Sometimes when I blog I feel like I have one foot in the library blog world and the other foot in comics blog world, so it is always interesting to me when those two worlds intersect. David Taylor of Love Manga reacts to a newspaper story about a 13 year old checking some manga for mature readers out of a library in Canada. I find it interesting that he wants libraries and bookstores to restrict what people are able to check out according to the publisher age rating recommendations. I’m going to reproduce an exchange of ours out of his comments:
Tangognat:Are you really annoyed that a library let a young teenager check out some mature manga, or as a fan of manga do you just want to avoid this type of situation so there is less bad press in the future?
Love Manga: Nope, not even mildly upset. I worry that the age-ratings are being ignored they after all are there for a reason. If they are continually ignored then we can expect lots more of these articles. Which is a BIG shame really as articles like these written in mainstream media do very little to help the image of Manga in the US, and in particular the UK where it is only one step away from just that weird Japanese Tentacle porn again.
I have said repeatedly on this site and others that the Manga industry here and in the US is long overdue for a really bad article where someone really gets upset about what their children are reading, this one above isn’t it but it is getting close. What would be really nice is if we didn’t gift the article to the mainstream media in the first place, by not acting responsibly.
Even though in many of his comments about manga ratings and their lack of enforcement, he evokes the idea of “protecting the children”, it seems to me that the main reason for arguing for this “protection” on the part of libraries is to protect the manga industry from bad press, the spectre of a really bad article about a kid getting his hands on some manga that is viewed by someone as inappropriate. In linking to the article, David Welsh picks out a quote about not wanting to see any more of these types of articles.
To me this type of story doesn’t have a whole lot to distinguish it from other newspaper stories about book challenges that happen all the time, but I wonder if to a manga or comic book fan it tends to stand out more. There’s a “Go Team Comics” meme that frequently comes up on blogs and discussion boards where it is implied that people should go the extra mile to support the industry that they are already supporting by buying their product. For example, if you are a true fan of a series, you should buy all the single issues AND a trade paperback in order to support the comic book creators.
I don’t think that the manga industry needs libraries to create access barriers in order to avoid potential bad press. It is an odd reason to argue for censorship, but I don’t think it is unxpected coming from someone with a “Go Team Manga” type of mentality. I’m not sure if in a similar situation I’d see an argument from ardent fans of Canadian Literature that Margaret Atwood novels should be taken off high school reading lists to avoid stories like this one about a school board banning and reversing the ban on A Handmaid’s Tale. And I don’t think fans of fantasy fiction would argue for restrictions on Harry Potter in order to avoid more incidents of book burning.
I think that even if there is a big news article in the future that portrays manga as evil, the industry will survive. Huge corporations are making a ton of money off translated manga. The industry is healthy. Even though manga seems mainstream to comics/manga fans, it is still new to many people, and newspapers will write stories that will portray it as both good and bad.
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.”
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.
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?
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.
[...] 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. [...]