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Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

navel-gazing

Getting Our Geek On: What Our Symbols Mean to Us

July 13, 2009 by MJ 55 Comments

As I’m sure you’ve all noticed, I am occasionally struck with an intense (if not profound) need to question the workings and motivations of my inner geek, generally expressed via long-winded navel-gazing in the form of a blog feature. In today’s installment of this periodic ramble, I address the question of my outer geek, what that means and why. As usual, I’m coming at the question from a strictly personal angle, but though the bulk of this post is about my own experiences in displaying my fandom, I’m hoping to motivate the rest of you to tell me about your own.

The outward display of fannish/geek paraphernalia is certainly nothing new or profound. From t-shirts to full-out cosplay, fans like me dress up constantly to some extent or another and have been doing so for longer than any of us have been around. I’m sure there have been academic studies done on fan culture and so on which address the subject in detail. Something that has struck me lately, however, is how personal some of these displays can be–to the point where I question the object of wearing them in the first place.

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Filed Under: FEATURES Tagged With: fandom, fullmetal alchemist, navel-gazing

Keeping Up Appearances as a Female Fan

June 13, 2009 by MJ 54 Comments

This morning as I was scrolling through my LiveJournal friends list, I came across a post by a friend, lamenting the obvious sexism in both the LA Times’ Girls’ Guide to Comic-Con and the upcoming Marvel Divas comics. I bristled, just as she did, at the implication (or perhaps outright statement?) that the only things that could possibly interest women in comics are hot guys, romance, and shoes. It was only after my initial disgust waned a bit that I was able to stop and think about how much work I’ve put into proving that kind of thinking wrong and how much that has shaped my actions and decisions–to the point where I may be letting those ideas about women control me as much as if they were true.

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Filed Under: FEATURES Tagged With: fandom, manga, navel-gazing

Why Manga?

June 5, 2009 by MJ 19 Comments

When I was struggling earlier today to begin a post, something that kept coming to me was how much my feelings for music seemed related–or at least similar–to my feelings for manga, both in depth and breadth. This led me to think about why I love both, and then to why I love manga. But to start, I think the question I must begin with is:

Why Fiction?

Something I’ve always had difficulty relating to is the concept of “real life” as being something different than a person’s online life. I mean, I get it kind of, but it’s not like I become imaginary when I sit down at my computer, and every person I deal with online is just as real as I am regardless of whether or not they are being honest about who they are. Just as in “real life,” my words and actions have the power to affect other people, for good or ill. So how is this not a part of my real life? Similarly, I’ve always been at odds with the idea that imagining, writing, reading, or interacting with fiction is somehow less a part of what’s real in this world (and in our lives) than anything else. Fiction is our greatest tool for sharing ideas with each other as a species, in a way that touches and inspires not just our logical minds, but our hearts and even that intangible thing we like to call our “souls.”

Nearly everything important I have learned about life, people, and the world around me has come from one of two places: my own personal experience or fiction; and I have a feeling that if it was possible to sit down and write out every one of those things, fiction would come out on top. After all, the potential human experience available to one forty-year-old woman is miniscule compared to the volume of fictional works written since the dawn of man, or even just since the dawn of modern language.

Fiction is the the place of dreams, yes, but also the foundation of reality–how we perceive it and how we express that to others. Even the most escapist works tell us something about ourselves, both as individuals and as a society, and I can personally vouch for the fact that even these works are capable of inspiring deep thinking and emotion, whether their authors ever intended that or not. Each person’s experience with a fictional work is wholly unique to that person, and yet it is a connection between one person’s ideas and another’s that gives it its power. This, to me, is the most awesome thing in all the world.

My personal devotion to the products of human imagination–for me, fiction and music in particular–has always been what makes me feel most connected to other human beings, and the only thing capable of successfully bridging my very rich inner life with my more troublesome outer life. As such, I feel these things are inextricable from my life and who I am, and I’m very comfortable with that.

Why Comics?

The one particular product of human imagination it took me until recent years to truly connect with and appreciate is visual art. Outside of a childhood obsession with attempting (unsuccessfully) to draw all the characters out of my own imagined fiction and one year at college during which I would repeatedly visit a particular Pierre Bonnard painting at the Carnegie Museum of Art–earnestly seeking the answer as to why it affected me in a strong, emotional way that other art generally did not–I was never a person who connected deeply with visual representations of life.

