experience) diversify it's becoming more evident, but there are also story tropes that are still distinct. How else, when they arise from two separate mother-cultures? To name only one, multiple genres of manga have, for decades, toyed with explicit homoeroticism in a way that comics in general do not. The genre diversity itself is another example, and the variety of story-types told in manga format. The symbolic language is, and can only remain, distinct as well. Curiously enough, such story tropes do not result in many fan-culture differences that I have seen, except insofar as manga fandom can, for example, show a more intense defensiveness, sometimes devolving into outright gay-bashing, over reading and enjoying explicit gay (only not real gay, which is a whole nother essay) romance, porn and slapstick. (ETA: I did not phrase myself with enough specificity here; I am aware of the voluble gay-bashing in comics fandoms. What I refer to is the particular "screw for my enjoyment while I deny you the right to live" double-mindedness that shows up among fen who are trying to have their cake and bash it too. The key word, here, is defensiveness.) The different story tropes I would put down as a distinction between the sources, but not one that manifests much in fandom culture outside of the actual preference for the style and content of one group of sources or another.
Now, what I would be interested to know is: do the same kinds of differences show up in the Western fandoms of Western and Asian TV? Or of Western bands and Asian bands? And do they manifest in gaming fandoms? That last especially interests me, since the game sources seem to be the most self-aware of the trans-Pacific trade.
ETA: As per suggestion, I would like to point out that I have not been present for the bulk of wrangler discussions on associated issues. These are thoughts going off in a different (somewhat) direction, so please to be not be bringing other fights in here. I am an unaligned polity.
ETA some more: Will not be replying to further comments on this one because work has descended for the term. Talk among yourselves if you like.
I agree that fuzzy Orientalism is the most regrettably common way Western fans of similar media from different national/ethnic groups (eg comics and manga) express their differentiation. That particular expression is generally a lot of hot air, yes.
But I also think there are real fan-culture differences, touching on though not always rising directly from the mother-culture differences of the sources. This is my attempt to articulate the ones that I've seen. Warning: generalizations ahead, though not baseless ones.
ETA: To elaborate, this post is based on my own and my circle's experiences in various fandoms; unfortunately I managed to phrase things rather more generally and universally than I quite realized at the time. *rueful* None of the following is actually meant to be a Declaration Of How Fandom Is Everywhere. That said, the experience in question is not a narrow one, and I think the following is representative of a significant section of manga (and anime) fandom participants.
One major fan-culture difference is Japanophilia. Not the study of another culture, though it can in a few happy cases evolve into that, but the fad for and valorization of the surface and trappings of another culture. It makes me twitch, but there it is. However much some of us headdesk, this exoticization isn't going away anytime soon and it is a significant fan-culture difference.
Another is what we might call the discussion tropes of the fandoms. These tend to evolve from a handful of defining features in the sources where they cross with the developing tenor of the fandom culture. A recurring discussion in comic fandoms, for example, revolves around the hypersexualization of women, and how objectionable it is to reduce all the women to a set of tits and an ass. Manga fandoms do not have this discussion (ETA: I should have phrased this as something more like "this discussion or similar ones regarding the rendering of women as two-dimensional objects who exist for the benefit of men and not as fully realized characters"), not as a Known Issue, not in the open, despite an at least equal tendency to appalling objectification in the source material. Instead, the discussion usually gets pushed into private mode before it really gets going. See above, re: Japanophilia and valorization, also re: headdesking. On the other hand, the original language itself is a discussion point largely peculiar to Western manga fandoms, as will generally be the case with a translated source. It expresses as everything from language lessons to fights over transliteration systems to the eternal localization vs. "direct" translation battle, and knowledge of those debates acts as one of the shibboleths of manga fandoms.
Then there's actual style and content in the source. There has always been a certain give and take, between this particular two-set, of artistic style, and as US comics (the only ones I can speak to from experience) diversify it's becoming more evident, but there are also story tropes that are still distinct. How else, when they arise from two separate mother-cultures? To name only one, multiple genres of manga have, for decades, toyed with explicit homoeroticism in a way that comics in general do not. The genre diversity itself is another example, and the variety of story-types told in manga format. The symbolic language is, and can only remain, distinct as well. Curiously enough, such story tropes do not result in many fan-culture differences that I have seen, except insofar as manga fandom can, for example, show a more intense defensiveness, sometimes devolving into outright gay-bashing, over reading and enjoying explicit gay (only not real gay, which is a whole nother essay) romance, porn and slapstick. (ETA: I did not phrase myself with enough specificity here; I am aware of the voluble gay-bashing in comics fandoms. What I refer to is the particular "screw for my enjoyment while I deny you the right to live" double-mindedness that shows up among fen who are trying to have their cake and bash it too. The key word, here, is defensiveness.) The different story tropes I would put down as a distinction between the sources, but not one that manifests much in fandom culture outside of the actual preference for the style and content of one group of sources or another.
