Being that I’m a male and own over 70 volumes of Yaoi, you can begin to imagine the frustration I’m having towards the genre. I have spent approx. $1000.00 on Yaoi, but for some reason, the explicit sex and “gay” relationships have not been appealing to me at all.

As a gay male, there’s really nothing for me in the manga market. I thought Yaoi was it, but it ain’t.

Since every non-Yaoi manga has heterosexual relationships, I’ve just begun to accept it and just read titles I like (like Death Note, and no, I do not try to imagine Light and L in bed together).

On the other hand, if you mean “yuri” manga, that is generally a sort of “reverse yaoi”… lesbian manga which is mostly, but not always, aimed at guys. Seven Seas Entertainment is the only major publisher that has a “yuri” line, books like “The Last Uniform” and “Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl”, but it doesn’t have a special trade dress to distinguish it from their other books. They’re pretty softcore and non-explicit. ALC Publishing, a small press company, also does a line of more specifically lesbian-oriented yuri manga which is probably available in Previews.

As for what good general-audience seinen and josei titles to recommend, there’s so many it’s hard for me to pick some out. My book “Manga: The Complete Guide” lists tons and tons of seinen and josei titles. Off the top of my head, my favorite josei manga is Moyoco Anno’s (FLOWERS & BEES, which is actually a seinen title, and HAPPY MANIA) and Fumi Yoshinaga’s (ANTIQUE BAKERY, and FLOWER OF LIFE, which is actually a little more of a shojo title). For seinen manga, most companies dabble in it, but I’d recommend Dark Horse’s entire lineup, Viz’s “Signature” or “Editor’s Choice” line, and in terms of artsy manga, Fanfare and Vertical.

Until this discussion, I had no idea about josei and seinen. I will try to stock them, as I do yaoi, because my store encourages browsing and I want to offer a wide range of genres. (When I became bored with Marvel, I discovered Concrete and Tales Of The Beanworld at my comicbook store. I suspect that other readers do the same.)

Concerning yaoi, what are the sales/interest in the female version? (The ones with the lilac symbolism.) Do those stories have the same genre problems as yaoi?

And talking about the elephant in the room, what do retailers recommend when readers get bored with the fluff?

I’m kind of inclined to want to read “heavier” manga myself — since I come out of an indy-comics background and I’m kind of jaded and looking for unusual artists like Fumi Yoshinaga who come along and shake up the clichés — but I totally understand the desire for more energy-efficient manga. ;) It’s the same principle that underlies popular movies, or television. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The success of manga in the U.S. so far has been mostly about escapism and fantasy, and though I hope that the public perception of manga grows to encompass a wider variety of manga, I don’t fault the popular shojo and shonen.

Mr. Thompson -

I’m probably not articulating this very well, but it’s not the presence of *actual* fantasy/sci-fi elements that I think allows Western manga readers to dismiss the cultural conflict – I think there are certain markers that tell us to read stories as “not real,” which kids’ manga almost always have, and adults’ manga (or at least, the stuff I’ve read) usually don’t. If the plot is pure wish-fulfillment and there’s heavy use of froofy symbolic imagery (falling feathers and cherry blossoms and picturesque blood splatters – basically the shoujo toolbox, which manages to be very close to the girly-fantasy-novels imagery set), then I think that gives a lot of American readers the impression that the story they’re getting is somehow padded from reality, and they have an “out” if something that upsets them shows up. In this way, I’d call Kare Kano, Princess Princess, and Monster “fantasies,” but not Tramps Like Us, Antique Bakery, and Vagabond. (There’s probably some more standard, less scare-quote-ridden piece of terminology for this, but I don’t know it.)

(And I keep saying “American readers” (substitute your own English-speaking country!) because I suspect that my “signals” aren’t always read the same way by the Japanese audience.)

And I definitely don’t think Tramps Like Us is bad, or that it’s not worth the effort to consider the gender issues going on there – it’s just that it *does* take energy. On this particular level, shoujo and shounen don’t (for shoujo in particular, energy-efficiency is an actual design goal, art-wise), which is going to affect people’s choices when they’re deciding what they feel like reading.