The simple explanation for this may actually be that, unlike music, prose fiction, or theater, visual art was not something I could successfully experience as a creator (or at least a participant)–something that those who know me well can recognize as an important part of how I interact with art. How it happened to be comics that finally achieved this is somewhat of a mystery to me, though perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the art is acting as part of a narrative, which is something I can personally connect to more easily than an isolated image.

Yet it was not western comics that actually pulled me in, but manga. Which brings me to…

Why Manga?

The fact that comics are part of mainstream popular fiction and therefore serve a much broader audience in Japan than they do here is, I’m sure, largely responsible for many of the elements that draw me most to manga–epic (but finite), single-creator stories in a huge variety of genres and styles, offering me the same variety and breadth of human experience and emotion as I’d find in prose fiction, movies, or television in this country. Whether this is connected to the sudden and profound realization that I could glean something new about the human experience from hand-drawn black lines on white paper, I am not certain, but I do know that my first encounter with manga was life-changing. It’s as though I was experiencing sight for the first time. For years, my imagination had subsisted (and very heartily) on written, and oral (including musical) language, either brought to life entirely by my imagination (as with print) or by other live humans (theater, television, film)–the closest thing to a visual element I was really in touch with. I can say honestly that up to the point I first read a manga, I really had no concept of how powerful and real a drawing could be or how strongly I could connect with such a thing.

It’s possible that a great deal of why I easily connect with manga in this way after failing to do so with western comics, is the tendency of manga to let the art take the lead in telling the story, which I think is less often the case in comics here. Odd that this would be the key, considering my previous attachment to prose; or perhaps not odd at all, since one of my problems with reading western comics had been that I kept feeling that the pictures were in the way as I tried to read the story. This is not a judgement on western comics, but really a suggestion that until I read manga, I was actually kind of impaired, and it took manga to fix that.

I think what is special about manga and why I have immersed myself so deeply in it in such a short time (aside from the fact that this is just how I do things) is that it offers a unique opportunity for the reader’s imagination. Something I used to talk about regarding art song, which was my favorite form of music to work on as a classical voice student, was that it offered an experience for interpretation that was different than anything else. Unlike opera, in which the music and libretto were working together to tell a single story, art song usually began as a poem–a form that invites greater personal interpretation than narrative fiction –to which the composer would add his/her personal interpretation through music–another form that invites great personal interpretation. The singer is then in the position to draw upon both these potentially disparate elements to create a third interpretation–one that is likely to be unique to each singer (ditto with the pianist, lest this be forgotten). By the time the art song reaches the listener–the final collaborator–the possibilities for interpretation are so richly layered that each person will take away with them something not only unique in itself, but uniquely guided by all who touched the piece before it reached them.

Now you’re saying, “Whoooa, crazy music lady, the manga is more like opera,” (unless you’re just saying, “Whoa, crazy lady you lost me three paragraphs back”) and you’d be right. Except not exactly. Plays, movies, and television are like the opera. Manga is something in between. Though the pictures and the words are working together to tell the same story, the fact that it is black-and-white drawn, still images providing the more specific interpretation of the text actually leaves much more for the reader’s imagination to fill in, which to me is closer to the art song, though perhaps close enough to the opera too to provide the best of both worlds. While the skilled mangaka has the power to inject true, specific human emotion into something as small as a single line on a character’s face, it is still up to the reader’s imagination to actually translate that into the face of a real human–a face that will inevitably be a little different one for each person who imagines it. Aside from the element of color, this is true of western comics as well, but it is the combination of all these things at once–the epic, finite works; variety of genres; visual storytelling style; and the crazy music lady stuff–that makes manga special, or at least makes it special for me.

~o~

If you’ve made it this far, you probably deserve a drink. Since I can’t offer that across cyberspace (is this proof of the whole “real life” business??) I will instead thank you for reading and ask for your thoughts. :)

Filed Under: FEATURES Tagged With: fiction, manga, music, navel-gazing

My Thoughts On Yaoi Manga, Part II

April 23, 2009 by MJ 23 Comments

So I’m starting with this topic because it received the most votes, but I’ll be talking about each topic on the poll within the next week or so, and posting some reviews as well, so hopefully I will please everyone!

