librarypunk - 014 - Manga

Episode Date: June 10, 2021

This week we’re talking with Matthew Murray, co-host of the Book Club for Masochists podcast, about manga in libraries! We covered a lot of ground so shonen jump in! https://twitter.com/MidniteLibrary  https://bookclub4m.libsyn.com/    Links referenced: Ohio Lawmakers Attempt to Ban Anime Book, Author Susan J. Napier Responds The Plight of Translation In America - In 2018 47 books were translated from Japanese into English (this number does not include manga or light novels) Manga in Libraries: Why Manga? Mangasplaining podcast YALSA’s Great Graphic Novels for Teens GNCRT’s Best Graphic Novels for Adults Reading List GNCRT’s Best Graphic Novels for Children Reading List Manga Plus

Welcome to Labyrinthunk. We have the power of God and anime on our side. Hello, I'm Justin. I'm wearing my silk shirt and I am ready to podcast about manga. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I am also ready to talk about manga. My pronouns are she and they. I'm Jay. Today I bought an Uzamaki shirt from Hot Topic that will get here in a few days, even though I've only actually ever read Tomiae and then like his Frankenstein adaptation. him, and then my pronouns are he him. I'm Carrie. I have

Chis curls to eat today, which are cheese, flavored corn curls. There's some form of Japanese snack that I found at the grocery store the other day. Oh, they're from the Philippines, my bad.

Okay, wow, that was, let's cut that out. Anyway, Anyway, I'm Carrie. She, her. Don't know anything about manga or anime. And we have a guest. Hi, I'm Matthew. I'm a librarian. At midnight library, midnight spelt wrong on Twitter and other places. I know about manga stuff and comics. I know a lot about comics. But yeah, also manga as a subset of comics. Also, I can't believe you haven't read Azamaki by Junjiito. I know. I know. I read Tomier, like, I know. No, you start with Tomier because Tomier whips. And then the weird one with like the porol in the stomach, that one was fun.

I know, I need to read Uzimaki so bad. I know, I really want to. The other one. The other one to start with is the 100%. Wait. The enigma of Amigara fault. I think I've even read like some of Uzimaki. I did a project on Toméay one time.

It was really fun. If I think Uzumaki is what I think it is. Like the girl with the spinning thing in her head. Hell yeah, because Uzimaki means spiral. Yeah. Yeah. I've like read some of that. Yeah, I've read Tomiye.

I know, I know a manga. Actually, I do know another manga. I've read one, which was I linked to it. I always have to remember it because I link to it in the discord. Yeah, Yoshiro Tatsumi. I read Goodbye, which was like a, like, kind of like the gritty everyday Tokyo style, like kind of graphic novel vignettes, manga from like the 50s and 60s and 70s,

which I thought was really cool. Like if someone had been like, this is manga, I never would have like associated it with like what other people called manga when I was growing up, because it was not like the same stuff that I saw. Do we want to start with definitions then, or do you want to do your new segment? Yeah, so we have breaking anime news. So I finally get to do an anime news segment

because it's almost tangentially related to what we're going to talk about. The Cowboy Bebop live adaptation coming this fall with the composer of the original soundtrack is coming on board. to do the music for the live adaptation. So I'm excited for that. That seems the theme song is so good. It's so good. Like, I don't actually know a lot about anime and manga, but I fucking love Cowboy Bipop.

So it's like, I like Jujito. I like Akira a lot. Cowboy Bipop. So good. I have never read or watched Cowboy Bop, which occasionally enrages my wife when she references it and I don't get it. That theme song. Wait, I've seen Cowboy B-Bob.

See, Carrie, you know way more than you think you do. Yeah, it's pretty good. And the music fucking whew-whips. Which fucking whips. So make it fun of me. I'm never going to delete any soundboard item, no matter how overplayed it is. So I'm going to do my seventh grade presentation. The Merriam-Wibster Diction.

I'm really nervous. I'm in seventh grade. Everything's awkward. The Merriam-Wibster definition of manga. Japanese comic books and graphic novels consider collectively as a genre. Also, an individual comic book or graphic novel of the manga genre, which seems like a recursive definition.

I have multiple problems with this definition already. Yeah. That's why you're here. A genre? you're saying everything from a specific country is a genre. That is not a good genre definition at all. Second, separating comics and graphic novels into two separate things is like, what's the point of doing that? Why specify those two different things?

Because one is for kids and the other one is rebranded so adults don't feel like nerds when they get too. Are graphic novels serialized? They can't. You can have serialized graphic. Okay. Oh my gosh. Do we want to get into this? Do you want me to like define everything?

People are nodding. No, yes. Yes, please. No, this is going to be Matthew Heavy episode. Comics are the format of sequential art, which is, you know, panel, things in panels, usually in panels, happening one after another. What, there can be, I've been into some very fun discussions that are useful to academics and useless to most people about this. But for other terms, graphic novel is anything with a spine is really what it comes down to. You know, if it's got, if you can put it on your bookcase and read what it says in the edge, it's a graphic novel.

Whether it's fiction or nonfiction or a collection of short stories or whatever it is, it's called a graphic novel. That's what they sell in bookstores. That's what you probably have in your libraries. Yeah, like I've read like the collected Sandman volumes. And I guess that's considered a graphic novel, even though that was originally, you know, serialized. It was originally released as single issues. And then so some people quibble with this stuff. And so you're like, oh, it has to be published as one thing to be a graphic novel or an original graphic novel.

So it's not reprinted from somewhere else. But then you have like web comics. They were never printed in physical form. Do they count? Manga. All the comics from Japan. They're not serialized in North America. They come out as books here.

but when they were released originally in Japan, or most of them when they were originally released in Japan, came out serialized in print anthologies or digital anthologies. And so... Shonen jump, right? Shown and jump, yes. So that. Defining manga, generally, a lot of people define it as solely as comics from Japan, though even that is something where what does from Japan mean?

And so there's some good examples of things. for immigrants manga is a very early thing that was found and reprinted. And it was comics published in Japanese in San Francisco newspapers in the early 20th century. And so that's something aimed at Japanese audience, created by Japanese people, but originally published in America. It gets shelved with the manga, if you have it in your library, probably, you know? But it's also not appealing to manga readers because they're a teenager is probably not super into reading this weird newspaper comic strip about living in San Francisco or in the early 20th century.

So yeah. Shonen jump. Oh my gosh. I don't know how much I want to do all this. Shonan is boys in quotation marks. Everyone else can see me do the quotation marks, but I'm saying them out loud. In that that's what it means. Shonin's Shonin style.

