Happy Pride. I refuse to be ashamed of what follows.
I read my first manga this week.
Okay, I know, manga (Japanese comics, basically, which is in its own completely separate bubble from Western comics) is one of the biggest publishing markets. It’s definitely not the strange, niche, geeky thing it once was when I was in high school. A number of my students last year eagerly told me what manga they were reading. I have many friends who read manga. For Christ’s sake, I write about American comic books basically every day.
I read poetry. I’ve even publish it—my own and other people’s. Who reads poetry? Certainly not as many people who read manga. Not by a long shot. Oh my god. Not by a long shot.
But for years I’ve resisted the manga siren song. Part of it was certainly how impenetrable it seemed to me—quite literally a different way of reading, and I mean that physically as well as intellectually. I didn’t know where to start, I didn’t know what I would like, and I was too consumed by my other interests to even try. So I didn’t.
I won’t lie, though. Manga, for me, has always been something other people read. Not me! I’m a nerd, but not like that. Not that flavor of nerd.
(And, in particular, not that flavor of white American nerd. Not that it stopped me from watching anime, tbh. I’m a ‘90s Millennial! I watched Toonami!)
But I read my first manga this week. After years of denying it, avoiding it, side-eyeing it, and, frankly, outright fearing it, I read my first manga this week. And it fucking ruled.
Let’s back-up. Hello, newsletter friends! I missed you last week! I skipped a post because it was my birthday over Memorial Day weekend, and I was busy planning a cute little “garden party” for my literal three friends. It was very nice; I made this strawberry lemonade from scratch. Then I woke up on Saturday morning, my actual birthday, and my very knowing mother gave me a Barnes and Noble gift card and basically told me to go wild. And when your mother tells you to go wild at Barnes and Noble, even at the age of twenty-eight, you go fucking wild at Barnes and Noble.
I’ve been thinking about dipping into manga for a while, to be honest with you, and this seemed like the right moment to try something new: the cusp of a “new year” for me and the cusp of summer simultaneously. I’ve been orbiting manga for years, and after dedicating an entire year to regularly reading and writing about comics, it’s starting to feel more than pertinent to familiarize myself at least a little bit with this ginormous sector of the comics and publishing world. So I went to Barnes and Noble on my birthday and I bought some goddamn manga (along with a few horror novels, a queer romcom, an anti-racist comic strip from the ‘40s, and more—she has the range, folks).
I ended up picking two things: a Junji Ito collection with a Frankenstein adaptation because duh and the first Chainsaw Man volume because a lot of comics folks I like, from Zoe Thorogood to Jame Tynion IV, seem to really dig it. I read both this week; I loved both this week for wildly different reasons. Ito’s Frankenstein—both the Shelley adaptation and the other interconnected short stories in the larger volume—is, honestly, revelatory, and I have a new understanding of Shelley’s novel after reading Ito’s visual interpretation. I also understand inking on a whole different level after reading Ito: what drama inking can add to a story, what pathos and atmosphere. Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Chainsaw Man, on the other hand, is slick and loud and pointedly contemporary in all the best ways, even as it tells a story about a kid possessed by a chainsaw demon. It’s weird, and it’s just plain cool, okay? Sometimes it really is as simple as that.
So, I’m a manga reader now. It’s undeniable. I want to read more—of these two creators in particular, but just in general, too. I’m a sucker for a good romance, after all. And now that I’ve accepted my own interest—welcomed it, even—I’m eager, as I always am when I find something new to learn, to dive in.
For manga, it does feel a bit like diving; this is a vast ocean, and I’ve done very very very very little exploring. I don’t know anything beyond the names of a few famous series. I’m still a bit clumsy with the right-to-left reading style, though I admit I love the literal feel of the books in my hands: their size and shape and weight are genuinely pleasing. Reading, after all, is just as much a physical experience as it is a mental one. How I read matters to me, and shapes the way I encounter the work. There’s something undeniably pleasing to me about the literal form of a manga collection (for which I’m sure there’s a very particular word, but I’m still learning the lingo).
But that’s dangerous, too. I can be obsessive about the things I like (can you tell?), and I have a bit of a collector’s mentality. I like stuff, and I like buying stuff I like, and there’s an endless amount of manga out there prepackaged in a shape I enjoy, ready to be bought. And, oh boy, I’m looking forward to buying it. But here’s my goal: if I’m going to, like, be into manga now, I can’t go looking for it online. Otherwise I’ll ruin my summer, you’ll never hear from me again, I’ll just be wasting away (and wasting my money) reading manga day in and day out.
Instead, I’m going to let the manga find me. And there’s pleasure in that, too, in being out-and-about and coming home with a small, unintended purchase instead of knowing that small purchase will be waiting for me on my stoop. For once I’m glad my closest bookstore is a Barnes and Noble nearly half an hour from my house. It means going there is an event—an event worthy of a birthday—and something to look forward to, to hope for, and to embrace with few expectations. Whatever I find when I go to Barnes and Noble, I find. That’s that.
And so too will it be my attitude towards manga, my new “thing,” my Summer 2023 Hobby. That’s the best part of it, really. I love tip-toeing up to something new, something I know I can really sink my teeth into, and anticipating all the discovery to come. Manga is a whole world, and I know so little about it. That’s exciting! That’s fucking thrilling. I’m about to read a bunch of shit I don’t know anything about.
Happy birthday to me. Happy summer. My reading taste is about to get so much weirder. So stay tuned, folks. And don’t be afraid to try something new.