In the end, however, I’ve learned to look at them the way I look at romance novels that play upon rape fantasy… it’s not for me and I don’t understand the appeal but instead of dwelling on that I’ll just stick discussing titles I like with people who have similar tastes.

Which doesn’t say much for the superiority of either part of the industry.

It’s true that Japanese culture is, by and large, more sexist than American culture, but I think this is something where everyone’s tolerance level varies. I get pretty frustrated with the traditional gender roles in seinen manga like AI YORI AOSHI and josei manga like Keiko Honda’s (OVER THE RAINBOW, WEDDING EVE). And of course the Harlequin manga, which are just translations of sexist (and apparently bestselling) American pop culture. In comparison to manga like these, stories like Moyoco Anno’s (HAPPY MANIA, FLOWERS & BEES) and even TRAMPS LIKE US seem almost transgressive. Yes, TRAMPS LIKE US is ultimately conservative, and I can’t say that it’s a *great* manga… but for people who are interested in examining these often ugly aspects of Japanese society, at least it’s looking them in the face. In contrast, many shojo and shonen manga may be set in a fantasy context, but all the countless little prejudices and moments of sexism add up over time.

Actually, I think some of the *most* traditional gender roles in currently popular manga… next to the boy’s romantic comedies and ero-manga porn… is in yaoi manga. Sure, they’re nominally guys. But replace the uke with a female character, and in a lot of cases, you’d have plotlines so sexist even Harlequin would think twice about publishing them.

[...] been wondering about the saleability of seinen manga ever since Kethylia’s original comments. I remember my first thought was of titles like [...]

There are a lot of josei and seinen titles I’ve enjoyed, but they’re literally harder for me to read because of the treatment of things like race and gender – I find myself sort of psychologically steeling myself up before reading something like Tramps Like Us, because of the way it calmly (well, not so calmly) takes for granted fun things like massive, crushing institutionalized sexism. There’s a resistance there that I think has made me less likely to spend money on the next volume in these series.

And it’s not like this stuff isn’t *present* in shoujo and shounen, because of course they’re products of Japanese culture, too. It’s that we’re able to ignore the things that make us uncomfortable more easily there, because most shoujo and shounen are, basically, fantasies – even when they’re set nominally in the real world. Those of us who read a lot of fantasy/historical/sci-fi stories set in monarchies or societies with rigid class systems don’t approve of *those* cultures, but we can (mostly) put that aside and enjoy them because they’re not anyone’s reality. The mechanics of shoujo and shounen usually make it possible for Americans to read the bits of contemporary Japanese culture we don’t like the same way, but with josei and seinen, which are frequently set in something that looks a little more like reality to us, that’s frequently impossible.

[...] Johanna can’t help smirking because as a woman who’s been elbowing her way into the boys club for years, she gets to play the ‘turnabout is fair play!’ card, and I can’t say as I blame her. At her Livejournal, the thoroughly unpleasant “Kethylia” makes the same point, but tacks on the added rallying cry of “This Is Just The Way Things Are, And Everyone Oughtta Just Shut Up And Accept It!” which is about the stupidest thing I’ve read on the internet today. To be fair though, I’ve only been on the internet for like an hour. [...]

That being said, Viz has published, and continues to publish, plenty of titles that are unprofitable, just because they feel strongly about supporting them (or, sometimes, because the Japanese licensors insist on it). And although this is speculation, I think it also might be possible that manga licensors are asking for larger amounts of money than they used to (since they know that manga is a big deal in America). And that in turn makes it harder to make a profit. I don’t have figures for this, but I know that happened in the case of the anime market, so it may also be the case in manga.

I’ve gotten that feeling with Viz and their adult titles — I suspect Phoenix would have been deemed a success if the series were published in 2000 (the way Adolf was successful enough to get a hardcover version) but in 2005 it was a struggling title. I wonder if the sales are more or less the same, but are now competing for labor funds with titles that flat-out sell better.

Seriously, that made my day.