Attitudes towards manga

Hmm... on a side note, I don't necessarily see the attitude in the opening pages as being contempt against manga per se. Though, yeah, the vibe isn't exactly the most informed sounding.

It's sort of the stereotypical attitude I'd always come across when putting the words 'librarian' and 'anything with pictures' together. *laugh* I mean, I constantly read articles about how they bemoan the radio, television, movies, and just about anything that's fast and has images--- I guess because they're often perceived as an attack on the established and fine art of 'reading real books'. No, strike that, I mean "reading real LITERATURE".

I guess sequential stuff of any sort is considered the less of two evils because at least _some_ reading is involved? Though, I'm not entirely sure such an aggressive "We'll get them at all costs to read our stuff" is a good stance to take towards the demographic they're trying to drag into the libraries. It sort of smacks towards the mistakes that a lot of comic companies took up a few years back? Then again... Libaries aren't exactly multimillion dollar businesses. And librarians aren't exactly corporate bosse...They're just people trying to get kids to welcome reading at all.

I have to give them kudos, however, for at least attempting pretty early on to get manga onto the shelves. The local libraries I have in my area hopped on it almost as soon as Tokyopop started their mass market flooding of titles. (or maybe they clued in with the abnormally large amount of nonchinese flooding the Chinese language section and walking out with comics they can't read...)

My guess is that the library associations may be a little more understanding of the medium along the eastern/western seaboard. :O I mean, since the access and major conventions and everything is greater along those places.

Dangit, LJ ate half of my original reply. Reposting.

----------------

I think my reading of the first couple of pages was colored by that next-to-last paragraph with the "Maybe they'll grow up to read good stuf. One can only hope" message.

She certainly didn't mention the Korean manhwa being published by the same publishers which carry most of the same cataloging problems as Japanese manga except for the left-to-right reading order, and she doesn't address OEL manga, which again carries a certain amount of the same problems (not to mention that Seven Seas is publishing them right-to-left and Tokyopop's publishing them left-to-right), instead saying that it's all Japanese. Which shows a very definite unfamiliarity with the subject matter she's trying to catalog and to me shows that she's not more interested in trying to learn just a little bit more, because the presence of Korean and OEL stuff is pretty noteable.

The aimed-at-kids-and-teens thing is off, too, since we're starting tos ee some of the josei titles over here. Erica Sakurazawa's works, for one, are aimed at the Cosmo-reading demographic, which is closer to college and early 20s than teen.

But you know all this already; I'm just ranting. :D

Yeah, I'm glad that they're getting them onto the shelves. My mom, who volunteers at her local library, grouches a bit when she's processing them because of the right-to-left format which means she has to be alert that she's not slapping barcodes on the wrong side, and because there seems to be a neverending supply of Rurouni Kenshin, but she's not serious about her complaints. XD

* Although the josei titles probably aren't seen much in libraries because of the often R-rated content combined with America's tendency to think any book with pictures in it is for kids.

Hmm... this goes to show, I shouldn't skim quickly and reply while I'm rushing around all over the place.

What I meant was that I don't think the writer would have that attitude against manga _personally_ and appears to have an 'us against the entertainment world' attitude in her writing. (as is the stance a lot of English teachers and school libarians I've read about/come across.)

That said, I think my library must be pretty darned... special or something, because I've actually caught at least half of them at one point or another reading the manga they're shelving. :} Which must be why they seem to have an idea of what's good to get hold of. The collection on the shelves of both graphic novels and manga are pretty comprehensive. Haven't seen much korean manwha, but there has been a surprising number of Bilal's crew of European stuff, and Hong Kong manwha. And there's practicallu an entire half-shelf of OEL works. D:

Reading more on that article... er. Can't argue with anything else you've said. :} I'm pretty antsy about the shonen-is-for-all-male-manga, and that pesky all-girly-comics-are-obviously-shoujo mentality that I've taken a kick at a few of the better read fen.
Especially if they insist that That Is All There Really Is-- the Rest Is Just Fringe Weirdness... Bleh, but that's a rant of my own that I'll not go towards atm.

My email to the editor

Dear Ms. Maurer,

I am a writer of nonfiction, TV, and graphic novels in the Japanese style. My memoir "All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: an American Misfit in India" was published by Rodale this year and reviewed by "USA Today" and "Entertainment Weekly," among other publications.

I am writing to point out a number of factual errors and, to say the least, arguable statements in Jeanne Poole's article on cataloging Japanese graphic novels.

1. Poole refers to Japanese graphic novels as "anime." This is incorrect. They are called "manga." "Anime" refers to animated films or television series. (Both words are used in the same form as singular and plural.)

