Comments on: Go Team Manga?!

By: MangaBlog » Blog Archive » Uneasy reading

MangaBlog » Blog Archive » Uneasy reading — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 03:36:24 +0000

[...] Finally, David Taylor has been hosting an interesting discussion—which migrated over to Tangognat—about whether libraries and bookstores should enforce the age ratings on manga. Purely by coincidence, Wai Wai gets the last word with a worst-case scenario. [...]

By: tangognat

tangognat — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 00:38:09 +0000

I do think that the best thing for libraries to do is to know their graphic novel collection and shelve things by age range. I certainly wouldn’t shelve Happy Mania next to Hikaru No Go if I was in charge of a graphic novel collection for a public library, because those manga have totally different audiences.
The part of the commentary that I found odd and a little distressing over at comments thread over at Love Manga was the idea that to fix the problem of shallow news stories was to place unheard of limits on access to printed material from libraries. In the examples that he’s using, he wants libraries to restrict access to manga by the age of the user. So a 14 year old wouldn’t be allowed to check a manga that a publisher recommends for 16+ out of the library. He wants a librarian to intervene and deny access to manga, so a story like this isn’t repeated. I don’t think that is legal, and it totally goes against one of the main principles of a library – to provide open access to information.

By: David Welsh

David Welsh — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 00:06:05 +0000

I just think it would be sensible if libraries shelved graphic novels in the same way they do prose… breaking it down into sections for children, young adults, and adults. I’m sure some do that already, and I don’t see that as censorship any more than I do when they put the Captain Underpants in the children’s section and Atonement with the general fiction.

I also think it would be fabulous if parents were interested enough in what their kids are reading to figure out that there’s a difference between Imadoki and Happy Mania.

These newspaper articles irritate me because generally they come down to a parent being surprised that comics aren’t always appropriate for kids, which they’d know if they didn’t dismiss them as a kiddie medium and if they demonstrated more of an interest in their kids’ choices instead running to the media when their kids used libraries in the way they were intended to be used.

From my point of view, it’s not a Team Manga attitude. It’s irritation with news media’s tendency to take specious and shallow approaches to these kinds of stories. And if libraries can prevent them by shelving their material by age group, which they do with just about every other holding category, and which publishers make easy by putting age ratings prominently on their product, then where’s the problem?

By: tangognat

tangognat — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 21:00:14 +0000

I agree that the way the media portrays manga isn’t very nuanced, but I don’t think it is the library’s role to take preventative measures like limiting access due to the fear of another newspaper article that will portray manga as dangerous. Sometimes the advocacy of comic book fans seems very one-sided to me.

By: Lyle

Lyle — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 19:27:35 +0000

I’d guess the big problem is that the media seems to look at The Handmaid’s Tale as an example of a Margaret Atwood book, but at the same times sees Crying Freeman (my brain is not picking examples well today) as an example of manga and not an example of a Kazuo Koike manga. Hence, comics readers feel like they’ve been insulted by association.

In essense these stories are “Zap! Pow! Big eyes and speed lines could be doing your children harm.” They’re not so different from those “the interenet is dangerous for children” stories where the real lesson was that “talking to strangers (on the internet) is dangerous for children.”