![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Text in comics
A brief summary and discussion from Neil Cohn of an article on eye-movements reading comic pages, for those interested in that sort of thing. One thing noted: participants in the study were more likely to skip past a panel if the next panel contained a block of text; modifying the page so that the text was farther away from the skipped panel resulted in less skipping. Cohn wonders what level of "comic fluency" the participants possessed, since it's not discussed in the article, and comments, "The desire to jump towards panels with dense text insinuates a focus more on text than on the visuals, which was characteristic of a naive comic reader's eye-movements compared with an expert reader in Nakazawa's eye-tracking study."
I find this all very interesting in relation to some observed differences between stateside readers of American comics vs. Japanese comics. For close to two years, I've been involved in running a (very small) graphic novel club for adolescent girls, all of whom read manga, none of whom had any experience reading American comics of any variety until the club. For them, the comics experience is manga, mostly popular shoujo and shounen series. My co-host and I are ginormous manga fans, and that's what we tend to stick to, but every now and then, we try to push their boundaries a little--we've done Dramacon, Megatokyo, Usagi Yojimbo, Runaways, and most recently, Bone. Dramacon was an unqualified success. In our discussion of the book, my co-host and I expounded at length on the similarities and differences between Dramacon and Japanese-origin comics, and we found that the likenesses of Dramacon to conventional shoujo style helped them enormously in accepting the departures. The biggest successes otherwise were Megatokyo and Usagi Yojimbo, which are fairly significant departures from shoujo & shounen manga in terms of form and storytelling style, but had appealingly familiar subject matter. Runaways was liked for the story (it's one of those rare Marvel comics actually intended for younger, newer readers, which is why we tried it), but all the girls found it immensely confusing in every respect, from the artwork, to the superhero conventions (even though Runaways plays down those conventions quite a bit), to the overall storytelling style. Bone, much to my surprise, was mostly panned. They didn't dislike it by any means, but they found it so uninteresting that we couldn't really keep them on topic.
(Bone is the most popular graphic novel series sold to kids in my store, after the general category of manga, and I had assumed there would be some overlap between the readers of Bone and the readers of manga--as of yet, though, I have no evidence that there actually is any overlap; heaven knows, no one ever buys them together. Right after Bone in popularity is Tintin, by the way. I have never, ever, even once seen a superhero trade sold to anybody younger than me in that store, and most superhero trade buyers have ten to thirty years on me.)
Anyway, I have for quite some time had a theory that part of the growing popularity of manga in the US, and its appeal to new readers who not only have never read an American comic in their life, but maybe never will, is the fact that manga is usually less text-dense than American comics. I'm speaking obscenely broadly right now, and I myself could easily cite a few dozen contradictory examples from memory--but I have read a lot of comics over the years, and really, stuff from my side of the Pacific has expodentially more text.
The more cynical assumption I might make is that manga is more appealing to unskilled or lazy readers, folks who like pictures but skip the words. It's probably true for some people, although I can't really bring myself to dismiss a twelve-year-old girl who easily reads manga but struggles with text captions; if she can read manga well, it is making reading easier and more pleasant for her, and she will get better at it.
A less cynical take on the appeal of more lightly-worded comics is that with less text, the marriage of words and pictures is a more natural and harmonious thing, easier to read, easier to understand, and more emotionally affecting. I grew up reading American comics--old stuff, too, with densely lettered narrative captions, giant white thought bubbles and speech balloons always carefully tucked away in corners, where they wouldn't cover up the art--and I'm pretty well versed in the language. Learning to read manga took quite a bit of effort. The stylistic and thematic differences are many and significant, and I started out with contempt for things I've since learned to love, like the cleanness of black and white art, or the fluidity of page layouts. Once I learned to make the adjustment, and starting reading manga with an easier eye, I began to find that I preferred it. I can still read and parse superhero comics, but I often find them jarring and awkward in ways I hadn't noticed before--they're too wordy, or trying to ape the experience of watching television (and yes, there is a difference between feeling like a TV show and being cinematic); the text and the pictures are often in competition with each other for attention, and not working together to create meaning. It's not always that way, but it is too often.