And that is getting closer to a genre, but is still not a genre, I would say. Defined by. Sorry, go ahead. defined primarily by NFTs. I mean, the way you were saying that manga readers generally... Nice fucking tittyes? That's a different subgenre,

subsection. I don't... Well, I've been reading manga in the past couple days. But yeah, sorry to interrupt. But yeah, Shonan is the big genre. Yep. And Shogho is for girls. Okay, but saying for boys and for girls is incorrect.

Exactly. It's reductive, yeah. And so even like Shonen Jump, which is the major one, supposedly like 50% of the readership are not boys. So, but it is the most popular is perhaps the way of putting it. I knew zero guys in my high school who I was friends with who read manga. It was all the girls who were like really into Naruto who like read the Shonin Jump issues from the public library in the teen room. Yeah. I would just like to point out the 20 something volumes of bleach on the shelf behind me.

Only 20? Only 20. Yeah, no, I haven't. I stopped collecting it probably around then. But yeah, so, you know, the, I would say probably one of the peak American Shonen series. Yeah. Both me and my wife really like it. So, yeah.

Shio is the more romance-focused stuff aimed at quote-unquote girls, teenage girls. Sainan is for men. and then Jose, and my pronunciation of some of these is probably off, is for women. And so it's about adults, stuff. And then you have, there's a term for children's manga that I cannot recall that would include things like Doremon, which, of course, I'm like, oh yeah, Doremon, everyone knows Doremon, that that's never been printed in English in North America, robot cat from the future. And then, Carrie, you mentioned Yoshiro Tatumi, who did Gagika, or Gagica.

Gagika, which is kind of more serious adult dramatic stuff. The other things that can be included in this often are comics from other countries as well. And so you have comics from Korea or China, maybe people may categorize those as manga as well. And it's a thing. And honestly, I'd say the largest reason for that is because they often come out from the same publishers. They're the same size, same publishers. similar-ish in style, I guess, though the Korean stuff reads left to right and right as opposed to right to left. But, you know, I guess even the Tatsumi stuff is flipped. So what does it even

matter? And then, I don't know, do we need to define more things? Is this a good start? It's a good start, yeah. The Chinese ones also read left or right, which I was very confused by. I didn't know that. I think it depends because I think you have different, I don't know, I don't know. There's like a tradition of Hong Kong specific comics as well, but I don't know how common, how popular those are anymore. They used to be quite popular. And now I don't hear about them anymore, so I don't know. I have a question, and you might know about this, especially with the Korean manga. I don't know what the Korean term was.

That's not Monwa. That's Chinese, right? It's very similarly pronounced. It's like Monwa. Manwa, yeah. It's spelt differently, but yeah. Yeah. Does the, like, colonization of Korea by Japan have any influence on, like, who publishes what or it being considered manga, or is it just America's like, oh, these all look the same?

And, or, you know, what sort of influences that? My understanding in the, when it first started, Korean comics first got it started getting published in North America, was that the licenses were cheaper. Oh, that makes sense. And so that's one of the reasons. And it was like, it looks similar. Like, the styles are, like, Japanese comics are very popular in South Korea. That makes sense. And so the artists that are creating, they're often stylistically influenced by them.

But their industry is a lot less, from my understanding, it's a lot less developed. And there is a lot less, there are a lot fewer Korean comics translated into English that are available. And the stuff that, my understanding is that the Korean comic industry does a lot more stuff digitally than, than printing. stuff. So it's just a different country. It works differently. Israel is what it comes down to. Hopefully, later this year, I'll be able to talk more about Korean comic stuff. Nice. So to get us onto libraries, I kind of wanted to ask, what's your interest in manga and comics? Where did it come from? And how is it guiding into library life?

I have been reading comics my entire life. Like, that's kind of basically how I learned to do it. I put a question in your document about what everyone's like first manga or anime was not realizing that most of you would not have any. Sailor Moon. I didn't know. But yeah, like my first manga was Sailor Moon as well. That was one of the first ones that got big in North America back in the 90s.

And that's how I watched the cartoon before that and I watched the original Dragon Ball before it was even Dragon Ball Z on TV in Canada. and without even knowing it was from Japan. You know, like, that's the era that we were in at that point. We're just like, what is this cartoon that's on television? There is no internet. Who knows anything about it? Not small child's version of me.

So that's how I got into it. And I just kept reading it and enjoy it. I like comics. I think comics in libraries is started to be a thing before I got to being a librarian person. but is still a thing that people want to grow or expand their collections. They're in every life. I still talk to people about putting comics in libraries. You still hear people saying, oh, I want to start a graphic novel or a comic collection

or whatever in my library. How do I do that? And I'm just like, oh, you don't have any yet. Okay. But let's look at what this looks like. And I think it's the same for manga in many cases that, like, you might have them in your library, but you might not have them in as many places as they could go, for example. So often you see these things heavily focused on the children section and the teen section,

and like maybe you don't have an adult graphic novel section, or maybe you're putting all, you're only buying manga for the teen set collection and not for other places. This is like, that's public library stuff. For academic libraries, my gosh, more of you need to buy manga. Just because there's not, no one seems to be actively, or very few places seem to be actively collecting that sort of thing for research purposes, which I think is not ideal. Does that make sense? Does that answer the question?

Yeah. Comics are cool. I like comics. They're great art form. They're not a genre. They're a medium. And manga are just comics from a cultural background. There's some interesting examples of creators from Japan who have stuff that, you know,

you know they're more heavily influenced by um like european comics like french comics or something like that and uh it's interesting to see the different styles that exist in from different places yeah on the first manga i bought was fushigi yugi um so i thought i'd throw a curveball in there i bought a bound volume of shojo manga that i had never read before but i was in barns and obel's like wow they got anime on books now so i'm just grabbed that and I bought that in middle school. I didn't read a manga until high school, but I watched Sailor Moon as a kid.

I had a Queen Barrel doll. Actually, I was real into Sailor Moon, especially Queen Barrel because she ruled. But I actually, my first manga that I read, so, like, Sailor Moon was the anime that I watched, but I read all of Death Note in high school because I had a friend show me that. And I was like, oh, this is cool.