2. She states that manga series never end. This is incorrect. It is a notable feature of manga, as opposed to American superhero comic books, that most manga series do come to a conclusion, sometimes at the end of one volume, sometimes at the end of twenty or more, but a conclusion nonetheless. Once the original writer of a manga series ends it, it will not be picked up and continued by anyone else.

3. She states that all manga focus on the battle between good and evil. This is totally wrong. Manga can be in any genre, and a lot of the manga published in the USA in translation are realistic school stories, romances, comedies, and sports stories-- all genres which have nothing to do with the battle between good and evil. Even sf and fantasy manga do not necessarily have anything to do with the battle between good and evil. That battle is a concern with only a small sub-section of manga.

4. She states that most manga published in the US is science fiction or fantasy. This is incorrect, as I explain above.

5. She states that good always triumphs. In fact, one of the major stylistic differences between manga and American superhero comics is that a happy ending is in no way guaranteed.

6. She states that "imagination and creativity are not required" (of the reader). This is snobbish, condescending, possibly racist, and wrong. Manga is a serious art form, much as books and film are a serious art form. Would she say make that same statement about movies or paintings, because both involve images? Would she say that about an illuminated manuscript, because it contains both images and words?

Furthermore, a great deal of serious analysis has been written about manga, and fans frequently write stories about their favorite characters, thereby proving that manga does, in fact, often spark creativity and imagination.

7. She suggests that teens who read lots of manga won't be able to read regular books. Japan, where manga is universally read by children, teens, and adults, is one of the most literate countries in the world. Why does Poole think that American teenagers will be stunted by reading material that both teenagers and adults read in its original language with no ill effects? Does she have any evidence for this?

8. She claims that manga are basically TV shows and video games in book format. In fact, they are a very different medium from TV, which you can see by looking at the manga and anime versions of the same story, and not at all like video games, because if they were, they'd be choose-your-own-adventure.

Finally, teenagers are not the only readers of manga. I read manga. Many of my adult friends read manga. In Japan, most adults read manga. I haven't noticed that it has, as Poole implies, made any of us stupid.

Sincerely,

Rachel Manija Brown

www.rachelmanijabrown.com

She was a vixen when she went to school,
And though she be but little, she is fierce.

William Shakespeare, "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

Re: My email to the editor

Let us know if you get a response. :D

Well, the cataloging part of things isn't utter crap, but it is overly complicated. Basically, a lot of what the technical side boils down to is that each library needs to make a few decisions about how to treat all manga and then be consistent about it. The question of whether to make a single cataloging record for a whole series or to make a separate record for each volume, for example, is rather more a matter of policy. The single record is more work up front but saves time and effort down the line, but a library deciding to make individual records for each volume really won't matter to patrons as long as the records are consistent with each other.

The article doesn't address what I'd expect to be a bigger issue for most public libraries. That is that libraries prefer not to do original cataloging (creating a record from scratch by looking at the book in question) because it takes longer and costs more. Most libraries either use the CIP (Cataloging In Publication) information that many publishers print on the verso of the title page or belong to cataloging cooperatives and use, more or less unaltered, the records that other institutions have created. When I worked in cataloging, we had a list of institutions whose records we preferred to use if we could get them because the catalogers knew from experience that those places had high standards. When libraries do have to create their own records, they usually try to make them as brief as possible, and manga are going to take a bit of extra work and therefore more cataloging money.

Some of the questions actually addressed won't be considerations for most libraries. For example, most public libraries aren't going to bother putting an LC call number on manga any more than they would for other fiction, and academic libraries that put call numbers on everything aren't concerned about attracting reluctant teenage readers.

Most libraries either use the CIP (Cataloging In Publication) information that many publishers print on the verso of the title page or belong to cataloging cooperatives and use, more or less unaltered, the records that other institutions have created.

True enough. On a whim, I just checked OCLC; they had records for whatever manga title I threw at them, and most would require very little alteration to conform to whatever policies the library happened to follow.

The call number thing puzzled me as well. Every time I've seen manga (or any kind of graphic novels, for that matter) in a public library, they've been given their own section and shelved alphabetically, and academic libraries probably aren't going to have manga at all--at least, none of the ones I know of are rushing to include manga in their collection policy....

I'm glad to have a second for my opinion on the cataloging being straightforward. My background's largely in serials and monographic series, so I know that some of what I think is easy and basic isn't necessarily so for those without the same experience. Of course, I also tend to think that monographic subject headings get absurdly specific... (Except when I'm the one *searching.*)

I think that Michigan State University might want to include manga in its collection. It has a specialized and quite extensive collection of comic books and graphic novels. If they have the money in their budget, I could certainly understand the collection development folks deciding to pick up some manga titles.

