I'm not entirely sure what prompted the thought last night, but The Wife mentioned during dinner that she should probably try reading up on some manga because she'd noticed that more and more of her students were talking about it and she probably ought to at least have a vague notion of what they're talking about. (She's actually on break at the moment, so I'm not sure why she brought it up now, as opposed to, say, two weeks ago.) I told her that "manga" is just the Japanese word for "comics" and that there's a huge range of material out there. I've got a few titles that she'd be welcome to read."But you've got just superhero crap, right?"
(She generally tries to ignore my buying habits.)
I gave her a really high overview of a few of the titles I had handy, and she said a few of them actually sounded kind of interesting. Later that evening, I pulled out the first volumes of Alice 19th, Bizenghast, Blank, Chrono Crusade, iD_eNTITY, Lone Wolf and Cub and Steam Detectives. Of course, strictly speaking, about half of those aren't "real" manga. Two are OEL, one is manhwa, and one is gekiga. But they're all shelved in bookstores under the collective heading of "manga" and I suspect The Wife's students wouldn't know/recognize/understand the difference.
My guess is that iD_eNTITY will be the only one she likes of the lot. And I'd bet that, if she likes that, I could sell her on Ph.D. Phantasy Degree pretty easily since it's the same author. (Although I haven't actually read the latter one myself.) And I'll bet that we'll spend an evening in Barnes & Noble in the next week or two with her just reading the covers of everything in their manga selection so she can pick out a few titles that sound interesting. And then, she's going to get frustrated because she'll only find one or two series, read through them in a fairly short period of time, and then have to sit and wait a few months for the next volume to be published.
But we'll see how things go.
Posts