I was a relatively sophisticated, adult comics reader when I picked up manga, and I still found it a very difficult leap from one set of artistic traditions to the other. I really only made it because I have a large enthusiasm for comics art (and a mad, life-long, instinctive draw to Japanese stuff. Whence it comes, I will never know). It'd be a very dedicated reader of comics indeed to do it the other way around--to go from the lively art and broad subject matter of manga to the arcane world of superhero comics. Superhero comics are an acquired taste--who's going to acquire them now? Not the girls in my club. We've found out by trying that it's not that easy to go from manga to non-superhero American comics; almost impossible--and really, rather pointless--to try to go from manga to superheroes.
There's a lot that's wrong with the American comics industry, and it's mostly to do with superhero comics. Better informed and more intelligent people than I have expounded on its flaws at length; I am left with the morbid belief that it will eventually collapse in on itself because it can't draw in new readers. I don't know what will happen to American non-superhero comics if cape comics fold, because I don't know to what extent they are either hindered or supported by capes. Indy comics like Dramacon that appropriate styles and themes from manga evidently can draw in new readers from the existing manga audience, if they want to; the dispirited reaction of my club to Runaways suggests that it takes more than a low price-point and a tankoubon-sized digest to reach the manga audience.
I find this all very interesting in relation to some observed differences between stateside readers of American comics vs. Japanese comics. For close to two years, I've been involved in running a (very small) graphic novel club for adolescent girls, all of whom read manga, none of whom had any experience reading American comics of any variety until the club. For them, the comics experience is manga, mostly popular shoujo and shounen series. My co-host and I are ginormous manga fans, and that's what we tend to stick to, but every now and then, we try to push their boundaries a little--we've done Dramacon, Megatokyo, Usagi Yojimbo, Runaways, and most recently, Bone. Dramacon was an unqualified success. In our discussion of the book, my co-host and I expounded at length on the similarities and differences between Dramacon and Japanese-origin comics, and we found that the likenesses of Dramacon to conventional shoujo style helped them enormously in accepting the departures. The biggest successes otherwise were Megatokyo and Usagi Yojimbo, which are fairly significant departures from shoujo & shounen manga in terms of form and storytelling style, but had appealingly familiar subject matter. Runaways was liked for the story (it's one of those rare Marvel comics actually intended for younger, newer readers, which is why we tried it), but all the girls found it immensely confusing in every respect, from the artwork, to the superhero conventions (even though Runaways plays down those conventions quite a bit), to the overall storytelling style. Bone, much to my surprise, was mostly panned. They didn't dislike it by any means, but they found it so uninteresting that we couldn't really keep them on topic.
(Bone is the most popular graphic novel series sold to kids in my store, after the general category of manga, and I had assumed there would be some overlap between the readers of Bone and the readers of manga--as of yet, though, I have no evidence that there actually is any overlap; heaven knows, no one ever buys them together. Right after Bone in popularity is Tintin, by the way. I have never, ever, even once seen a superhero trade sold to anybody younger than me in that store, and most superhero trade buyers have ten to thirty years on me.)
Anyway, I have for quite some time had a theory that part of the growing popularity of manga in the US, and its appeal to new readers who not only have never read an American comic in their life, but maybe never will, is the fact that manga is usually less text-dense than American comics. I'm speaking obscenely broadly right now, and I myself could easily cite a few dozen contradictory examples from memory--but I have read a lot of comics over the years, and really, stuff from my side of the Pacific has expodentially more text.
The more cynical assumption I might make is that manga is more appealing to unskilled or lazy readers, folks who like pictures but skip the words. It's probably true for some people, although I can't really bring myself to dismiss a twelve-year-old girl who easily reads manga but struggles with text captions; if she can read manga well, it is making reading easier and more pleasant for her, and she will get better at it.
A less cynical take on the appeal of more lightly-worded comics is that with less text, the marriage of words and pictures is a more natural and harmonious thing, easier to read, easier to understand, and more emotionally affecting. I grew up reading American comics--old stuff, too, with densely lettered narrative captions, giant white thought bubbles and speech balloons always carefully tucked away in corners, where they wouldn't cover up the art--and I'm pretty well versed in the language. Learning to read manga took quite a bit of effort. The stylistic and thematic differences are many and significant, and I started out with contempt for things I've since learned to love, like the cleanness of black and white art, or the fluidity of page layouts. Once I learned to make the adjustment, and starting reading manga with an easier eye, I began to find that I preferred it. I can still read and parse superhero comics, but I often find them jarring and awkward in ways I hadn't noticed before--they're too wordy, or trying to ape the experience of watching television (and yes, there is a difference between feeling like a TV show and being cinematic); the text and the pictures are often in competition with each other for attention, and not working together to create meaning. It's not always that way, but it is too often.
