Adult bookstores and porn emporiums have a LOT more money to spend in court than comic shop owners.
Fair enough, but what then caused the post-war decline in comics readership if not a boom in censorship? I think the broad popularity of anime and manga in Japan isn’t entirely due to any quality intrinsic to those media, but due to some difference between American and Japanese culture (which allowed the Japanese versions to diversify and grow, while the American forms began to stagnate). I’d be interested in figuring out exactly what it is.
I didn’t nececcarily mean bannings, censorship, and prosecutions for adult anime and manga. I was thinking more of the conservative/fundamentalist professional outrage machine picking up the anime/manga issue and running with it. “Look at what the secular humaninsts/moral and cultural relativists/filth merchants are subjecting your children to now!” could provide a lot of mileage for the likes of O’Reilly or Medved.
And it doesn’t have to revolve around hentai, although some juicy anecdotes about unsuspecting moms finding hentai titles in family video bargain bins and the like would provide heavy ammunition. Brent Bozell’s media watchdog group has just come out with a report basically stating that children’s television is more depraved know than ever and uses a lot of examples from anime (and anime inspired shows) shown on Nick and CN. And Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Paleolithic) has made noises about hoisting the flag on the issue.
The growing popularity of manga and anime as it moves outside the limited comic book store circuit into bookstores and other mass-market outlets (the topic of the thread), might make it a more likely target. And complaints don’t necessarily have to revolve around explicit sex or graphic violence. The very “otherness” that some on this thread have stated as the reasons for manga’s appeal can be used against it. I’ve seen a few disoconcerting reviews on Christian sites (Focus on the Family, CAPAlert) warning parents away from Sprited Away, not because of sex and violence, but because the display a different concept of spritualism. And imagine if the Dobsons and Robertson of America find out that teenage girls are reading bishonen titles like Fake?
I suspect that much of the decline was due to competition from other sources of entertainment. Comics seem to have been going pretty strongly through the 60s and the early 70s. Then, about the mid 70s, personal computers, electronic arcades and VCRs began to actually make a dent in home markets. Possibly the arrival of relatively cheap high fidelity sound equipment in the 60s had something to do with it, too. Kids who had been reading comics were now playing Pac Man, popping a tape in the VCR or playing Lode Runner on their Apples. Or they had hit their early to mid teens and were now more interested in the Beatles and the Rolling Stones than Superman and Batman. It’s sort of like what happened to pulp fiction magazines and radio dramas in the 50s.
Just a thought. I have no hard facts to back it up.
That’s part of it, but not all of it. After all, the Japanese have had plenty of high-tech distractions themselves.
But what I was getting at is that the decline of comics started after WWII. It’s become most worrying and apparent since the 1980’s, but it’s never returned to its wartime sales levels. There’s a reason they call it the “golden age”, after all, and it isn’t because the comics were better.
At the same time as American comics began to declin, in Japan manga was just starting to get going and diversify. Why did comics gain wide acceptance in Japan while becoming a juvenile and then niche market in the US? Mishandling by the American industry is part of the story, but not all of it. I think it has something to do with the cultures of the two places in those times and places, and I’m interested in what those differences are.
Harvey Pekar (American Splendor) went on a world tour to pormote the movie and stopped in Japan for a few days. His opinion was like the bulk of everybody’s here, that more adults read comics in Japan. He went with his host to a comics shop, but found out Anime/Manga IS marketed for children. There is very little in the way of adult/alternative comics. The store owner said they maybe had one such comic in the back somewhere.
Pekar later met up with a Japanese artist who does alternative comics, and he verified the same thing. He had a hard time getting published anywhere.
This is from Pekar’s Our Movie Year.
Hmm … okay … but what about the persistent stories we hear of Japanese businessmen reading comics on the Tokyo subway and the like? Is that just an urban legend kind of thing, something that comics fans tell themselves so they can feel better about reading comics? Is Comic Book Guy perhaps spreading propaganda?
The observations aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. After all, how many American adults have read Harry Potter?
I know what you’re saying and I agree, it would crank them up big time, but ou must know that once the pundits get howling, the censorship groups will get cranked up, too. They would see it as a juicy opportunity. It would also appeal to the xenophobic streak that runs rampant in the same population: look, it’s not just nasty cartoons, it’s nasty cartoons by furriners!
Adult Swim airs after 11 at night. Good luck on convincing the maisntream that the Cartoon Channel is looking to corrupt the kiddies. Though I gotta tell you, those shows are DISGUSTING. I don’t advocate bannign them, but give me a good, clean hentai any day.
Agreed. Plus, if past history holds, most of the people who protest, if there ever is one, will not have ever read any manga/seen any anime. They’ll just be taking the word of Fearless Leader that they should be outraged.
Re: the art, just as you prefer manga-esque art, I’ve always preferred the art of Western comics. I love the detail, the colors, the realism. In one of the rare cases where I DID like a manga, specifically the highly stylized art of Demon Ororon, I found that other manga fans sneered at it. I’ve had some bad experiences with manga fans in general, which has further driven me off the genre.
Re: shounen-ai, or Boy’s Love, if you’ll check upthread you’ll notice that myself and several other pointed out numerous titles dealing with homosexual themes. I’m not saying you have to read them or whatever, just that they exist. I’ve never seen anything quite like the fluffy love stories in shounen-ai, that genre in particular may be native to manga, but stories starring GBLT characters aren’t hard to find.
