Last month, when the teenage daughter on NBC's The Book of Daniel turned out to be a talented manga artist selling drugs to pay for her software, adults may have said, "Huh?" But their teenage daughters probably knew exactly what manga was.
These black-and-white comics, translated from Japanese best-sellers and meant to be read back to front and right to left, are a huge hit with American teens and 'tweens. They can find manga (pronounced mahn-ga, with a hard G as in "girl") in the popular teen magazine Cosmo Girl or they wait impatiently for the next book in a series to be translated and brought to the shelves of a nearby Barnes & Noble or Waldenbooks.
Once publishers persuaded chain bookstores to carry their manga (as opposed to comics shops), girls could find it easily -- in malls, where they were anyway.
Cori Kasura, a 13-year-old student at Glenwood Middle School who describes herself as "a very large fan," discovered her first manga two years ago at the public library.
"A lot of people brush them off as just a comic, and they shouldn't," she says. "They deal with real-world problems, and I guess I kind of like that. Of course, some of them have a magical spin."
The plots of manga specifically written for girls, called shojo, come in two subgenres: magical girl stories, in which a Bambi-eyed heroine with a super power saves the world, and ones with more realistic plots about unrequited love, relationships and high school angst.
But to call them realistic in the way, say, a Judy Blume novel is realistic, would be stretching it. One of Cori's current favorite series is W Juliet, a best-seller published by Viz Media about a tomboy who makes friends with a beautiful newcomer to her high school -- only to find that he's a boy disguised as a girl (to prove to his father that he has the talent to become an actor). Romance blossoms and complications ensue, and it takes 14 volumes to sort it all out.
At $10 a volume, that's a lot of babysitting money.
Of course, young fans can always get their fix at the library. The Baltimore County Public Library has been adding to its collection and now has more than 2,800 volumes in its branches, 330 different manga titles in all.
"It's definitely one of our highest circulating collections," says Jeff Doane, a librarian in the Towson branch young adult section. "The whole system is suddenly realizing [that manga isn't] a one-hit wonder. These books are read to pieces. That's pretty cool."