I was a relatively sophisticated, adult comics reader when I picked up manga, and I still found it a very difficult leap from one set of artistic traditions to the other. I really only made it because I have a large enthusiasm for comics art (and a mad, life-long, instinctive draw to Japanese stuff. Whence it comes, I will never know). It'd be a very dedicated reader of comics indeed to do it the other way around--to go from the lively art and broad subject matter of manga to the arcane world of superhero comics. Superhero comics are an acquired taste--who's going to acquire them now? Not the girls in my club. We've found out by trying that it's not that easy to go from manga to non-superhero American comics; almost impossible--and really, rather pointless--to try to go from manga to superheroes.
There's a lot that's wrong with the American comics industry, and it's mostly to do with superhero comics. Better informed and more intelligent people than I have expounded on its flaws at length; I am left with the morbid belief that it will eventually collapse in on itself because it can't draw in new readers. I don't know what will happen to American non-superhero comics if cape comics fold, because I don't know to what extent they are either hindered or supported by capes. Indy comics like Dramacon that appropriate styles and themes from manga evidently can draw in new readers from the existing manga audience, if they want to; the dispirited reaction of my club to Runaways suggests that it takes more than a low price-point and a tankoubon-sized digest to reach the manga audience.
no subject
It's a shame about Bone not going over well. Jeff Smith wanted to recreate the feeling of the comics he read as a kid, most notably the large compilations of Pogo, which would probably seem "foreign" to younger readers today; newspaper comics and superhero comics are largely heading towards a half-obscurity, half-limbo. (Although a visit to the San Diego Comic Con may say otherwise about the cape comics.) Pogo and other serialized strips, like Little Nemo or Terry and the Pirates wouldn't be printed today, as far as I can see, and the reading public tends to reflect this.
I would be curious to hear what the club thinks of more indy Western titles (Hopeless Savages or any of Chynna Clugston Major's works come to mind), or of a story like Persepolis, but I understand that the reading list is probably already set in advance. For years, the title that I used to get non-comic book readers into graphic novels was Brian Talbot's The Tale of One Bad Rat, which is decidedly comic-booky, but not a superhero story and very emotionally rendered.
In any case, thanks for a thought-provoking essay! :)
no subject
I was floored by the poor reception of Bone. Personally, I loved it, because it's really well-done, but more importantly, it's something you should be able to read without any preliminaries--if you can read and make sense of the Sundays comics page, Bone ought to be pretty accessible. I didn't know about the intention to recreate an old comics feeling, but I'm not surprised, because I so often got that sense when I was reading it.
no subject
It's too bad they didn't like Bone. I love how it starts off so simply and morphs into a huge, meaningful epic of (well) epic proportions. And with strong characters like Thorn and Rose are a definite plus, too. Perhaps it was too fantastic for them--it sounds like this group enjoys their everyday shoujo quite a bit.
Dramacon is so cute! But the attempted rape in Book 1 did bother me a lot, and the plot detail that she rode home in the same car as her ex-boyfriend really creeped me out the first time I read it. On the other hand, there were so many funny and well-observed moments, like the dispute at the Convention between Bethany and the little boy who says that only Japanese people can draw manga, or the discovery that the Creative Idol (whose name I've forgotten) is as human as any of them.) I'm rather looking forward to Volume 3.
I would love to run a manga reading group, too. There are so many interesting titles for mature readers, and a surprising amount of depth in manga dismissed as "kiddie fare". Ah, I can dream, right?
May I friend you?
no subject
I quite like Dramacon. I grudge it its occasional moments of awkwardness precisely because it's so strong otherwise, and one of the best bona-fide manga-influenced OEL titles I've ever seen. Chmakova is a very talented artist and writer and it's a successful fusion of different comics traditions. I've been underwhelmed by almost every Tokyopop OEL title I've seen, even the ones I enjoyed. Dramacon is the first one I've read with a recognizable shoujo manga legacy, and that doesn't feel like an indy western comic that happened to be made under a TP contract (nothing against them that signed with TP, and power to those who can get published. But manga really is more than a label and a price point).