Now, what I would be interested to know is: do the same kinds of differences show up in the Western fandoms of Western and Asian TV? Or of Western bands and Asian bands? And do they manifest in gaming fandoms? That last especially interests me, since the game sources seem to be the most self-aware of the trans-Pacific trade.
ETA: As per suggestion, I would like to point out that I have not been present for the bulk of wrangler discussions on associated issues. These are thoughts going off in a different (somewhat) direction, so please to be not be bringing other fights in here. I am an unaligned polity.
ETA some more: Will not be replying to further comments on this one because work has descended for the term. Talk among yourselves if you like.
no subject
Thank goodness there are, at least, detailed summaries of Saiunkoku Monogatari, that's all I can say; I'd have gone nuts else.
And, really, I have to wonder about the commercial priorities too. Are the commercial houses taking their cue too closely from the loudest fandoms, or is there some lingering sense that "cartoons are for kids" keeping them to the mainstream shounen and shoujo material?
no subject
Now, ok, everyone knows the old translations were "bad" in that they changed too much to make the manga accessible/acceptable/whatever. Blah blah blah, fanrant. On the other hand, a lot of them were very well-written and didn't require a lot of prior knowledge of Japanese or otaku culture to get into. A lot of them were also quite pleasant to read because they sounded like normal, literate English. (My views on translation, let me show you them. ;D)
But then the otaku won. (Yay. Woo.) Now, not only are manga much cheaper, but the translations reflect what otaku like! Unfortunately, what otaku like is crap.
Overly-literal, painful-to-read, otaku knowledge-requiring, original writing style-obscuring C.R.A.P.
And the choices of series follow the same pattern. I have no problem with Shounen Jump bestsellers, but one of the things that makes them sell so well is that they are all exactly the same. (I'm sure I'd get hugely flamed for that if I posted it some places, but a quick glance at any big manga store in Japan would show exactly what I mean.) Shoujo series aren't always from the same magazine, but they also tend very heavily towards the sf/f otaku love. When they aren't sf/f, they're usually the same few kinds of vaguely zany or extra emo school romance.
These things are fine and good, but it has created an atmosphere where manga in English really is a genre (or a couple of genres anyway), not an entire medium. And it's a genre designed to appeal to otaku in the first blush of their love affair with anime/manga. There's enough momentum right now and enough current fans are recent enough converts that the current industry is easily able to support itself.
But! The current style of translation and to some extent the subject matter are going to send a lot of non-otaku running for the hills. That means other types of manga aren't going to be even commercially viable in English, let alone successful... which means no new fans with new tastes... which means no new manga catering to those tastes... which means no new fans with new tastes... You get the idea.
So I don't think it's just that they're taking their cue from the loudest fandoms. I think it's that a habit of doing that somewhat in the past has led to a situation where they can't do anything else. Before, no one knew what manga were. Now, when snobby adults are finally getting into graphic novels (no, seriously, every Real Literature bookstore in NYC is overflowing with the likes of Persepolis), everyone "knows" that manga are for teenage sf/f fans with low standards for prose.
(Rant rant rant rant! ;D)
My personal view is that the solution is for scanlators to stop ripping off Shounen Jump authors (whose work is totally going to get translated anyway) and start cultivating new English speaking audiences for manga. Unfortunately, my impression is that most scanlators really only do it for a couple of years and are all the same kind of new fans who are desperate to fit into the otaku community by doing the most impressive Naruto speed scan or some BL too porny even for the publishers that specialize in translating that.
Scanlating older series would require a few hundred bucks of shipping and yahoo auctions fees if they're out of print and a still pretty decent outlay of cash even if they aren't. Josei tends to cost more in the first place because it's published in larger volumes on nicer paper, and places that carry Japanese language manga in the US don't tend to have it (or anything weird or from a non-standard publisher, actually). And if you do scanlate these things, you get very little attention, very little financial support, very few offers of help... I guess I can't entirely blame people for their lack of interest.