It’s kind of stunning now to go back to my original thoughts on yaoi, not because the things I have problems with in the genre have changed, because they really haven’t (though I probably have some new things to add). What’s changed is that I have finally nailed down what exactly it is I’m looking for in a boys’ love story, and the simple truth is that it is exactly what I’m looking for in any story, no more, no less.

I’ve read arguments from time to time (made by people I respect a lot, mind you) about certain things only being “okay” in a BL story–things they would not accept in any other kind of story. And while I can see the point that these things are potentially unavoidable in the vast majority of the genre, I still don’t like them, and wouldn’t purposefully read something with those elements included unless there was a lot of what I do like in there to balance the scale. So in this entry, instead of talking about what I don’t like in yaoi/boys’love/whatever, I’m going to talk about what I do.

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Filed Under: FEATURES Tagged With: manga, navel-gazing, yaoi/boys' love

Manga minis + a lecture

April 20, 2009 by MJ 9 Comments

Good morning, all! I have a couple of reviews in this morning’s Manga Minis, for volume three of Hitohira (see my reviews for the first two volumes here and here), and for DMP/June’s BL one-shot, Love/Knot.

So, something that keeps coming up between me and another reviewer dear to me is a deep insecurity about our own reviews that kicks in whenever we read something written by the other. I think her reviews have an incredible clarity and power of description that immediately tells the reader whether or not a book is something they want to read–something I feel entirely helpless to achieve. She thinks my reviews are thoughtful and especially insightful into the emotional world of the characters, which she envies on some level. Basically, she thinks her reviews are missing the “big picture” and I think mine are missing the point. Most of the time, I think we just admire each other in a very constructive way that inspires us both to do our best, but sometimes we become disheartened by our perception of our own skills, and that’s when I think I have to pull out some kind of lecture on the subject for both of us to listen to. This is my attempt at that lecture. …

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Filed Under: FEATURES Tagged With: manga, navel-gazing, pandora, reviewing, writing

Personal musing on La Corda d’Oro

April 7, 2009 by MJ 22 Comments

One of the anime series currently available for viewing on Crunchyroll is La Corda d’Oro, based on the manga series licensed in the US by Viz (which is, I understand, based on a video game). My husband brought it up to me recently as a series he’d be interested in watching and when he told me the name, my ears perked up as I reached excitedly into my pile of review copies where I have volume ten of the manga waiting to be reviewed for Manga Recon’s “On The Shojo Beat” column next month. Seeing this as a great opportunity for me to study up for my review (I don’t own or have access to the first nine volumes of the manga), we plunged right in.

Now I’ll say right off, I am really enjoying this anime series. Sure, the musical selections are straight out of someone’s supermarket CD of “Your Favorite Classical Music Hits,” but honestly this is what I expect to see in popular fiction, and even when the arrangements of these overused standards are utterly ridiculous (I looked it up–there actually is an existing arrangement of Pachelbel’s Canon for just violin and piano, as ill-advised as that may seem) the characters are so sincere about playing them it’s hard to remain snobbish about it, even for a stodgy old music geek like me. Recently, however, there has been a bit of a plot twist that has seriously thrown me for a loop. I found my own reaction to it surprising, revealing, and actually a little bit hilarious so I thought I’d talk about it here. Major spoilers after the jump. …

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Filed Under: DAILY CHATTER, FEATURES Tagged With: anime, la corda d'oro, manga, navel-gazing

Musings on online identity

March 7, 2009 by MJ 21 Comments

Hello all. I’ve been nursing a severe case of crankiness with a side of the blues over the past couple of days which has made me a poor blogger. Hopefully this will soon pass.

There’s been a disturbing exchange going on in sci fi fandom recently, which I won’t get into here because everything useful has already been said (my favorite post is actually by a friend of mine, here, which also links to this astonishingly thorough nutshell), but something that has become a side-issue of sorts is the question of using pseudonyms on the internet, and whether doing so diminishes a person’s credibility or perhaps even negates it entirely. As a person who has interacted online both using a pseudonym and using my real name, I find this attitude perplexing at best. Names, after all, are loaded things, capable of both giving someone power and taking it away. Let me explain what I mean by that….

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Filed Under: REVIEWS Tagged With: fandom, identity, navel-gazing

Item: One Moon

February 20, 2009 by MJ 24 Comments

“You mean it wasn’t real? The bandit? The moonlight?”

