Manga, Magic and Genre Pedantry...

[Hillsy]

OK...Firstly - A link

http://bordersblog.com/scifi/2011/04/26 ... ed-worlds/

For those of you too busy to read through the whole post, i've trimmed out the paragraph that's had be chewing my thoughts.

Why is it that anime, manga and video games can quite happily throw genres into a blender, like Miyazaki’s mix-and-match SF/fantasy/eco-fable Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind or the technomagical Final Fantasy universe, but such ideas rarely catch light on our bookshelves? Is it that nobody is writing them, or is it that nobody is reading them?

I've been looking for this kind of genre for a while myself, and have really struggled to find it outside of graphic novels. Often those that have welded something together have done so in a very dark, bleak manner (e.g Geomancer), or a more contempory, Urban manner (e.g Quantum Gravity series). Some have hinted at some kind of interdimensional magic/tech collision (Just finished The Steel Remains), but its been a very subtle hint.

Now as Chris Wooding points out - there must be a market for the "style" as manga & Anime continue to sell well in all cultures. And as the Graphic Novel & Comic mediums do a fine job of feeding that market, I can understand while people arn't perhaps writing a glut of 'non-graphic' novels and moving towards publication through sheer weight of numbers. So what about the market?

Is it that no-one wants to depart from the established mediums. Do these types of stories gravitate towards established genres once the stylistic veneer of the world has been stripped away? Naturally I'm biased - I've got two novels that blend post-apocalype, future tech and magic in manga/anime way, and a third gestating in my head - but I do wonder why such a notable genre has so few examples in traditional novels?

What do you think? Is manga/anime fine as it is? Are there loads of books I'm just not finding? Do you have the same hankering for heros screaming along glass lined motorways on steroid pumped hover-bikes, sword in one hand and punching flaming wyverns from the sky with lighting bolts hurled from the other? Or am I alone?

[Collectonian]

Nope you aren't alone at all. Two of my WIPs, and to some degrees a third, are heavily influenced by my love of manga, anime, and Japanese light novels, particularly in terms of where a story might go and the various themes. When I read one of my novels to him, my sweetie said he could tell it was manga influenced :-) In Fall From Grace, I have angels and demons who use magic, swords, guns, and have air ships :-P

Aisuru, To Love, set in Japan, has a couple of demons walking around what is otherwise normal Japan. The latter has been through a few critique sessions and the reactions are always interesting. Those who love manga and anime just get it, no probs. Those who don't seem to have more mixed reactions, but most who read YA in general seem receptive, it just sometimes requires more explanation that what you seem to need in a manga. For example, the appearance of the demon didn't garnish enough reaction from the MC for readers, while in many manga, a character can meet a demon for the first and be pretty much "cool, moving on" :-)

I do think there is a market for it, though I think it might be harder to get to market as first you must get through the agents and the publishers, who may be less willing to take a chance. One sticking point I can see is the sluggish sales of Japanese light novels here. Most are highly praised, but due to a severe lack of marketing or push by the few companies releasing them, they get little attention outside of the existing fan base. Tokyopop is one of the worse for this, myself. Their frequent starting of series then dropping them didn't help, but they are closed now so... Personally, I'm hoping that Yen Press' is going to help turn the tide, as they are really pushing out the light novel series, and getting them out into the stores versus always leaving them to be special ordered, and doing cross advertising in non-light novels. They also are, so far, showing greater dedication having the backing of Hachette. :-)

Several of the biggest manga series ended up on the New York Times bestseller list, no small achievement for what is generally considered a "niche" market. I think if a light novel can get up there, you'll see a lot more opportunities for native written works with such an influence being picked up.

So long rambling later, I say write it if it is what is in you to write, but be ready to have to work a bit harder getting it out there. And if you aren't already, get out there and buy light novels so they know there are readers who want more *grin*

[Cookie]

Like Collectonian, I think there is a market out there, somewhere. But I also read manga, so I like that style.

Boneshaker is kinda like that. It has airships and zombies. No magic though.

[Hillsy]

Whoops....kinda pushed the manga angle a bit to hard

Cookie: Boneshaker is an interesting one....It's on my to read pile (Am gnawing on 1200 pages of Peter F Hamilton at the mo) but the from the reviews the sense I get is one of Post Apoc, with a bit wierdness thrown in....which is pretty cool, and I don't think there's enough of that ilk about. A friend of mine did a film degree and he talks about the perveyance of the Hiroshima disaster throughout anime and a lot of Japanese culture in general. These ideas of disasters and spiritual/magical/ecological outcomes that are far beyond realism are a very real byproduct of that.