You are certainly welcome to friend me. :D Mostly I talk piffle and complain about work, though.
no subject
I agree with you on the bulk of TP's OEL stuff. When it comes to American style manga, I've been very impressed at the Minx line so far, except for Clubbing, the ending of which was completely counter to everything the plot had led up to.
As for me, I talk about books and movies and comics a lot. You seem cool and I would love to read your stuff more, and here your opinions on the things I've read. *goes merrily off to hit the friend button*
no subject
I think the only thing I've read from the Minx line is The Re-Gifters, which was excellent. I keep meaning to check out some of the other titles, because I'm all about American comics actually putting out a hand to a new audience, particularly a new audience of people who happen to be the same gender as me. (An American comics fan can get kinda lonely if she happens to be female.)
no subject
no subject
no subject
The articles on eye movement were fascinating; I've always wondered about that, if certain panel juxtapositions were easier to read than others, and how much mere microseconds of attention can make difference in the way we read comics.
As to the manga and American comics thing-- I grew up on manga and only recently began reading American comics. I read superhero comics
because I have no taste, but they have definitely been more difficult to read and, when given the choice between a trashy manga and a trashy American superhero comic, I will always go for the former. Now, I started reading American comics in high school and I would like to say that I don't believe myself to be an "unskilled reader" in my preference for manga. I think that manga and its low-density text is more appealing as a format to me because it's inevitably a bit more realistic timewise-- while American comics might be closer to a picture book, manga is closer to cinema. The pictures and the words move more in close to real-time, whereas with big, thick speech bubbles, the reader is presented with a static image and little progression while information is being conveyed-- sort of the difference between "show" and "tell." Because I'm more used to manga, I prefer the cinematic approach that I'm used to. I don't think it's a matter of impatience-- I mean, I CAN read prose, if I really want to, thank you very much-- but I personally feel that if I'm going to read comics, they should BE comics, a medium that should intrinsically rely on images just as much as if not more than text, and text should never dominate.The other reason that manga might be more "readable" to those who are used to it isn't even related to text; manga (especially shoujo manga) has more fluid and natural panel and image movement, allowing a very smooth, often interrupted visual flow, whereas American comics and shounen manga might be more choppy, focusing mostly on presenting lots of information rather than making that information easily accessible. Some American comic storyboarders don't even pay heed to speech bubble placement-- they draw the art first and Photoshop bubbles in later to accomodate space rather than to enhance flow, so it's naturally more difficult to follow. Also, manga tends to have greater negative space while American comic images might be more cluttered, so it's easier to find the focus in manga, which results in a faster read.
I began to read American comics because I liked the stories; I am probably in the minority, seeing as superhero comics aren't exactly the most compelling and original narratives in existence. It was very hard for me to come over the boundary, and even after trying to read American comics for 2 years, I find myself having to stop and backtrack and reread things, and I find it annoying to have to keep my eye still and read an entire speech bubble when the images aren't moving. To me, it sort of feels like reading PowerPoint slides at a slower pace because a presenter reading out loud off the slides talks much slower than I can read.
pt 1
I'm inclined to say yes, but that's an answer borne out of personal experience and my sitting and nodding at
If certain panel juxtapositions are easier to read than others, there's probably some degree of cultural variance. I remember while I was a student in a film class, being absolutely thrilled to realize that saccadic patterns in the American version of The Ring were mirror-reversed from the original Japanese Ringu (left-to-right is natural for Americans; right-to-left is natural for Japanese, although I've been told there's some funky text tricks depending on whether the text is horizontal, vertical, romanji, or not romanji. Japanese seems to be fiendishly difficult).
Now, I started reading American comics in high school and I would like to say that I don't believe myself to be an "unskilled reader" in my preference for manga.
God forbid that I should give the impression in this post that I think manga is less inherently sophisticated than American comics, or that preferring manga marks one as immature or naive as a reader. I have had experience with both, and though I deeply love American comics (especially capes), and all their weird idiosyncrasies, I prefer manga; I find manga to be, on the whole, a more fulfilling comics experience than western comics. I've seen a lot more manga achieve that sublime harmony between word and image that sets comics apart from novels and cinema than I've ever seen in western comics; if I step very carefully around text-heavy western comics, it's because I have a lurking suspicion that an illustrated text story is in some kind of class of its own, and I'm reluctant to dismiss it as an artistic aim.
