Girl power comic series#
The success of Tokyopop, founded in 1996 by Stuart Levy, started with "Sailor Moon," a manga series and a cartoon about a 14-year-old girl with magical powers. Founded in 1986 and distributed by Simon & Schuster, Viz publishes boy manga like "Dragon Ball Z" and "Yu-Gi-Oh!" (both of which are also cartoons, trading cards and toys) and a slew of titles with female stars, including "Boys Over Flowers," about life at a prestigious academy, and "Imadoki," about navigating the perils of friendship, dating and high school.
Robbins knows her manga, and is providing the dialogue for four shojo titles published by Viz. Robbins said, referring to the overly endowed young women drawn in superhero comics. "The girls are cute, they're never insulting, and they never have big breasts," Ms.
"Manga is bringing back the very same subjects, but with a twist, a 21st-century Japanese sensibility," she said.
Girls once had their pick of titles like "Millie the Model," "Patsy Walker" and "Betty & Veronica" to enjoy. Whiteman said that manga titles aimed at girls would make up 75 percent of the initial titles.Īmerican comic books for young girls have not been popular since the late 50's, said Trina Robbins, the author of "From Girls to Grrlz: A History of Women's Comics" (Chronicle Books, 1999). "When we find something that strikes a chord with a very broad section of today's children, we feel compelled to take our publishing in that direction." Mr. "We publishers are always looking for ways to grow," he said. Doug Whiteman, the president of Penguin Young Readers Group, said that deciding to publish manga was easy. Penguin Group USA formed a three-year partnership with the Los Angeles-based Digital Manga and plans to publish 8 to 10 titles in the spring. "There's going to be something like 1,000 trade paperback volumes being released this year," Mr. In the comics business Dark Horse already publishes manga, and DC Comics has just entered the field. The American pioneers of manga publishing are Viz and Tokyopop, but the boom in sales has attracted a new wave of publishers, including Del Rey, Hyperion Books for Children and Penguin Group USA. This year showed "strong double-digit growth," he added. He said that manga sales were $50 million to $60 million in 2002, and climbed to $90 million to $110 million in 2003. Griepp suggested, can also be attributed to the country's acceptance of Japanese pop culture in anime, video games and films. Titles are sometimes even categorized: for girls (shojo manga) or for boys (shonen manga). Manga often celebrates strong female characters in adventure yarns or stories focusing on love and relationships. In bookstores, the colorful, digest-size manga collections are usually next to the shelves of graphic novels, which feature iconic domestic characters like Batman and Spider-Man. "Manga producers in the United States have tapped into a new audience for comics - the female consumer," said Milton Griepp, the publisher and founder of ICv2, an online trade publication that covers pop culture for retailers. Sales of Japanese comics - more familiarly known as manga (pronounced MAHN-gah) - are exploding in the United States, and much of the boom is due to efforts by comic book publishers to extend their reach beyond young male readers.