And so I read that. But I was getting more into just like, comics in general in high school because I read Sandman and was like, oh, yo. And I also had like a teacher I was close with who was like into comics and who was helping me get into it. But then I really didn't haven't read that much more except for things like Junji Ito and stuff like that. It's something I want to read more of. But yeah, so Sailor Moon for me too, but actual reading it was Death Note. The, it's two things, I guess. One, like I just want to, say that I think it's hard it's easy for people to miss how popular this like Japanese cartoons

and Japanese comics are internationally like they are published all over the world in so many languages um like we don't even get everything in English there's tons of stuff that has never released in English that is available in other languages yeah that was one thing that the popularity of this stuff is yeah that was one thing that really surprised me um so like I wasn't really ever interested in anything super uh any kind of uh or anime or anything, but when I went to Spain, it was really popular over there. And it was a lot of stuff that, like, especially at the children, in the children's market and like the really young children's market and things like that, that you would see that

was, like, not what you would see in the United States and things like that. It was really kind of unexpected. I did not anticipate that. There's definitely cult, like, and you see it all through. like Latin America as well. It's available there. There's tons available in France. It is just, and the cartoons are in, you know, every country in the world, really.

But I think the kid stuff, there's less of it in, my understanding is that there's less of it in English and North America due to cultural differences that exist. And so you will see things like parents bathing with their children, which is a no-no in, like, in the United States. And so that stuff doesn't get released. The distribution is also really different. I bet you got into anime a lot earlier because the distribution was different in Canada than the United States. And Latin America, all my friends who were Latin American would be like, oh, yeah, they're already on Dragon Ball GT.

I'm going to tell you what happens at the end of at the end of Dragon Ball. So it's a huge international market. It's definitely, it was more, it seemed to be more popular. in Canada back in the 90s for anime at least. But I cannot say for now everything is just streaming online. One of my older brothers was a giant 90s anime nerd. And my first anime was Ronmo one-half, which I was just talking about this should really have given away the whole non-binary thing earlier.

because, you know, I was obsessed with it as a kid and it's like, hey, that seems completely ideal being able to switch back and forth between male and female. That would be rad. And then I grew up and didn't realize I was queer for another like 15 years. But yeah, I don't remember the first manga that I read, probably in high school, like, like Jay, but I didn't really get into it until I got into Clamp. and that was when I was in my early 20s. So I was a big, big into the ex-Holic and Subbasa fandom in like the late aughts. So that's, and then I haven't read anything for years. Ramno one half is another one where the nudity in it has, is like it never made the jump to like a television in North America the way that Sailor Moon or Dragon Ball did because of the like, especially like, it's like teenage. nudity. And you're like, whoa, whoa, hold on. I watched like, what's going on? Yeah, Ronma,

girl Ronma runs around without a top on all of the time. There's the one character who's a pervy old man who steals all of the young girls underwear. Yeah, a lot of it didn't, translate great, but. Oh, hi, Arthur. One thing, so I, despite me not actually knowing a lot about anime, I took an anime class in college, on like the sociocultural stuff at it. And one thing that shocked me was how much, like, early Japanese animation was used for, like, propaganda purposes. Like, one of my, the most interesting ones to me was, like, this little squirrel that was teaching all these Japanese animals, Hidagana as opposed to, or no, yeah, Hidagana as opposed to kanji, because Hidagana is Japanese and kanji is Chinese. And they were, like, in a Shinto temple instead of anything Buddhist. And so I just didn't know if, you know, if manga had any sort of early propaganda or anything or like stuff like that like, where that would never get ported over into English because it's not the right market.

And you said that there's all this stuff that doesn't get ported over and then maybe where it would or anything like that. Well, like I think the first thing to say is that it's not just Japan that was producing propaganda cartoons. Oh, yeah. you know what is it the the donald the daffy duck donald doke they really they didn't have the yeah they didn't have the clutch on that idea alone oh yeah no i'm not saying they did yeah the early so the early manga market post world war two uh in japan worked very differently um and it worked very like i don't know all the details but my understanding is like creators made comics for rental stores specific stores and then you would go there and you would borrow the books. And so it was like kind of regional based and it was very much aimed at children.

Wait, is that a library? A fucking library. Holy shit. But it was like it you would go to different stores, I guess, and they would have different stuff available as well. But yeah, it was, it was very library-like in that way. But it's like a library for capitalism. And those are still common, you know.

You still have the manga cafes and stuff. like that where you just go and you pay a fee or you pay for drinks or whatever and you can just read manga all day. And it's because they produce so much of this stuff. Like you can't buy enough of it to keep. Like you don't have enough space in your house to keep it all. Like you look at the anthologies like Shonen Jump, which is like the most popular one, is like 500 pages or comics every week, you know? Like put that in your bookcase and after a year, you're like, okay, I need a new room. I have two shelves worth of manga, and this is probably, this is after several pairings down. So this is the manga I absolutely cannot part with.

And yeah, that whole shelf would have been manga at one point in time. It's just that it comes out way too fast, especially, you know, when you have ones like bleach, which is probably into the hundreds by this point. I think the last time I saw it on the shelf at the library I used to work at, it was in to the 90s and that was a couple years ago. Bleach hit 74 volumes. And then stopped. It's over now.

So you see. So I mean like with that to bring it back to library shit. Because it's a library podcast. With that kind of volume in mind for all of these, you know, many, many series, how does an institution, either like a public library, library or a university or, you know, a special collections or whatever, start to build a manga collection or either for research or for public consumption or whatever. I mean, like, how is that sustainable?

How is that developed? I mean, there's a lot of consideration there because of questions about sustainability, questions about, you know, a number of things there. It definitely is. And so like when you are doing collection development, I think the first thing to look at is like, who is your audience? What is the audience you're going for? And then what are they going to want? Do they want all 74 volumes of bleach or do they want something else?

And then you have like bleach is, you know, recent is. It's in print. But for older series, volumes fall out of print and you can't get them anymore or you're buying them on eBay or something. you know? And so what do you do when you're missing three volumes from a 25 volume series? Do you keep it on the shelf or do you get rid of it? You know, is it still circulating? Do you just say, hey, go to this, you know, pirate scan website to read the missing volumes because we can't buy them? I don't expect that to be on a library's website. But I'm sure some library folks have told patrons that that's what they need to do to read the rest of these things. Because you also get series that don't finish coming out in English as well. That's another problem.

or a thing that you have to think about, like just because the series has started coming out, doesn't mean it's going to be successful or popular if you might never get those final volumes. Yeah, and on piracy, although I bet there's a lot of librarians who don't know what piracy is. So they're just like, this is online somewhere. Like, you can go.

