The US would probably consider the target readership for Translucent to be female, since the lead character is female and she spends her days dealing with her personal high school problems. But since the lead female is a cliché, shy, demure girl who is still desired by the people around her (yet her fabricated problems are all centered on her NOT being desired), she’s a pretty typical example of a male mangaka sloppily wallowing in femininity without actually understanding it, making her, well, more of a fetish than a character female readers are supposed to relate to. I know that sounds harsh, but I find it hard to describe sub-par moé any other way. The opposite of moé stories for boys are stories for girls with ensembles of unrealistic, beautiful boys who suffer from cliché angst in a superficial and oftentimes very “unmanly” way. Example: Gundam Wing.

Like with Oh My Goddess, Translucent was originally made to appeal to boys, and thus throwing it at girls because it has superficial ties to our media’s definitions of “femininity” (love stories are for girls, schoolgirl leads are for girls) undermines the female audience and perpetuates stereotypes of “what women want” that were originally pushed, in many cases, by male creators. Shoujo and josei don’t necessarily have to be written by women, but they’re written FOR women, and that’s a very important difference. Girls deserve a genre designed for them, don’t you think? Especially since in this country, pieces of media aimed at “both genders” tend to slant, arguably, toward adolescent male. We don’t need manga falling into the same trap, thank you.

Personally, I want to hear more from Lianne about why Translucent isn’t a shojo.

And I quite liked High School Debut, which I tried on your recommendation.

I think in the US we’re trained to think of horror as a genre for male audiences and that female horror fans have atypical tastes (or that its not really horror if its audience isn’t mostly male), even if there are different tendencies that can be found between the genders.

[...] Johanna Draper Carlson rounds up some recent manga news items and offers her own thoughts. (Pop quiz: Does Dark Horse actually publish any shôjo, or just manga titles from other categories that people who like shôjo might enjoy?) [...]

[...] Comics Worth Reading, Johanna Draper Carlson comments on a number of recent manga developments, including the Viz omnibuses and Mike Richardson’s [...]

And yes, Lyle, very true that the omnibi are a great idea to prop up a scarily long series.

I wonder what kind of long-term effects these projects will have. It’s getting to be like DVDs … the longer you wait, the better package you get, so why buy at release?

I think that’s the balancing at with determining which titles get the omnibus treatment. The counter-argument to your concern (a valid one, I should make clear) is that the omnibus editions can break down the entry barrier for a story with plenty of volumes out.

For example, I look at the number of GTO titles out and it’s stopped me from sampling the series since I worry about volumes I can’t find and those volumes look very expensive because of their number (which is admittedly silly since I’m only going to buy a couple volumes at a time regardless of how many are available).

So the trick is finding titles where there are more potential customers who are still putting off sampling the series.