The collection also includes some other odd stuff. I had a friend who worked there for a while, and she found a cataloging record for a roll of superhero toilet paper that included a note saying, "Roll is incomplete."

I think that some academic libraries might also budget for manga if they have faculty specializing in studying manga or in studying fan fiction, but that would require faculty with tenure and influence. Even in a case like that, I think the library where I used to work would hesitate since volumes of manga aren't very durable and don't tend to have enough margin to allow for the trimming that (re)binding requires.

When I was at my previous job, I used the ILL services a lot to request weird and wonderful books for my own amusement, many involving manga (although not manga itself), from the university's library. I kept getting copies of the book without any library trappings - no call numbers or anything like that - and clued in that they were actually ordering many of the books I'd requested and let me have them before they were cataloged. I was pleasantly surprised. :)

I've used ILL a lot at this job, too, but none of the books have been purchased. Acquisitions encourages faculty and staff to request books, though, so I think they're fairly open to that sort of thing. Not sure how much it would take to get them to order actual manga series, and not just lit crit of it, though.

I had a friend who worked there for a while, and she found a cataloging record for a roll of superhero toilet paper that included a note saying, "Roll is incomplete."

Forgot to comment on this - that's lovely! :D One of the museums I worked in had a volunteer doing their object descriptions. Said volunteer - who we loved to death because nobody else wanted to do them - was an ex-engineer and was absurdly specific in the descriptions. The collections manager and I used to entertain each other by reading the descriptions out loud and trying to guess what it was.

I think the best one was a tiny toy model of an old six-pack of glass Coke bottles, which started off something like "Rectangular container, 1" x .37", with six protruberances from the upper side..." and went on for half a page.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled digressions.

I suppose it's possible that it only seems straightforward to us because we're used to manga in the first place? I can only imagine the reaction of, say, the assistant librarian in Nowheresville (pop. 1000) when confronted with a stack of translated multivolume books that are full of pictures and read backwards. (Not to disparage the librarians of Nowheresville in any way, you understand.)

I had a friend who worked there for a while, and she found a cataloging record for a roll of superhero toilet paper that included a note saying, "Roll is incomplete."

Hee, that's fantastic. My professor was right--it really is possible to catalog anything!

It occurred to me that any academic library whose school has a sizeable East Asian Studies/Culture program probably ought to look into picking up some manga for their collection. Possibly some of the libraries in California, too, seeing as how Tokyopop/Viz/etc. are based out there in L.A. and San Francisco; I wouldn't be surprised if there are teenage manga fans planning to attend college out there, hoping to snag a job with one of those companies.

I suppose it's possible that it only seems straightforward to us because we're used to manga in the first place?

It is possible. I think, though, that most of the things that would seem weird to that cataloger in Nowheresville wouldn't affect cataloging. I wouldn't expect manga to be more complicated than any multipart monograph/monographic series/whatever such things are called locally. Compared to cataloging, say, scores or photographs, they should be pretty straightforward.

Hee, that's fantastic. My professor was right--it really is possible to catalog anything!

It really is. One of the libraries in our system had a collection of railroad paraphernalia-- uniforms, lights, etc.-- that all had cataloging records. I think it's largely a matter of establishing standards and then sticking to them.

Of course, I rather think that there are things that aren't worth cataloging. Things that are ephemeral, for example, like newspaper clippings or newsletters that aren't going to be kept or things that are otherwise well indexed, like specific records in a database.

My local library shelves most its manga in the YA section with a sign that more graphic novels are in the 700s or whatever it is.

I don't catalog manga myself (being a special librarian whose specialty has nothing to do with comics/manga, unfortunately) but my mother, who is a school librarian, does and she says that the Dewey Decimal Classification System places manga, like all comics, under a call number. 700s, I want to say.

Of course, what she and most other librarians choose to do is seperate them out and shelve them alphabetically, as you've noted. Nonetheless, it's trechnically not what you're "supposed" to do if you follow the cataloging and classification rules to a tee.

In fact, the undergraduate library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has a decent selection of graphic novels, including some manga. It uses the Dewey decimal system, and all graphic novels have call numbers beginning with 741. The main stacks also have a few Japanese-language manga (which are catalogued using the Library of Congress system, because they're in the Asian collection).

--Adam

Whoa, there's manga in libraries in America? Awesome... I wish we had too. XD
Here it's still all in comic books stores... All two of them! =D

Anyway, this article (The first part at least, I didn't understand the cataloging part at all XD) Was pretty... Dumb. XD
She should at least read some manga before making such an annoying, elitist judgement... Do some research. But I guess she wanted to sound smart or something. XD