100%. I've seen library folks point people at pirate like manga websites, not knowing that they are full of pirated stuff. And you're like, oh, but my library patrons told me about the site. I'm like, it not illegal. Yeah, the scantilations, which is for people not in the know, is the scans of the Japanese that fans then translate and then typeset and upload illegally. And Japan doesn't really have the ability to like internationally stop people from doing this, although someone in Japan

did just go to prison for three years for hosting a website like that. The two things to think about it is like, one, there is a long history of fan translations of this sort of material. If you go back to the early days of anime fandom, it was people doing fan subtitles versions of TV shows and movies and passing around VHS tapes that spread across North America. And that was the only way you could get these things because they often weren't commercially available. And the fan translations are something where there might not be another way to read this comic. So this is the only way to access it. But at the same time, this has led to publishers being very frustrated. lot of the time. And, like, it's not just limited to Japanese comics for scans of things. If you want

any, not any, not any, but like, you know, any Marvel or DC comic, the majority of stuff published in the last, like, 20 years, is available online illegally, very easily if you want to access it. And yeah, that's, that's it. Don't, don't use those sites. Buy from comic bookshops. But also, like, don't buy Marvel and DC comics to begin with, really. Like, they don't need your money. Borrow those from. the library. But I was going to say about scan translations. You also get stuff that you're never going to get in a legit translation. So that's the infamous all according to Kekaku. Because people would just like teach people Japanese and just be like, okay, I don't feel like translating

this word every time. So I'm going to say translator's note, he's referring to himself with an old pronoun, deal with it. And then just leave it in and not translate it. So that's an experience, I think, is I miss. It happens in the comics as well sometimes. You know, you get, it's very common for the Japanese honorifics to be left untranslated because translating those into English is not really something that can be done easily. And so you have all those like San and Sama and everything happening with people's names. And then there's like just a glossary at the beginning that says, this is why this is happening.

But the publishers often deal with, you know, they're, translating the stuff as quickly as possible. And you now have this really interesting thing where they will simultaneously publish the stuff in Japanese and English. So it's available in English, online, the day it's available in Japanese. But that's not the final copy that will be available in print. They'll change the lettering. They'll fix sound effects. They'll, you know, they might even change the translation because they don't have, they have more time when they're putting together the print book. Yeah. And there's also, and I know this is at least the case for like Chinese like boys love stuff because I know like the untamed which I actually haven't watched people keep

telling me you need to watch the untamed like untamed but I know that like that is started from a Chinese like boys love novel but that like there's no official English translation of it and so it's like a fan translation that you read online and that there's been comics and even an anime and then the Netflix I don't think it was originally done for Netflix but the one that's on Netflix but because that's like a queer topic like I wonder if like does subject matter ever have anything to do with like what gets ported over what gets translated what gets published what like becomes a necessity for these like scannlation sites how can libraries like get this stuff if it's not being officially put out like how do you navigate all that kind of stuff if it's not like if this comes back to like what collection you're building you know if it's not available in English maybe you can get it in another language and that's what works best for your collection. Can you get it in Spanish? Can you get it in French? Can you get it in the original Japanese? Because that's the, that's what you're, there's a there's people that will access it and use it in that format in that language. I don't know.

So yeah, when you're looking at building your collection, who is your audience? Do you have the space? Do you have the money? Can you say, okay, we're going to be buying, you know, we're going to buy the series until it finishes coming out? Is that something you're committed to doing? And also, are you committed to making sure that you're staying on top of that. That's a thing with so many folks. The audience for these often want them as soon as they're available. And so are you going to be getting it when it comes out as soon as possible? Yeah, I was going to ask, would you say that that's like the most challenging part of maintaining

like a manga collection is like keeping the consistency of a series? Like I know at a public library I used to work at one of the U-Services librarian when he got hired had the massive project of trying to basically cross-reference the entire like graphic novel, the YA graphic novel section and see how many complete series we had and what we were missing and how it was surking and all of that stuff. And I think he had like a 95-page spreadsheet.

Yeah. So would you say that that's like the, the challenge to a manga collection versus like other kinds of collections? I think the two challenges. One is knowing what series to even start collecting, which ones will be popular? And part of this is very localized. Like, you know, you're going to have the big series. But what is popular for you, for your collection, what is right for your collection is going

to depend on, you know, the local audience for that sort of stuff. But then being able to commit and saying we're going to keep this in stock because copies get lost, copies get damaged. Are you going to, what, like, that's a question people have all the time. time. It's like, okay, like, I can't get this volume anymore. It's $100 on Amazon because it's out of print. Do I keep it on the shelf or not? Yeah, that leads us to the next section I wanted to ask about because that seems to lend itself really easily to digital collection building. And we all know that that means buying a platform subscription that you're never going to get rid of.

And also, it does mean you're going to save physical space and physical space does cost money. So what have you been hearing and when you're asking? Asking academic libraries, what are they considering? Do they want the physical? The other thing to consider is that there are series that are available only digitally that are not available in print as well. And so if you're looking for a really complete collection, maybe you have to get the stuff digitally. So for digital comics, digital manga, there are three places that people can add them to their collections. First, school and public libraries.

Academic libraries are like, it's like, you know, generally academic libraries don't have like, you know, prose fiction e-books. And it's the same thing with the comics. I haven't encountered any that have many digital comics available at all. If any of you know of examples, please let me know. So the three primary places to get, to add digital manga to your collections are Hoopla, which is the streaming service where you have access to everything through Hoopla. Comics Plus Library Edition, I think is the name of the other one. Yeah, they have an academic one too that I found today.

Okay, yeah. So like they're trying to get into more places. And so those are both streaming options and you just have access to everything on those platforms. Those are great for people that don't have the time and don't need to find out what it is. You don't have to buy each volume individually. You set your budget for it and you're like, cool, we're going to spend this much on it every month. It's a pay per borrow system. And usually the library systems cap how many borrows people can make each month. The other system, you can buy. You can buy. You can buy. You can buy. You can buy. You can. individual titles through Overdrive and have them available through. And it's accessible through overdrive. And then there's multiple ways that you can download or access the titles, depending on how it's made available. And so some of them are you can only read them in the browser. You have to have an internet connection to read them. Others are downloadable in Kindle format.

Others are downloadable in EPUB format. There's a whole bunch of different variations. And some of this comes down to licensing agreements. And so there are some manga also that are not available digitally because the publishers are just like, nope, we only only. want it to be available in print or you know we're going to charge you this much to make it available digitally and the publishers are like that doesn't make sense for me to do that um so that's another challenge to that yeah and the problem i've noticed because i started playing around on

overdrive and comics what is it comics plus app is that their tagging is dog shit so overdrive for instance It doesn't have, if you can go to the category, graphic novels and comics, which we've already set you off on that. Jesus Christ, guys. I'm sure that came out. The bunnies are misbehaving. I think they're fighting or something. So Overdrive will give you graphic novels and comics, and you can't really subselect by manga, because even though it's not a genre, sometimes people know I want to find a manga. I'm looking for this because I'm a fan of it.

