 Japan has a
single manga genre - shojo, or girls' comics - that is probably larger
than the entire U.S. comics industry. Colleen Doran, best known for her
magnum opus "A Distant Soil," notes that girls' comics in Japan aren't
all about hearts and flowers, since there are some horror stories in the
genre. But shojo manga is all about emotional intensity and strong characters,
both in what they do and how they look. "There's a certain stereotypical
quality to it," Doran said about shojo manga character design. "You look
at the face and you know what the character is. I object to that a bit,
but it's instant recognition." |
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 Most U.S. comics
feature costumed superheroes, but there once was a major market for romance
comics aimed at women, a market that has dried up in the last 40 years.
What caused that market to disappear? Doran points to the political paranoia
of the 1950's and a book, "Seduction of the Innocent," that attacked comics
as harmful to children. The book was aimed at the bloody EC Comics of the
time, and led to congressional hearings on those books. From the hearings
grew the Comics Code Authority, an industry censor that took the sharp
edges off comics' art and story lines. Doran feels that damaged the appeal
of all comics and hastened the demise of the romance books that once were
common on newsstands. |
 This site has
written before about Doran's unique family, where both parents were forensic
investigators and dinner table talk often centered on murder and mayhem.
No surprise then that the Sept. 11 terror attacks drew some "I told you
so talk" from Doran's parents. "It never seemed strange until Sept. 11,"
said Doran. "My father always looked at the large buildings and said they'd
be targets. " She said that her father was at an anit-terrorism seminar
in Utah when the attacks came. "He was so nervous he couldn't stop talking,"
Doran said about a phone conversation with her father. "He was saying `If
there is a bomb on a plane, here's what you do and where you put it to
minimize damage.'" Doran's dad then had to get special clearance to get
on a flight home, which happened to be filled with government investigators. |
