Gravett, Paul: Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics (2005)
The San Bernerdo County Library has banned Paul Gravett's Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics for obscenity. MangaBlog has an excellent round-up of the news reports and online responses (also see today's follow-up and Gravett's own set of links).
There are enough people discussing the controversy; what I'd like to do is discuss the book. I spent some time last year looking at the books on manga available in English, and Gravett's Manga is by far the best of them. The most recommended books are still, I think, Frederik Schodt's introductions, Manga! Manga! and Dreamland Japan; they're valuable, but they are also, respectively, twenty and ten years old. Gravett describes how manga in Japan is produced, marketed, and sold; details its beginnings and its major genres, including many not available in English translation; and seems to cover everything, from manga for little kids to "silver manga" for seniors, from hand-sold cult hits to popular doujinshi ("amateur" manga that's sometimes fanfiction in comics form and sometimes just manga distributed outside major press publication) to massively popular entertainment. It is carefully researched, insofar as I can judge without access to the primary sources; it is engagingly written; it is so comprehensive it could serve as a primer for beginners and a coursebook for experts. This isn't a disposable cash-in book on a popular topic; it's a model of popular scholarship. If you're curious about manga, the book is well worth checking out of the library; if you already have an abiding interest in the topic, you'll probably want to own it.
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coffeeandink) wrote,