And Comics Plus, I clicked on, okay, they've got a manga tag. I'm going to click that. First page was entirely the comics of Avatar, the Last Airbender, which is a product of the United States. And not particularly, I don't think, even given the discussion we just had about diaspora comics, would not qualify his manga in most situations. It was written by White Men. So yeah.

Well, the comics were, a lot of the comics were written by Gene Yun. Oh, right, right, right. I was thinking of the show. Sorry. Gene Luen Yang, who did American-born Chinese. And so not just written by white people for the comics. But I did also see that they had like subgenres like Joe say. So I did click that.

And I'm like, okay, it looks like they got it right. So you can buy a pre-packaged streaming service, but it's not going to be, I don't really see that as a good. idea for academic institutions. They're going to want like a very curated collection. And the other thing to consider for that is that those streaming platforms have a lot less stuff available than ones where you're buying it per title. And so there is some stuff available through those platforms. I think some of like Tokyo Pop stuff is available through them. Udon, some of like the manga classics and manga Shakespeare stuff is available through those

platforms. And so, you know, those can be great platforms if you're accessing those. But if you want to provide the greatest access, they're not going to give you the most manga that's out there at the current moment. That can change any day because they're all probably working on licensing agreements with this stuff. But there can be like multiple steps involved there because it's like, okay, we were going to talk to the American publisher. They need to go talk to the Japanese publisher and then they come back. And I think that's one of the reasons it's taken longer for this stuff to be available. So first of all, Justin overdrive's searching is just shit ultimately. together.

If you've ever tried to look for queer romance novels via Overdrive, which you would think would be, you know, that's what e-books are for, you know. And they're impossible to find. Exactly. And it's impossible to find because it's romance or LGBTQ. And it's like those, and it's like six novels under LGBT. Yeah, apparently there the point shall meet. Exactly, which is.

But I kind of, I had another question. I kind of wanted to go back to print collections for a second. If somebody is starting like a collection and wants to start to try to figure out what is popular and what might resonate with their audiences, you know, whether or not they're buying for adults or teens or whatever, are there, how would they start to go about that? Do you have any recommendations coming from there? Sure. There's a series of, there's tons of resources for this. For library folks out there, there's a series of webinars that's been going on this summer so far that's talking about this sort of stuff. There will be a link in the show notes, I assume, because I can't recall exactly what it's called.

And it's like, honestly, if you just want the popular stuff, it's you go to like the Shonen Jump. You look at what's like popular on like Netflix and like what's popular on the anime sites. The most popular manga comics in English generally are Jujunji Ito comics, which are the horror comics. And then it's the most popular like shonen fighting cartoon, the comics that those are based on. And so it's like if you just want the highest circulation possible stuff, that's what you buy. But if you're looking to support other areas, then it is a lot more, it can be more difficult to figure out what people want for those. And I think like Jay, you mentioned the queer comic stuff. And so there's a number of those that come out that are, I think have become very popular.

in English. Oh, yeah. And so you have my lesbian experience with loneliness. No, no, no, no. I'm not even talking about Yawi, which is boys love manga, which I don't really even consider queer because those are written, oftentimes those are written and drawn by women for women. Yeah. And so it's not really any.

Which is like the hunky gay dudes written by hunky gay dudes. Yeah, yeah. They're really scary and stuff. Yeah. So, but a couple of the titles I would mention. are my lesbian experience with loneliness, which is an autobiome memoir comic about someone dealing with a lot of hard stuff, a lot of, it can be a hard read. There's a lot of mental health stuff going on in that comic.

But it's also very good and it's proven to be very popular. And several of the sequels have come out in English and those have been quite successful. And I think one of the reasons it's successful is because that was really really, is one volume. And so if you're adding that to the collection, it's very easy. And there have been several other volumes. There was my solo exchange diary and then my, what was the most recent one? My alcoholic escape from reality by Nagata Kabi is the author. And so those are easier to add your collection because, like, they're for adults. So that's one thing really. Like other people can read them too. But like I think the primary audience for them is adults. But it's easier to sell that

to somebody saying, hey, read this memoir comic by a queer woman in Japan. It is also manga. It's also Japanese comics. But that was originally published as a web comic as well in Japan. And so it is a different origin from things. But another one that I think has proven to be very popular in English is my brother's husband, which is a series about a man whose brother moved to Canada, got married to a man, and then died. And so now his husband is coming to Japan to meet his, his husband, his dead husband's family. And it's all about him dealing with his like, it's all about like dealing with homophobia in Japan. And it's really a really sweet emotional comic that's really good. And it's two volumes. So that's a very easy one to add to your collection, I think. You know, it's, it's, if you're

considering things like, how much space do I have? And that, that's, this is something that I haven't mentioned before, or I have only tangentially mentioned, is like, when you're talking about manga, one of the reasons it's shelved by itself so often in its own section is because they are published, the majority of them are published at smaller sizes than American comics are. And so you can fit more of them on the shelf. You can put more shelves in the bookcase if you put them on their own bookcases as opposed to interfiling them with like, you know, European comics and American comics and everything like that.

That makes total sense. I've seen like a lot of juvenile collections get done that way too in academic libraries, Any kind of sub-collection, you just can maximize your physical space. But I hadn't thought about that for manga. 100%. That's why you do it. And this is because, like, yeah, they're physically smaller. And if you're looking at having 60 volumes of something, you're like, how do I get all of

these on the shelf? And it's like, oh, I can put more shelves onto the bookcase if I only shell these with each other. And it's like it's good and bad, you know, for those things. Because it means that the people that are looking for those can find them a lot more easily. but it's also bad in that like people won't stumble across them in the same way. And it's interesting that you do see libraries, public libraries, shelving some of those titles in with mix them in with the graphic novel stuff. So like the Tatsumi book that that Carrie mentioned earlier is usually shelved with like,

you know, the adult graphic novels section, the grown up section because it's not, it's just a different, it's aimed at a different audience. You know, and it's actually also printed in a different size and everything as well. Like they're very much going for a different audience than the people that are reading bleach in Naruto and One Piece. But in academia, the two types of collections that I've specifically seen people collecting manga for are, one is graphic medicine. So health librarianship stuff and building collections to support that. And you all know who I'm talking about when I talk about someone doing that specifically. It's Matthew, no.

Yeah. Like the graphic, the graphic medicine librarian person. And so he's buying, he's specifically buying manga for those collections. And so he's getting stuff. He's getting like my lesbian experience with loneliness, but he's also getting fiction comics. My cells at work is one that is all about how, like, the body works, except it's told through, you know, personified representations of like blood cells and stuff.

