Comicsgirl

Archive for December, 2004

The Washington Post ran an article yesterday called Schools Turn to Comics as Trial Balloons about a planned program in Maryland that will use comics to help encourage reading among students from kindergarten through high school.

It’s pretty lightweight although still informative. The article does gets points for mentioning Fredric Wertham at the very moment I was thinking “What would he say about all of this?”  (Yes, I’ve read Seduction of the Innocent.)

It’s an encouraging step, I think, in the mainstream acceptance of comic books.  I know things like this have been done other places.  Maybe one day we can all see comic books as a respectable literary form.

I still think that day is a long way off, though.

The tide turns on graphic novel from the San Antonio Current.

It’s really about time there was a smart, well-researched article out there on graphic novels.  Read and enjoy.

The winter ‘04 issue of Bust has a fun little article on the popularity of shojo manga with young women (and not just teenagers, who get the typical coverage on this subject).  While I enjoyed the assertion that Sailor Moon was responsible for creating a generation of female anime/manga fans (because I agree — that’s what Sailor Moon did for me), I do get tired of the “Manga understands what women want to read more than Western comics” argument.

I don’t read a lot of manga, like I’ve mentioned.  Some of that is the cost — and while I’m sure it works out to be about the same in the end, it’s easier for me to spend $3 on a single comic than it is to spend $10 on a collection of 4 manga issues — it’s also that I just never manged to get into it.  While I’m happy that women are reading comics of any sort, I think those that say there’s no good Western comics for women just aren’t looking hard enough.