The word easy is a dangerous one, and I've used it to my own peril: easy is wonderful if you're in advertising, deadly if you're a critic.
I'm thrilled that the audience for manga has many people who have never read, and may never read American comics. I'm glad it can reach a new audience, a healthy audience that isn't dependant on the precarious American comics industry; when I speculate about the reasons why it can reach that audience, it's fueled by curiousity about what it is in comics that reaches readers, and not by a desire to pass judgement on those readers.
Some American comic storyboarders don't even pay heed to speech bubble placement-- they draw the art first and Photoshop bubbles in later to accomodate space rather than to enhance flow, so it's naturally more difficult to follow
True. I think this is greatly a product of the way so many American comics divide responsibilities between writers, pencilers, inkers, and letterers. Of course, many solo indy artists share the tendency to shove text off in a corner where it won't interfere with the art, but I tend to believe that's mostly an aesthetic legacy; it's something that American (and, for chrissakes, all the other western comics artists that I'm lumping together in my own ignorance) artists and readers can and maybe should learn to overcome.
pt 2
You fascinate me, as you are exactly the opposite of me, and what I have never elsewhere encountered: someone who went from manga to American comics, instead of the other way around. I can tell you that I had a similarly slow learning curve from comics to manga: my first encounter with manga was probably in 1997, and I would have considered myself an enthusiast no sooner than 2005 or so; it's taken a lot of manga, and a lot of really good and interesting manga, to win me over from what I read as a child. It's a radically different experience, isn't it? Yet, I can't dismiss that PowerPoint slide experience as an inferior one. I remember reading reprints of original Hal Foster Prince Valiant comic strips when I was a kid, and maybe it was just the practice with comic books that enabled this, but I was totally engaged by those Prince Valiants; as utterly enthralled as I would have been with any book, with no sense of distance, no processing time. Those, somehow, managed some real fusion of word and image, despite the fact that text was always confined to narrative boxes, even the dialogue, and image always illustrative.
Re: pt 2
And I still get confounded by manga speech bubble sequence sometimes, even in my tenth year of reading it. (Doesn't stop me from loving manga, of course!)
no subject
One possible factor here is that you're mixing genres too much. Like, one big difference in how comics/manga are sold in Japan vs. the US, is that there's a lot of specificity in how manga series are marketed and to whom. I'd say the kind of reader that goes for shoujo or yaoi (I'm that kind of reader, anyway) would be less likely to like the superhero genre and may be turned off American comics because of their frequent equation with the superhero genre. I say this as someone who likes superheroes and loves American comics (as distinct from manga), and has been a comics fan before getting into manga (I was into anime, but not manga for the longest time, because I preferred American comics for being colored, of all things).
Likewise, 'Bone' may be popular, but with what audiences? It's the equivalent of weird adventure/comedy shounen, isn't it? Maybe if someone likes 'One Piece' they're more likely to like 'Bone' (not sure, never read it, though it's been recced to me). I think it's quite likely shoujo readers would like 'Strangers in Paradise' or 'Love and Rockets', and other more characterization-driven series like 'The Sandman' and a bunch of Vertigo titles. Granted, those are all wordy, but there's lots of girls who like shoujo because it goes in depth in the characters' minds and is about relationships, and more is always better. That's partly why doujinshi for shounen series are so popular, aren't they? There's this urge to go deeper into the characters' minds and motivations in a way shounen manga doesn't allow for-- and most superhero comics, including an unusual one like 'Runaways' (though I enjoyed it) don't really go that far either. There's a reason most of the audience for them has traditionally been male, though the female readership is currently on the rise, I believe.
