The current issue of Wired Magazine, issue 15:11, is no newsstands and in bookstores now. The cover features the title “Manga Conquers America,” and it is worth the reader’s time who is interested in manga, or Japanese comics, and its relationship to anime, or Japanese animation. The online edition includes several features and online extras. The main article includes the following in its introductory paragraphs:
“As you may have noticed, Japanese comics have gripped the global imagination. Manga sales in the US have tripled in the past four years. Titles like Fruits Basket, Naruto, and Death Note have become fixtures on American best-seller lists. Walk into your local bookstore this afternoon and chances are the manga section is bigger than the science fiction collection. Europe has caught the bug, too. In the United Kingdom, the Catholic Church is using manga to recruit new priests. One British publisher, in an effort to hippify a national franchise, has begun issuing manga versions of Shakespeare’s plays, including a Romeo and Juliet that reimagines the Montagues and Capulets as rival yakuza families in Tokyo.
“Yet in Japan, its birthplace and epicenter, manga’s fortunes are sagging. Circulation of the country’s weekly comic magazines, the essential entry point for any manga series, has fallen by about half over the last decade. Young people are turning their attention away from the printed page and toward the tiny screens on their mobile phones.”
Features and online extras include:
Features
“Japan, Ink: Inside the Manga Industrial Complex”
“How Manga Conquered the U.S.: A Graphic Guide to Japan’s Coolest Export” (which provides a timeline of manga’s growth and popularity in the U.S. in a manga format)
Extras
Readers can also look forward to an inteview here soon with Antonia Levi, author of Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation (Open Court Publishing, 1996), who will discuss cross-cultural considerations related to understanding anime, and specifically she will address her article in Mechademia vol. 1 where she considers the werewolf figure and the “wolf-human dynamic in anime and manga” as well as American horror.
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