Earlier today, an old friend commented on my Facebook status, jokingly begging me to blog about something other than manga. I had to laugh a bit, especially since this person has known me a very long time, because I would have thought most people in my life have realized by now that, well, I don’t really do hobbies. I do passions. I grab on to the things that are meaningful to me, and let them carry me to my next destination. I’ve always felt very strongly that these things lead me to where I most need to be, and so far that philosophy has served me very well in life.

So, if you’re among those who mourn the fact that this has become primarily a manga blog, just try to think back to all the things that brought me this far–all those stops along the way where I found each of you–and remember that even when I’m unsure about where I’m going, I’m always fully committed to the journey. This is the one truth about my life I know for sure I can believe in. For now, the journey has brought me to manga, and I’m extremely excited to find out where I’m headed from here.

Now… will somebody please license Bakuman?

Filed Under: DAILY CHATTER, FEATURES Tagged With: manga, navel-gazing, station identification

The curse of the critical eye

October 22, 2008 by MJ 12 Comments

This morning, I read a post by a good friend of mine, sistermagpie, over at LiveJournal, in which she talked about some conversations she’d seen recently revolving around whether academic analysis could ruin a person’s enjoyment of fiction. The crux of her post was that she couldn’t imagine that analyzing a story could ruin her love of reading, and when I first read her argument, I was in complete agreement. Wouldn’t analysis simply deepen my love for something, by helping me to fully understand and appreciate the depth of the material? Then I remembered my state of mind when I left the commercial theater business, and my brain said, “Oooooooh, that’s right.”

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Filed Under: DAILY CHATTER, FEATURES Tagged With: Bloggish, criticism, manga, musical theater, navel-gazing

How I got into comics, or why there is hope for Bob Thompson

August 27, 2008 by MJ 34 Comments

Yesterday, Brigid Alverson linked to an article by Bob Thompson at the Washington Post, in which he discussed the recent popularity of graphic novels, and his experiences sampling them as a steadfast “prose guy.” I link to Brigid’s post here, because her reaction to the article was much like mine (and a million other manga fans across the internet, including John Jakala, whose post on the subject she also linked to, and who spoke about it in thoughtful detail), which was something like politely irritated disbelief at the fact that he seemed to pass hasty judgement on manga as a whole based on one volume of Naruto and seemingly little else. This is especially interesting, given that he does recognize late in the article that, “in the world of Japanese comics, you can do anything you want.”

Nobody needs me to reiterate the article, and pretty much everything that could be said about it already has been, and by people much more eloquent and knowledgeable than I. If I have anything to offer here, it is my own story of learning to love manga, because really, if I could fall in love with it, anyone could, even Bob Thompson.

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Filed Under: DAILY CHATTER, FEATURES Tagged With: comics, hikaru no go, manga, navel-gazing

Random, happy, confusing, exciting

August 18, 2008 by MJ 1 Comment

First of all, many thanks to those who have been leaving BL recommendations for me here! I’ve started looking a bit at some of the recs, and will report back in more detail soon. So far, the series I’ve looked at are Shout out Loud!, Let Dai, and Totally Captivated, and I’ve liked at least *something* about each of them, though I still have some reservations.

Random: This made me laugh for an entire day. Seriously.

Happy: I have at last acquired a scanner, which means that my next installment of the Fullmetal Alchemist Read-a-Long will include scanned pages from the Viz editions, rather than scanlations which I’d resorted to originally. I’ve also updated the previous entries (vol. 1 & 2 | vol. 3 & 4) with the proper pages. I’m also thinking of posting some version of my massive xxxHolic post in this blog (previously posted in fannish places), now that I have proper scanned pages, as I have a pretty much constant urge to try to draw people into that series.

A bit of navel-gazing to follow: …

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Filed Under: DAILY CHATTER, FEATURES Tagged With: fullmetal alchemist, manga, navel-gazing, star wars, writing, xxxholic

End of an era

August 5, 2008 by MJ 4 Comments

I’m actually going to talk about something other than manga today. Hopefully this does not mean the end is near.