What? That's amazing. If you don't know it, you should definitely get it for your collection. there's a ton of them it's proven to be yeah it's proven to be incredibly successful and there's a ton of spin off sword as well not all of which are available in print but there's like one about like how um like what a person goes through when they're pregnant or you know what happens to your body when you're like an alcoholic and don't sleep enough stop okay okay yeah I'm okay I'm gonna put this in my collection development profile holy shit yeah carry sold yeah perfect This is a minute when tonight, yeah. The other one I've seen is support for teaching. And so if you have like a teacher's college or whatever, you want to have those stuff available because the teachers, so that they know what their kids are reading and so that they can like know how to use them in assignments and everything for that. I had a question about manga use for like language learning.

I have a friend who is fairly fluent in Korean. She lived in Korea for a while, and she worked at University of Washington's East Asia Library, I think it was, while she was a student there. And I recently asked her coming up for this episode, like, did you guys have manga and what was it used for? And she said their manga collection, you know, equivalent was pretty much all just for leisure reading. Have you seen manga use untranslated manga in any form to support language learning? I forgot to ask her, but I meant to ask her if she started reading comics in Korean to help with her Korean, but I was interested in that aspect too. It's very much, I've seen it. People talk about it for EFL, like English as a foreign language learners, but not many places have non-English language comic, like comics in general,

honestly. So I don't, the one place that that you would see that is in Canada. Because in, you know, it's a bilingual country, French and English. And so you will have school libraries in Canada having French language comics. And honestly, pretty much every public library in Canada is going to have some French language comics. And people are going to be using those to develop their French skills. I read those comics to develop my French skills because my French is not very good. But reading comics is a really, great way to experience media and not have to understand all the words. Yeah, like I know when I was working in public service at a public library, we recommended comics and manga for children that, you know, maybe we didn't want to read prose books, you know, it's two different ways of processing. So it was always like, oh, your kid doesn't want to read Rick Reardon, maybe they should try comic books or, you know, that kind of thing. So that's kind of what I was thinking.

Like, can adults use them for that too? Definitely. 100%. And like an example is a series called Saint Young Men, which is about Jesus and Buddha, who are roommates in Tokyo, in modern day Tokyo. And so this series was not out in English for a long time, but it was available in French. And so one of my friends used it to improve their French language skills by borrowing it from the library and reading in French because the library had it.

It's now in English, though. Yeah, I was just going to say that, like, comics have been used a lot in public health campaigns, particularly, like, among the, like, I mean, the gay men health, the, yeah, the gay men's health crisis, New Yorkmen's health crisis, Drake Gates, like, they used the safer sex comics to, oh, we've already talked about this, actually. mind. I bring this up every time we talk about comics, so I'll just shut up.

We've already talked about this, so I'm not going to repeat myself again. It's relevant. Yeah, but I didn't listen to that episode. No, I see this all the time. I'm just like a broken record, okay. But it's like, it's one of those things that doesn't stop me. It doesn't stop any of us.

Well, the buck stops here. It doesn't stop me from doing an entire anime episode. Um, anyway, yeah, but I mean, like, it's, there's, there is definitely like an accessibility angle to that that I think is really major. Um, that is, um, like, it's also reading. Like, fuck you if you don't think it's reading. Right. It, it is reading, but it is, it is a different type of reading as well. You know, it's, it's not a one to one equivalent with reading prose because understanding how to read like panel to panel and what's going on in those panels is a different form. of as a different form of reading. Yeah. So it's like watching a movie with subtitles is also reading, but people never talk about that as a form of reading. Yeah. I've been reading about language immersion because I'm trying to get my Spanish better, especially

like Mexican Spanish. And a part of it is like passive listening. And they were saying also don't just watch it with English subtitles on because you're going to start reading and you're going to stop listening if you're trying to do active listening. Also, I have all of Scott. pilgrim in French. So I'm pretty, I pretty sure I got that from a Canadian publisher when I was working on my French back in the day when I thought I was going to have a career as a historian and needed to know French. If you want to read comics in Spanish, the best, the easiest place to read

manga comics in Splannis is mangaplus.shuessa.com.j.j.j.j.j.j.j.j. Which is a legitimate place where they put manga online and it's available in English and in Spanish and they do a lot of like simultaneous translation stuff. So you only get like the first three chapters and the most recent chapters, but it's there's there's hundreds thousands of pages of comics available for free on that site if you want to if you want to if you need somewhere to practice your Spanish. Yeah. But I would love to see more libraries buying manga and comics in general to support other collections and to support support other departments. I think there's so much stuff that you could be doing that I think would be really interesting to do that.

And it's just like, you know, there are adaptations of classical works of fiction. There's the Frankenstein adaptation that Jay mentioned earlier. There's also a manga classics adaptation of Frankenstein. And so there's different versions. I worked at a place that had a veterinary school. And I'm like, you need to buy silver spoon, which is a manga about going to an agricultural, an agricultural high school in Japan. And like we have a veterinary program.

We have an agricultural program at the school. You should buy this so that people can read about what it's like to learn about these things in Japan because it's talking about it like because it's also teaching you about all this stuff. And it's like an entertaining comedy, but it's also like this is how a farm works in Japan, you know? Or if you have like an English department, there's tons of shakes. There's a bunch of like Shakespeare adaptations that you can get out there.

I've read the Julius Caesar one. It's so good. Like the time I read Julia Caesar was the manga Julius Caesar that they do. It's great. And like so the manga classics, the manga Shakespeare stuff is really popular with school teachers as well. You know, like that's a different area. And so like if you are supporting a teacher's college or whatever, having that stuff saying, hey, this is a different way that you can teach these classics is something that you can do.

But also you have, there was a great collection I saw at a university in Iowa, I believe. And it was a food collection. And it had, it was mostly cookbooks. But they also had like, here's all these cozy mysteries about chefs. And here's like this Japanese, like, here's manga about food. Because there's so much manga about food out there. It's so popular. And like some of them are ridiculous.

And so you have like delicious in dungeon, which is like kind of a fantasy parody of these things. Because it's about going into the dungeon and fighting monsters and eating them. But then you have all these other ones that are like, here's like, competitive chefs and they're cooking food and they're going to give you the recipe that they're actually making and you can cook it at home. Or you have Oshinbo. I can't remember exactly what that is. And that's all about different food as well. I think like Iron Chef comes from Japan. So that makes sense that there would be a competitive chef manga. Yeah. It's a way shinbo is is one of the cooking manga and it's about like like food reviewers in Japan. Like

trying to find the best food or something? I need to read this yesterday. Jesus Christ. Anthony Bourdain the manga. And then you have the ones that mix different things. Otherworldly, oh, what is it called? Otherworldly Izakaya Nobu is one that is a weird fantasy one where like this modern Japanese is Akaya, which is like a bar snack sort of restaurant, is like,

in medieval Germany and all these Germans are like, what's with this weird Japanese food? But it's delicious. It made, like, I was smiling so much in this comic because the people are just so happy to be eating food they think is really good. It's really strange. I'm like, I don't even want to eat this food. I'm a vegetarian. But the joy these people are getting out of eating this is like made me smile like way more than I expected. And I think that's one of the things like we're getting more.