Anyway, 'Runaways' in particular has a meta background-- its enjoyment is highly increased by being familiar with comics history; a lot of its appeal is because of how it reverses or comments on old comics trends, after all. Otherwise it's just another story of its kind. If there's adventure series that have cross-over potential, it's stuff like 'Hellblazer' and 'Y: the Last Man', but then I'm probably biased; I do know they go deeper into their characters than most superhero titles and yet their plots and structure are both stand-alone and sufficiently mainstream. 'Bone' has a weird look/aesthetic, at least at first glance; the art never struck me (why I never picked it up). In manga, y'know, everyone tends to be pretty :> Shallow but true!
no subject
(This is not a value judgment I love Bone with great intensity don't kill me)
None of the other comics you listed are very "cartoony," and given the sort of places a kid in the US right now would usually be seeing that style of art - that is, mediocre-to-insulting newspaper comics and cartoons - I think it's sort of reasonable that they would have trouble getting into it. They might never have run into anything good in that particular aesthetic before. If a reader doesn't trust the medium, she won't risk the kind of emotional investment she needs to get anything out of a story with an epic-type structure (if "epic-type structure" is not a completely obnoxious phrase). Therefore, the story becomes boring.
I suspect that this is why I still haven't managed to finish Lord of the Rings. I read so much really bad epic fantasy in high school that I now mistrust it and keep it at a distance, which isn't a good way to read.
no subject
It could perfectly well be, you know. It's a leap from Kitchen Princess to protagonists who actually look like marshmallows.
Also, that reminds me of a conversation I once had with my old store manager: she (a great believer in reading stuff your customers buy to try to get a sense of what it is that they like, and why) had bought, but never gotten around to reading, a volume of Bone, during her ongoing quest to educate herself on comics post-Elfquest--I loved her for many things, but most especially the knowledge that she was a giant fan of Elfquest--and I happened to mention, as we were leaving from an egregiously late store close, that I'd just finished Bone, and thought that she'd like it, as it had qualities of epic fantasy, although it did lack lusty vampire romance.
"Bone?" she said, in her sort of clipped, brittle, ironically humorous speaking style, which I am incapable of replicating in either speech or writing. "You mean the one with that blobby little white thing?"
no subject
no subject
Good point. There are few really good syndicated comic strips around; even fewer that are accessible to new or young audiences--I love Doonesbury, but I certainly didn't love it as a kid, and it's a long-running, old strip best appreciated with a simultaneous knowledge of its own history, modern 20th century history and politics and contemporary politics--and damn few comics that, regardless of their sophistication of writing, have really innovative visuals. For expressive, creative visual techniques, just off the top of my head? Zits. I can't call anything else to mind, although I imagine there's a few.
no subject
About Bone, it occurs to me non-manga-style "children's comics" or "all-ages comics" may have the "most to lose" when pitted against manga. Almost all the boom in manga publishing has been due to material aimed at tweens, the "13+" market. That age group has totally absorbed manga. On the other hand, there are very few translated manga in the indy-comix, underground, art-comics mode, very few translated equivalents of Eightball or Maus (Barefoot Gen, sure, but not quite...) or the Acme Novelty Library. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that even American superhero comics are much more concerned with Grappling with Big Issues than most manga, however superficial and awkward that grappling may be. I suspect that many American comic artists, even mainstream ones, have some interest in the whole "indy-comix, creator-owned" pool of comics which is more open to political subject matter (look at just about any superhero comic in the Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis age!) or experimentation for experimentation's sake, and even when they're doing superhero genre exercises, they feel the urge to throw some of that in there.
(Or maybe I'm just talking about the superhero books *I* like? I dunno... what do you think?)
pt 1
If I recall correctly, they were thrown by the superheroes who show up in the first chapter (the superhero RPG Alex plays in), the concept of supervillains (not villains, just the specific supervillain concept as it relates to superheros), the secret identities, and all of Molly's discussion pertaining thereto, and the discussions among the kids about how to use their powers, and should they fight crime, and so on--and yes, given the extent to which Runaways tries to avoid tapping into that stuff, I was amazed it still didn't process, but it didn't.
I thinking, maybe crime-fighting vigilantes don't serve the same function in manga as they do in American comics? In manga, you certainly get people with superhero powers, and you get powered people with spectacular costumes, and you get powered people working for crime-fighting organizations, but whenever it's the latter, there's invariably some element of the institutional about it. Sometimes you have your ronin loners, and they'll fight for justice, but they don't patrol the streets, looking for thugs, and they definitely don't get paired off against Galactus.