It’s not just homosexual themes, that’s a common misconception about BL. BL is, for the most part, made by women for women and is very different from gay porn made by and produced for men. It is not just the feature of gay characters that I like, but the feminine nature of the stories, the emphasis on aestheticis and emotion, and the graphic sex scenes of two attractive (by my standards) men having hot, hard core sex. The gay manga/comics do not appeal to me. Similarly, my gay male friends who are into gay comics/manga do not like my BL. Mostly because they complain that the men look like women instead of men. I’ve met more straight guys into BL than gay guys. The closest that comes to it is American slash which is text based and takes real characters (Spock and Kirk is a popular pairing.) Although American artists (again, almost all female) are emulating it, all of the good, high quality stuff can still be found only in manga.
I think it all comes down to a matter of taste and what you are looking for.
Well, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that American comic book sales started to steeply decline as the number of households with television began to sharply increase…but I get what you mean. I’ll run down some points here:
*I mentioned some social and demographic trends in America that influenced the deline. In Japan, the opposite holds true. Suburban dwellers still commute by mass transit to urban city center not only for work, but also for leisure. Large department stores and entertainment complexes are downtown near rail and subway hubs, not out in car-accessible only shopping malls along freeways. Every residential neighborhood has a shopping arcade with small mom-n-pop store, convenience store, and/or a bookstore, all of which will have manga. In fact, I’m pretty confident I can claim that EVERY child in Japan will pass by at least one store (and often more) where manga is displayed while going to and from school.
*In both countries, adult comic readers started out as child comic readers (very few people in either country become habitual comic readers as adults. There comes an age when many/most kids reading comics aimed at juveniles lose interest. In Japan, those readers can advance to more adult material. In America, in the years when comic sales where declining, there was no adult material to graduate to, so kids just stopped reading. The Comics Code limited what mainstream companies could publish and other publishers had limited distribution (underground comix limited to headshops and the like and almost no comics shops in the 60s and 70s for other stuff.)
*I would say manga had its turning point in the early 70s. Manga had been ubiquitous and popular in postwar Japan, driven by weekly anthologies built around popular features (just like today) . This was also the time when manga started pushing the envelope of socially-accepted content. There were anti-manga campaigns by civic groups and PTAs , and manga-burnings, but these eventually faded away. The more adult features were moved out of the shonen/shojo weeklies and into monthlies. The early 70s was when shojo manga really started to come into its own. Manga for girls existed previously, but it was created by Japanese men (like romance comics in the U.S). However, this was the era when girls who grew up reading shojo manga started becoming manga creators. Conversely, the American comics market has been hurt by the loss of girl readership.
I don’t know what you would consider DISGUSTING. Inu-Yahsa? Aqua Teen Hunger Force? Ghost in the Shell? Moot point anyway, since Bozell fcues on afternoon/evening programming, listing shows like Teen Titans, Fosters’ Home for Imaginary Friends, Shaman King, Danny Phantom, Shaolin Showdown, DBZ, etc. as problematic shows.
Ah, I see what you mean. I couldn’t tell from your earlier post if what appealed to you was the homosexual themes or the particular style of shounen-ai. As was mentioned upthread, there are a number of Western comics that feature gay protagonists or storylines, but none I know of that fit into a shounen-ai mold. Although I wouldn’t classify any of them as gay porn rags! I never got into shounen-ai myself, mostly because I like my men to look like, well, men, but I have several friends who are. I’ve noticed lots of bisexual girls tend to be into it. My pet manga, Demon Ororon, does have Othello and Mitsume, who I wouldn’t call a couple, exactly, but who kick lots of ass anyway.
I don’t think it’s just the style, it’s the stories as well. I’ve got a lot of june (more adult boy’s love although the terms are always changing) and the stories are really different from the few pieces of gay manga I have. My two favorite authors are Nishida Higashi and Yamada Yugi and you can see by the examples linked that the art work isn’t particularly beautiful and it isn’t set in a fantastic world. (BTW, both of these artists are very popular in Japan) But the stories are great little gems with interesting characters falling in love and, yes, there’s sex but it’s secondary to character development.
The character development is what sets it apart form gay manga. Gay manga tends to feature large, burly, often hairy guys who meet and screw. Women aren’t reallly interested in that even if they do like the idea of homosexual couples. In women-written yaoi manga, it’s more average guys having a relationship, not just sex.
I wasn’t referring to the art style (what I’ve seen of shounen-ai doesn’t seem to be drawn all that differently from other styles of manga) but the story-telling style. Shounen-ai tends to focuse on emotion and relationships and cute love stories, that sort of thing. Western comics, even when they have gay protagonists, have a different sort of mood to them. I think it’s just different cultural styles. Mind you, Enigma and Age of Bronze are NOT gay porno mags. But you wouldn’t mistake them for shounen-ai either, even if they were redrawn in a manga art style.
I’m not sure what show it is, but it’s not one of the anime they run. It’s an American production and I can’t remember the name offhand but it seemed to exist for the sole purpose of making fart, shit, and poop jokes, with the usual embarassed jokes about sex, homo and hetero, thrown in. It looks like its writers were Beavis and Butthead. Not the people who WROTE Beavis and Butthead, mind you. The characters. I would never advocate censoring it, but anyone over 14 who watches it is most certainly an idiot.