But I think the number one culprit is that most scanlating is done by people whose language skills aren't so hot. They may or may not produce a good product in English, but they're not fluent enough to easily deal with importing manga themselves or reading the kind of blogs/magazines/books/whatever they'd need to to figure out what less mainstream authors they should check out. Lots of them could probably translate harder, weirder series, but someone would have to select the series for them and send them scans. (Most of the scanlation groups that do cover older series, especially older shoujo series, seem to have decided on the project because they found scans online. It's rarely a matter of actively going out and looking for a classic series they already know they want to do.)
Maybe, now that I think about it, what's really missing from manga fandom is manga blogs written by bilingual fans who could read a wide range of manga in Japanese, write beautifully in English, and let everyone else know what they're missing.
(The manga blogs I've looked at are great, but they are often written by monolingual English speakers reviewing new US releases. The blogs I've seen by native Japanese speakers who read really interesting stuff usually have about one post a year because it's that hard for the blogger to compose nice-sounding prose in English.)
I keep thinking I should scan some samples of my collection and do a blog on just how diverse manga are or something. (Or post somewhere like scans_daily? Do they have much manga?) My Japanese isn't anywhere near good enough for the type of blog I'd like to see, but it would be a start.
***
Oh, and the difficulty thing specifically: I've seen a few series that people are interested in but don't attempt to scanlate because they're freakin' hard. I don't think that's most of it though. There are whole magazines full of easy stories that no one ever touches. (Mystery Bonita!) I think it's lack of access to the physical volumes, lack of access to scans, and lack of knowledge about what's out there that determines what projects people take on. (I'm sure someone has attempted Hellsing, for example, and that's a pain in the ass to read. No furigana. Lots of gazillion-kanji Christian jargon. But it's also famous and popular.)
*cough* But enough of my ranting.
no subject
That's definitely a thought I've had before, though, about the cookie-cutter genres. And I do have to wonder what will happen when this fandom wave collapses. *envisions a scrabbling, eleventh hour rush for alternatives, kind of like the alternative-fuel scrabbling*
That's also a really good point about the basic availability. It feels like the pipeline is less tenuous, now, but it isn't really is it? We all still rely on world of mouth, and those comparatively few fans who have acquired enough reading skill in Japanese to go looking for the Next Big Thing, and the charity of strangers with scanners.
no subject
I think there may already be a bit of that going on. Matt Thorn's blog post from a while ago was commenting on the perception that manga publishers are having a harder time than before.
Yeah, pretty much. The few really old series I've seen serious interest in are all things like Rose of Versailles that were written up quite a while ago in Manga, Manga and Dreamland Japan and other influential English language books on manga. I think people would be perfectly happy to read other sorts of series (though someone who's currently into Fushigi Yuugi probably isn't going to go for a 4koma comic strip about being a middle-aged office lady or that Jeeves & Wooster manga adaptation--I know I wouldn't have), but it's hard to find those things. If they're commercially translated, they probably cost twice as much as the standard stuff without being obviously 10 times better. If they're scanlated, they get lost among all the zillions of other scanlations. The total volume of translation is really high, but it still tends to sort itself into these narrow little genres.
...It probably also doesn't hurt that a lot of scanlation groups demand that you debind in order to provide prettier scans. No one is going to debind some out-of-print 70s shoujo title, especially if they had to import it from Japan.
The other thing is that I think we do get a lot of the Next Big Thing series now, which gives this false sense that you can get "anything" now where you could get "nothing" ten years ago. The stuff we really miss out on is niche market manga, the midlist, and classics from the 70s and 80s. (And unfortunately, that covers all josei, good and bad, and basically everything that deals with adult women in an interesting way.)
I do see a little bit of interest in less standard things from the BL fans, but aestheticism seems to be mostly inactive right now (speaking of the sort of resources I think anime/manga fandom could use more of!), and the scanlation fandom is all about very recent titles or doujinshi of more famous things. There totally are series that have developed, three-dimensional characters, and there are even some series that have developed characters who are supposed to read as actual gay men (it's not common, but it certainly happens now and then). They're just not popular (or even known) among people doing scanlations.
no subject
/drive-by trivia