Collectonian: Yeah I think there's a certain...acceptance...of manga fans to structural wierdness that perhaps doesn't match up with a lot of peoples idea's. I think Urban fantasy is changing that a bit - the modern acceptance of, say, vampires being not just one off monsters or small brooding clans, but part of a "second layer" of society is certainly pointing that way. Indeed you'd probably get some hate mail if you tried to just portay a Dracula Character now in a novel: a single avatar of evil as a unique life form. The night watch series had demons, magicians, vamps and so on all with licenses and agreements and so on.

As a result of some elements of manga definately align with Urban fantasy a lot more than trad fantasy or Sci-fi, I think that....urgh how to explain myself....that willingness to make the distinctions between different tropes as thin as possible, to forego collective identity, gets a little lost within the genre of Urban Fantasy. And because of that, only the stuff that falls in line with UF is getting into the system (I grant you it is changing, albeit slowly). The Japanese Light novels you were talking about seem to (I've only skimmed a half dozen of them on amazon) seem to fall close enough to UF that you fear that after an edit or two they'd fit into that genre wholesale. Which is part of my original point.

Genre is fundamental as a marketting tool, and I think that's a good thing - identity is very important. And at the moment I think - as a pure idea, ignoring medium or execution - that certain plots would be considered only in graphic format, as though it is in itself a genre, and one of the genre tropes is the fact that it MUST be a graphic novel.

I mean something like a trad fantasy theme of Pure Good Vs Pure Evil, based on another planet where people can only survive underground in huge caves formed into cities, but working on a psuedo-modern level of technology (cars & lasers but no modern farming equipment for instance)....such an idea would be classified as graphic novel only. It's part Sci-fi, part fantasy, part urban fantasy....and there is a market, but in graphic novel form only and I don't understand why.

Is it purely because the readers of already existing graphic novels don't want to read printed novels of the same stories because they don't think they'll be as good in that medium (Manga, Anime, Video Games etc etc)? Or is it the writers of such ideas all hire a cartoonist?

[JohnDurvin]

If I were a famous columnist or essayist, I would have written one on just this subject long ago, as I have noticed it to be an emerging theme in the depths of culture today; for lack of an established term, I call it "awesome-ism." It's the sort of fiction where traditional laws of subtlety and nuance are bludgeoned to death by cyborg dragons, nibbled by zombies, revived by ninja warlocks, and enslaved using vampire blood and nanomachines, forced to fight pirate dinosaurs. Is this what you're talking about?

If so, yes, manga and graphic novels are about the only places you're going to see these--for now. In literature, the craziness of it all is too much of a strain on suspension of disbelief--I know, I've tried to write it many times--and it's hard to get it all in there believably without awful blocks of description porn. The only books that come to mind are the "Samurai Cat" series, written I think by Mark Rogers; some of them are mediocre, but "Samurai Cat Goes to the Movies" is made of mash-up parodies of movies, including "Yellow Brick Road Warrior" and a sci-fi epic involving Aliens, Predator, and Star Trek; the characters are pursued by a Terminator through all of it, who turns out to have come back from an alternate future where the main character was never born (and yes, they go full "It's a Wonderful Life" with it.)

The next space Awesome-ism will conquer is that of movies, I think. Terry Gilliam's been doing a stripped-down version of it for a while now--I think "The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus" pulled it off--and "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" will, I hope, be heralded as the beginning of a genre, utilizing all sorts of allusions and literary devices in a magical-realism sort of way, except filtered through the haze of Mountain Dew and video games that most people below thirty see things through these days. "Sucker Punch" is in there too, but its awesomeness is somewhat mitigated by the gut-wrenching awfulness of the characters--the entire plot is a device to keep the protagonists' minds off being sexually exploited minors in a mental house.
Finally, there are rumors that Steve Purcell, who works at Pixar, is working on a "Sam & Max" movie, which will be the most awesome Awesome-ist movie ever, assuming it's not just a rumor.

For the most part, though, producers haven't noticed enough of an audience for this kind of thing, for some bizarre reason; it probably has something to do with the awful failures of adaptions of many of these works, but they don't seem to realize it's because you just can't take "Speed Racer" or "Street Fighter" seriously. So, it's left to indie groups that don't have the budget to do it well. Check out the 'fake preview' scene on YouTube, featuring trailers for movies that should exist but never will.

For the moment, though, comics are where it's at. Be happy you can get it when you can. If you don't already, read "Axe Cop", a webcomic that's written by a six-year-old and made entirely of this genre.