Like there's a major manga boom right now or like the second manga boom in North America. And so we're getting more weird manga here. think. And so you're getting more of the stuff about cooking or the stuff about, you know, health things and stuff like that, which I think is really neat. It's not just all like, you know, people fighting each other and like whatever. But there's there's that as well. You can also get those. There's so much sports manga. Get that to support your athletic stuff. Yeah, that's what universities have, athletic stuff. Support your athletes. So on the topic of food in anime, right?

because they always talk about how rich, how richly food is depicted in anime. What is your favorite representation of food in anime? I want to say Jibli movies. I'm just, I have the montage of, I've seen on Tumblr, like the gift sets of just the different. The making breakfast and Howl's Moving Castle. Exactly. Yeah. The buffet and spirited away, you know.

Like I'm also like vegan vegetarian and I want all. the bacon that Calcester is helping them make. Like, it looks so goddamn tasty. All your bacon burn, yes. All your bacon burn, baby, yeah, that's right. See, I just say, like, mine doesn't even be an anime. It's Tompopo. That's my ultimate answer all the time, just hanging out and eating ramen.

It's all day every day. Have you seen Tompapo, Matthew? I can't remember what that one is. It's the ramen western. It's a Japanese film about a ramen shop. No, I have not seen that one. Incredibly good. Anyway.

But yeah, like when I said there's so much stuff that's untranslated, like I'm not. Like there are like monthly magazines that it's like, here's 300 pages of golf manga every month. Here's 300 pages of mahjong manga every month, you know? And they've been coming out for decades. And like none of that is in English. And there's a really famous, fairly famous series, which is about a like Japanese salary man. which is, you know, like the businessman person. And it tracks him going, it takes decades of him starting at the lowest rank and gradually

getting promotions and rising up through the ranks in this business. Like it's, there are like two volumes that were bilingually translated in Japan as like ways to learn English. And that's like the only stuff that's available in English as far as I know. So is it literally just like a way to learn vocabulary? I don't know why that one was chosen as a way to learn. One of the Japanese publisher chose, I think back in the 90s or early 2000s, several series. It sounds like it would be like a way to learn like business vocabulary, like a way to learn business English.

Yeah. Honestly, that probably was one of the reasons why it was chosen, but I cannot say for sure. Anyway. Yeah. It sounds like a government program probably jumped in and was like learning. Like a cultural exchange kind of thing. But yeah, like I think it's kind of surprising. that you don't see more bilingual stuff.

And there have been cases in the past of places publishing bilingual comics as ways to learn Japanese in North America. But I'm a little surprised that you don't see more of that over here. And I think it's a, my interaction with some publishers of non-English material is that they're surprised when people want stuff that's not in English. They just kind of assume that there isn't any interest in people learning other languages, honestly. Yeah, well, yeah, it's America. Why the fuck would we do that? I mean, you're in Canada where people sometimes learn two languages if they really want to. Yeah, yeah, they learn English as their second language because they, their first language is French. Because they're from Quebec. I live in one of the few bilingual education K-12 areas in the United States. So all your classes are offered bilingually all the way up until you grow up and then and then leave the area and realize the rest of the United States is not. interested in doing education that way. But they want our teachers because they're all of them bilingual. So we're at an hour and I wanted to ask Matthew what you think the future of manga collections looks like in libraries, keeping like a broader eye out to like Korean and

Chinese comics as well. I think there will be, I think you'll see more Korean and Chinese stuff get translated. I think there's just more Chinese stuff getting made now. And so more of it's going to come over eventually. You know, eventually China, just because they have, they'll get a hit, whatever it happens to be. They'll make, you know, a movie or an anime or something that becomes really popular and people will want the comic that's based on it or that it was based on. It's going to happen at some point. I'm sure it's already happening in other countries, just because they're producing so much media at this point. But I think that in libraries, I hope that we'll see more focus put on manga for adults in public libraries, I think.

And it is interesting. I'm like, do I want that, do you shelve that separately when enough of it is available or do you keep interfiling it? And I don't know the answer to that, you know, because those series are often, they're not as long, you know, they're not running 60 volumes. Those ones generally run a lot shorter, you know, if it might be 10 volumes, but you know, you get how many volumes of Walking Dead are there? You know, that takes up more shelf space than a lot of,

than some of this stuff is. But the other issue with those are like, how do you catalog these things? I think is a big question that you have to discuss as well, because it's like, do you go by title? Do you go by creator name? And I'm sure there's lots of places that are like screwing up the creator names as well because, you know, the Japanese family name going first so often is going to,

there are definitely catalog records that are incorrect. because of that. Yeah, I was going to ask if you knew about what the cataloging landscape was for for manga and such. Okay. I will tell you. In general, in general, cataloging for all comics and libraries is very poor. That's just surprising.

And it's because I would say the primary reason for this is because comics so often have multiple creators and catalog systems are not set up to allow to have multiple primary points of access. And also like with us. relying on OCLC records and stuff. Yeah, it is. And also, you have, people are looking for comics and manga differently than they're looking for other things.

How often does someone come in and say, I want to see the most recent books that Penguin has published? You know, it's not going to happen, but people are going to say, where are your Marvel comics, where are your Shonen Jump comics? That's what I want to read. I want to see what the newest Shonen Jump titles you have are. And that's not happening with prose fiction. That's not happening with anything.

Like maybe, like there are definitely some people that are being like, oh, I want to see the newest DVD that like whatever that this company's put out, you know? But they're not the predominant user base for that sort of thing. No, like I remember I was at, I was at an Illinois Library Association conference in grad school. And someone was doing some presentation on cataloging. I remember. And he mentioned how, how, like, I think it was like how he could, how he was enhancing his local, like his records with local headings. And he noticed that whenever anyone wanted a video game, they always searched for PS4. Like, it didn't matter what system it was actually for, but PS4 was how people were searching for video games. And so he just added that as a local heading to every single video game

and that entire public system so that people could find video games the way they were searching for them. That is an entirely different episode, but one of the things that I found so often is that the people that are searching for video games want things for a specific system, and there's often no way to limit your search to only things from that system. Yeah, it's terrible. And it's just like, these catalog systems do not work for video games. They just do not function. I was trying to see what, did we have manga? And I searched manga.

