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CBG SATELLITES
The ADD Blog by Alan David Doane
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1.2 We Got the Beat Back in the late Mesozoic era, when translated manga titles were still being released on a monthly basis in floppy pamphlets that read from left-to-right, I remember looking at the manga rack at Atomik Pop! where I work and thinking, “Maybe I should make a little shoujo endcap just so that people will notice that they exist?” Carefully, I took the thin stacks of SAILOR MOON, CARDCAPTOR SAKURA, and SAINT TAIL, placing them on the thin wire racks next to their strangely tiny digest collections spine-faced as they were, along with SMILE, Viz’s shoujo magazine of the time. It was a little ray of sunshine in the manga section that I enjoyed tending though I never expected it to do much more than cover that one end-cap. What the hell did I know? Shoujo manga now takes up one giant wall of a triangle display as well as a few stand-alone displays nearby, adding up week-after-week to be one of the most dynamic sectors of our graphic novel department.
While the audience (myself included) in the store for shoujo is not exclusively female, they do account for the largest percentage of sales and, as such, largely represent new customers for the store rather than old ones converted over to new areas of interest. So, it should come as little surprise that when we got wind of Viz Media’s intention to debut a new monthly shoujo magazine, SHOJO BEAT, we got more than just a little excited.
We got so excited in fact that we decided to run a big special on shoujo manga for the month of June, culminating in a big party to celebrate the release of the first issue. The party was last Wednesday, June 22nd and so I’m here with pictures, a little commentary, and a review of SHOJO BEAT #1. The planning and implementation of the party was largely the work of ATOMIK POP! employee Kim-Chi Do-Hobbs.
In addition to her solid front counter and excellent customer service skills, Kim serves as the arbiter of aesthetic considerations inside the store and has almost succeeded in teaching me the proper way to fold a t-shirt. The menu she selected was a lot of fun, sushi rolls with wasabe peas and a variety of Asian snack foods with the strains of Pizzicato Five and a variety of anime soundtracks keeping the mood light and festive. Viz Media was very generous in their support of our promotion, providing us with a bundle of the preview issue of SHOJO BEAT a couple of months in advance. The turnout for the party, largely driven by the free preview copies we had handed out, was really strong. Reaction to the first issue of the magazine was largely positive, though some bemoaned the potential threat to their pocketbook (in many cases, already groaning from their enthusiasm for manga) that the SHOJO BEAT line of manga will no doubt come to represent. While SHOJO BEAT is neither the first shoujo anthology nor even the first one published by Viz, its debut is, nonetheless, an auspicious occasion. Earlier shoujo anthology magazines were forced to rely on Direct Market accounts to sustain them with little success. The growth of manga sales in nationwide bookstore chains is suspected by many to have been driven by female readers and, if that is true, sales of SHOJO BEAT nationwide could surprise market analysts and surpass that of SHONEN JUMP. Even it only finds an audience roughly equivalent to the one shoujo manga enjoys in relation to shonen manga in Japan, it will likely have an impact on the 51% of the mass-market audience largely deprived of appropriate comics for the last fifty years that will be decades in the measuring. So, cue that CD of ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA and let’s find out what the first issue of SHOJO BEAT has to offer...
Entering the world of SHOJO BEAT reminded me of reading my sister’s TEEN BEAT magazines back in the day except that I was definitely more engaged by the manga now than I was reading about the haunting quality of David Cassidy’s eyes then. This alone represents something of a paradigm shift for the presentation of shoujo in the US, announcing boldly that it no longer feels that it necessary to sit in the corner and pretend in order to be accepted that it is not a product ideally suited for teenage girls with teenage girl concerns. Not being one of the aforementioned, the intended effect of articles like GET THIS LOOK! and TOKYO STYLE: Top Ten Must-Have Accessories was no doubt a little lost on me. More welcome were the surprisingly eloquent and informative short pieces on topics like the Japanese belief in blood type as a personality indicator or the history of shoujo sports manga. These along with biographical material and short interviews with manga-ka whose works were featured in the manga section of the magazine made for the kind of substantive reading experience that I get or used to get from magazines GIANT ROBOT and the late and much lamented, PULP. The ads are tastefully directed specifically towards the female audience and seamlessly continue the brand-building model begun at SHONEN JUMP by extensively advertising Viz Media shoujo product right alongside mass market products already familiar to its potential audience. The manga section offers six shoujo manga series new to the English language market. The lead-off feature, NANA by Ai Yazawa (Paradise Kiss) is given the most space at 100 pages as well as a gorgeous two-page spread in color to open the series. It is also the most mundane in its interests, the romantic life of a young woman named Nana who, along with three friends, decide to move to Tokyo to study Art. Discussions of sex are, at times, frank but nearly all the action takes place off-screen as is common for shoujo. Yuu Watase’s ABSOLUTE BOYFRIEND shares similarities with shonen series like CHOBITS or OH MY GODDESS but turns the tables by giving her lead character a perfect, robot boyfriend. Watase, notorious for including racy drawings of her female characters to play well with the male portion of her fanbase, opens this story with a solid display of her storytelling techniques but fails to elevate the story above the level of the several hundred cliches of which it is composed. Her slapstick approach to sex keeps the premise from overwhelming the story with ickiness but does little to inspire any real sense of sympathy with the characters. Kaori Yuki’s GODCHILD was probably my least favorite of the features offered. The steampunk goth vibe of the story isn’t well-served by Yuki’s jerky storytelling style and stiffly rendered costuming, coming off as a period piece inspired by nothing in particular and with little to direct its focus. More up my alley was Taeko Watanabe’s KAZE HIKARU, a playful and informative piece set just before the Meiji restoration that follows the story of a young woman who poses as a man in order to join the order of the Shinsengumi. Watanabe has a very clean style with a thick line for shoujo and rarely resorts to expressionist techniques to tell the story, reminding me at times of a younger Rumiko Takahashi. Marimo Ragawa’s BABY AND ME is a story about a young boy who helps raise his younger sibling in his late mother’s absence. There was something about the timbre of the narrative in conjunction with the art that I found very disturbing but I can’t articulate exactly why after having just read the first installment. Maybe it will turn out to just be tedious but it’s just weird enough to read more. The manga section closes out on a high note with Mitsuba Takanashi’s CRIMSON HERO, a manga about girls’ volleyball. It is possible that my fascination with sports manga (especially shoujo sports manga) is due to the complete void of anything like it in the contemporary comics experience but, whatever the reason, Takanashi’s artwork manages to be both stylish and appropriately kinetic for the topic at hand. Upon finishing the issue, I couldn’t help but feel like it was a major triumph, not just for Viz in having launched a charming new magazine, but also for the perception of comics and manga in the United States. If SHOJO BEAT proves ultimately to be a sustainable enterprise, it may achieve the goal of cultivating a passionate audience among girls and women for comics and manga on a mass-media level that has not been met since the 1950s. To me, that sounds like a meaningful enterprise worthy of our interest and, where appropriate, financial support. -- ROB VOLLMAR Rob Vollmar is the Eisner-Nominated writer of THE CASTAWAYS and BLUESMAN, both with artist Pablo G. Callejo.
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SHOJO BEAT Vol 1 #1