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Friday, June 24, 2005
Shojo Beat Magazine Premieres
Went to the Waikiki Borders today looking for a decent magazine read, found the premiere issue of Shojo Beat and I just couldn't resist. My anime intake right now is near-zero - I've got all four discs of Paranoia Agent sitting around here somewhere, but I haven't watched it yet. My manga intake hasn't increased much either, though I'll be picking up Genshiken regularly, based on the first volume, and have a couple of things on order at the local comic shop. But Shojo Beat is something I'd been anticipating since I first heard of it and will pick up regularly.
For the uninitiated, Shojo Beat is a new manga monthly from Viz in the same mold as Shonen Jump, except this is devoted to girls comics and not boys. Hence, the names. I've yet to read the magazine but it has six different manga covering different styles and premises. It's also got articles and interviews and a free DVD, rounding out the package nicely.
I'd long been a fan of shojo manga, dating back to Matt Thorn's translation of Promise for Viz, the first time shojo manga was translated for an American audience outside of Rose of Versailles for Frederick Schodt's Manga! Manga!. (At least, I think that's the case. Any real manga historians out there can correct me if I'm wrong.)
And does anyone remember when MixxZine came out and started publishing translations of Sailor Moon and Magic Knights Rayearth? There's a certain joy to serialized reading, to looking forward every month to another shot of story, even if the plot isn't quite going anywhere. The magazine format also felt like a bargain - at the time of MixxZine, Viz was still publishing 32-page comic books, and paying full price for Ranma 1/2 felt like a rip-off since it took all of a minute to read. (I also ordered the "teacher dating student" game Graduation from an ad in MixxZine, paving the way for when I'd do the exact same thing in real life. College, though, not high school.)
In contrast, I've never been a fan of the Shonen Jump comics or boys comics in general. I was glad to see the title catch on in the United States, but nothing in there appealed to me. By coincidence, Jarret over at I'm bad at naming things discusses shounen anime - quite eloquently, too, parsing out some of the characteristics of the genre.
It's not that I think these kinds of stories aren't as good as what I like, it's just that what I like is different. More feminine for the most part, though Kindaichi and Battle Royale are notable exceptions. In many ways, I think shojo manga performs a similar function as Jpop - the heavy melodrama, the high school girls, the optimism and unabashed commerciality of the genre...
No penguin suits, though, so chalk one up for Jpop.
Oh, and I also picked up this month's Atlantic, mostly for the Paul Wolfowitz interview though the article on North Korea was pretty damn interesting. But Shojo Beat has prettier pictures.
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Hooray for Nana in English!
That was definitely the best manga in the first issue, enough to keep me tuned in every month...