So, I got an e-mail this morning, letting me know that Derek Sivers is selling CD Baby. I knew it had to happen someday. Derek never really intended it to become what it did, and the site was never going to be his life-long passion. He’s selling to Discmakers, and while I’m not exactly sure what to think of that, they are at least a company that depends on independent artists for their business, so they should understand who they’re working with. After all the drama with Livejournal selling to SixApart a few years back, I suppose I should be much more jaded over all this “they’ll do a better job” type of talk, but I can hardly think of any person I’ve known in any business with more integrity and real sincerity than Derek Sivers, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt here. Yes, I’m sure that there will be changes at CD Baby, and probably some of them I’ll like, and some I won’t, but that might have happened even with Derek. Now I admit, I don’t have as much at stake as many other artists on the site. My cd is out of print, I’m not marketing it (as if I ever did, heh), and I’m only collecting digital sales from CD Baby at this point anyway. But I really believe in and care about what CD Baby stands for, so I do have some stake in preserving that. I hope Tony Van Veen at Discmakers feels the same way. Also of interest, the birth of CD Baby comes in at #1 on CMJ’s “Ten Moments in Ten Years : a celebration of independent music.”

On a more personal note (because that’s what I do, I personalize everything, and hey, I’m managing to bring in manga after all), Derek also posted today Abraham Maslow’s 8 Ways to Self-Actualize, which really struck a chord with me this morning. …

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Filed Under: DAILY CHATTER Tagged With: graphic novel, manga, music, navel-gazing

Manga. Sort of. Which I am able to make all about me.

July 24, 2008 by MJ 12 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot about what draws me to manga over western comics, partly because I’ve started reading Captain America, which I’m enjoying, but wow it is hard for me to get used to reading comics in color. I feel like I should like it *more*, but I mostly find it overwhelming (which is, I think, the main reason I haven’t made it through all of Sandman, despite my deep love for Neil Gaiman). For some reason it is a lot easier for me to follow comics that are in black and white, and there’s no getting around it. I’m also really accustomed to the number of panels found on a page of manga, rather than on a page of a western comic book, and I find manga easier to look at because of that as well. What I’m really getting around to here, though, is why I tend to consider my graphic novel in-progress to be an OEL manga rather than an American comic book, and these things (as well as others) influence that. In the next couple of months I’m going to be searching for an artist to collaborate with me on the project, and I think I need to be clear with myself about what I’m looking for, before I get all tangled up in that.

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Filed Under: DAILY CHATTER, FEATURES Tagged With: graphic novel, manga, navel-gazing

Total immersion

February 1, 2008 by MJ 2 Comments

As you may have noticed, when it comes to fiction, I most often opt for total immersion. There’s really nothing I love more than completely losing myself in a fictional world (mine or otherwise). And, actually, I think “losing myself” is the wrong term to use, because this process is *such* a personal, intimate experience for me, and when I am immersed in a world this way, I feel entirely *present* in a way I often do not feel in “real life.” I think I am, in many ways, more myself in these moments, when I am able to interact with someone else’s inner life through my own.

All that is really just a complicated lead-up to the fact that I have spent the last few days pretty much immersed in the Black Cat universe, and what will probably turn out to be a long-winded description of just how much I enjoyed that. The weekend was spent with the Black Cat anime, followed by a day or two of rapturous flailing, followed by rapid consumption of the manga, which took another two days, and which pretty much blew my obsession with the anime right out of the water. Not all of it is blown, mind you. I’m still haunted by the music and glorious imagery of the anime, especially in the first six or seven episodes, and there are elements of the anime that I probably love more than the manga, though I love the manga much more overall.

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Filed Under: DAILY CHATTER, FEATURES, REVIEWS Tagged With: anime, black cat, manga, navel-gazing

Ichigo’s MJ’s Resolve

January 9, 2008 by MJ 8 Comments

Wow, it’s been a while, I realize. The holidays took over my life for a bit, but now I’m back into the daily grind. I worked a lot on the graphic novel over the past week, and things are really starting to take shape. I won’t have as much time, now that I’m back to work, but I’m trying to set some realistic goals over the next few months to keep myself motivated. I truly have never had an original project of my own that excited me as much as this one does, which helps too. I’m hoping to have a final script for the entire series completed by the end of the year, and possibly even well before then, depending on how demanding the rest of my life is. I’ve never been big on New Year’s resolutions, because I think they tend to set a person up to fail, so I’m not going to make one. But my desire to complete this project is strong, as is my resolve to do so.

I also did some reading over the holidays! …

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Filed Under: DAILY CHATTER, FEATURES, REVIEWS Tagged With: anime, banana fish, basara, bleach, death note, graphic novel, maison ikkoku, manga, mushishi, navel-gazing, tactics, xxxholic

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