Oh yas, manga has its own conventions. In truth, even when we did manga titles, we'd often spend a fair amount of time explaining some of those conventions, or cultural context, because someone would get confused. The superhero thing might have seemed more exceptional to me because I was, for all intents and purposes, the only translator for that in the room--I was explaining as much to my co-host as to the kids.
I'd always thought all-ages non-manga and kids' manga could co-exist peacefully; now I wonder. I really hope they can, and I will do my damndest to cross-sell them to people.
On the other hand, there are very few translated manga in the indy-comix, underground, art-comics mode, very few translated equivalents of Eightball or Maus (Barefoot Gen, sure, but not quite...) or the Acme Novelty Library.
Yeah, there's some, but not a lot. It's so hard for me to really know, because as a monolingual English speaker on this side of the Pacific, everything I know about untranslated manga has to come through interested third parties, and I can't get an accurate gauge on what the bookshelves look like from that. I know there's not much of that type in translation. I don't know what exists to be translated (definitely some) or when, if ever, the American market will be ready for it. (Here's the million dollar question: how will the manga audience age? What will they want when they get older? I will set fire to anyone who opines they'll grown up into Batman, but I'd be happy to listen to anyone with a thoughtful take on that. God willing, the answer will be, "enough josei titles to support a magazine.")
pt 2
I also know I lack the context to be able to pick up on much in the way of existing satire/commentary in manga as it pertains to Japanese politics, and if it's not too blatant, even commentary as it pertains to global politics, so I'm not entirely comfortable saying it's not there at all.
Even as I type all this, I can think of titles in translation that contradict all this, but not very many, and mostly older, and therefore not really relevant to the point.
It's kind of hard for me to examine contemporary American comics with an eye towards "big issues" because when I think about the part I know best, superhero comics, I'm mostly blinded by rage and disgust, and that naturally does not lend itself to making thoughtful observations. I see what you mean about giving them credit for trying, no matter how badly they do it, but if they're trying and they keeping screwing it up, maybe that says something about the wisdom of making the effort. Can comics handle intellectual rigor and depth and big issues? Absofuckinglutely. Can superhero comics? I don't know. There have been some wonderfully readable results from attempts made over the decades, but you have to consider context as well--if a political superhero comic works as a political discussion by subverting the superhero part, it's not really succeeding on all the levels it's trying, and it's not proof of success, even if it's good. And vice versa.
As for the non-superhero stuff, I don't think I know the field of possibilities well enough right now to be making sweeping generalizations about content. I've been slowly broadening my horizons for years, but I feel like I'm in a body of water where I still don't know the depth.
Re: pt 2
However, about "Big Issues," I guess what I'm saying is that when I think of the "most critically acclaimed" American comics, even among superheroes, I tend to think of works that have a fairly high amount of political content and intentional "high-culture" references. Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis... to some extent, they all play around with politics and religion and art movements and history and other obscure, weird, intellectual things which you would not in a million years see in Shonen Jump. Even in Death Note.
Now, admittedly, I guess all the authors I've mentioned are all British dudes who got their start in the '80s and '90s and perhaps my ideas of the big-name creators are out of date, when we compare to other modern superhero comic authors like Rob Kirkman and Brian Wood and Garth Ennis (a great writer, I think, but not as artsy and high-faluting as the other ones I've mentioned), or even J. Michael Straczynski. It's possible that my idea of the Really Awesome Superhero Comic Authors is just 15 years out of date (sob). Also, all these people are clearly writing for a "seinen" audience and not a "shonen" (let alone shojo) one.
But still, they *did*, or *do*, represent the "high-end mainstream" of American comics, and they all have great visibility, winning Eisner Awards and so on, being recognizable to all but the stupidest fanboys, while also selling lots of copies. Does it make any more sense to compare them to seinen authors like Kaiji Kawaguchi and Naoki Urasawa, rather than comparing them to Masashi Kishimoto? I dunno. Or perhaps I'm being blinded by the fact that these comic authors, perhaps partly because they're British and grew up with the super-dense British anthology comic magazines, all create very "information-heavy" comics, which is the exact opposite of manga, in which ideas (if there are any ideas at all) tend to percolate slowly over the course of hundreds of pages.
But yeah, that's what I mean when I say that American superhero comics ("American" despite the fact that all my favorite creators are British :/ ) tend to be more idea-driven than Japanese comics.