And I was like, oh, that's not going to bring anything up. So I tried thinking of authors. I'm like, well, that's not going to work either because who knows what? order it's in. Yeah, yeah. You're, you're going to end up like looking for publishers. And even then, like, the publisher data is not always correct, you know, because they're like, oh, this one put in it in as so and so incorporated and this one like left the dot off incorporated. And so it counts as two different publishers or whatever it happens to be. And it's just like, where are the records coming from? Who is doing the cataloging? There's a whole bunch of stuff there that are issues.

And then you also just have, you know, the one thing that I've never seen is, um, using the names of the creators or the comic, not in English as well, you know, are you putting in the original transatlated Japanese title in your catalog metadata? Are you putting in the creator names in Japanese? And I think, you know, you should do that. But that's not something that you see. I think in general, we're bad at doing that for cataloging pretty much anything. And it's just because the people that are doing this cataloging, you know,

Do you speak Korean? Do you speak Japanese? Do you speak Russian? If it's a non-English alphabet, it can be very tricky to do that. Yeah, that's why things like Orchid have multiple representations of your own name. So you can spell it, how you translate it, how you write it in traditional, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese. And so it allows the author control over that. But how is that going to work for a publishing industry?

You know, they're the ones generating most of the metadata. And then you also have things like translators are often not credited either. You look at something like the Eisner Awards, which are the major comic book awards in North America, in English, North America. And it was only a few years ago that they started crediting translators on the awards for the things that were like best reprint from Asia. And they're like, oh, we should credit the translators for these. And even now, like the newest, the nominees for this year got announced and Junji Ido had some stuff nominated. for like, you know, not in that category. And so it was like, oh, best writer, artist, Junjiito.

And they're like, oh, did the translator get credited for that? No. So what it is. The other place you mentioned earlier, and I forgot to do this, if you're looking to develop a collection, there are the American Library Association, YALSA, top graphic novels, top 10 graphic novels for teens and best graphic novels for teens list. And then the graphic novel and comics roundtable, best graphic novels for adults. Those are really great places, I think.

and they're doing a best graphic novels for children's list as well this year. So I think those are good places that can get stuff. And those also allow for people to nominate titles. So if you read something that you think is really good, nominate it for the lists. People complained last year that there was enough manga in the adult list. And I'm like, I asked you to nominate it. So that's the thing to think about as well.

And just like there's communities out there, you know, just ask for that sort of stuff. Academic, especially for academic librarians, if you're saying, hey, I want to support the history department. I want to support the Religious Studies Department. I want to support the engineering department. I don't know what engineering comics there are out there, but I'm sure there are people that can help you with that sort of thing.

And like, you know, the expectation for this stuff is like you don't have to be an expert in everything to be a librarian, but you need to know what questions to ask and where to ask them. If you have a religious studies collection, there's so much Japanese call, so much manga you need to get, though. There's tons of stuff that I think would be really good to, to add to those such of collections and not just Jesus and Buddha being roommates in modern day Tokyo

but lots of other titles as well. Yeah. I was going to say earlier, Tenshi Mui was a weird anime to bring over at that time because there are so many Shinto references that there's absolutely no way anyone ever understood and no theater in Kabuki and yeah, anyway.

Sailor Moon is filled with that stuff as well. It's like one of the Sailor Mars is like works at a temple. And it's just like, what is this temple? They're like, it's stuff? That's one of... Meatball head. Yeah, that's one of the things I really appreciated about the scantilations when I used to read them for clamp stuff is because they would help put that cultural context in there. You know, it gets starred. You could look at the footnote and be like, oh, that's why this makes sense as opposed to just a bad translation or in a mere, you know, somebody trying to make it make sense in English instead of just giving the cultural context for it.

The best English editions, print editions of manga have editorial notes in the back that explain so much of the stuff. There are some editors that are exceptionally good at providing cultural explanations to stuff, Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, which is a great horror manga about a group of students who graduate from like Buddhist university and then realize that they can't get jobs because they have degrees from like a college about how to be a Buddhist. and they all have like superpowers and they like find dead bodies and then like do their last wishes is basically what it comes down to. What is this called? Karasaki Corpse Delivery Service. It is fantastic.

It's great. And it has, I think, the best editorial notes that I've ever encountered. Because the editor, let me double check on the editor because I want to make sure it's the right name. Oh shit. Apparently a U.S. live action film based on the Kurosagi Corpse delivery service is in development. So the editor in that series, so it was published by Dark Horse. And there's supposed to be more promised, but it's been like a very long time since the last volume came out in English. So buy it. So hopefully they release more in English.

Carl Gustav Horn is an editor for that. And he explains so much in the footnotes in the back of the book. It's like each, it'll be like each of the chapter titles in this book are the name of a song from a from a 1970s Japanese singer you know and like explains the context of that and then it also like he'll just go off in like weird random stories about like people he met and translators and things are about Japan as well so they're like they're incredibly entertaining I've known people that have read his comics he's edited just for the editorial footnotes in the back but then you have other ones that have nothing in it at all and as much as I appreciated that my lesbian experience with loneliness was published in English because

it was so fascinating to look at, to have this memoir comic about someone coming to grips with their sexuality and dealing with mental health stuff, it didn't have any editorial content. And I'm like, I need to know more about like the Japanese sex industry about how queer people are treated in Japan because I just don't have the context to fully understand what's going on in this comic. Like, is this, how big a deal is this thing that's happening? Is this a big deal? And it's, it can be tricky for some of those things to just not know.

And I'm like, if I don't know after reading, you know, how many thousands of pages of manga, watching all this other stuff, then like the average person also, like, if you just give it to somebody, they won't have, they won't necessarily know that either. One final thing I will mention that I think is really interesting. And then I will stop talking, I promise, is looking at works that are translated into English. I saw this article that I'll send to all of you about, and it said that a few years ago, you know, there were 43 Japanese novels translated in English in North America that year. Or it was like a fairly low number.

And I'm like, oh, wow, this clearly doesn't include manga because you're looking at translated stuff. And there's like that many volumes are released every month for manga. And also light novels, which are a different topic entirely. And so I think it is impossible to understate how much of a foreign culture's material is being released in English. when you're looking at this stuff, there's no comparison. There's nothing else that is having this many pages and this much stuff and this much influence on people and this many people reading it compared to any other languages, material being released in English.

And so that's why you should get it for your library. That's a really great pitch. You should be like a salesperson. Isn't that what they're doing here? You should be like a manga hawker and like hawker. and like hawk manga to libraries. Go to work for a manga vendor. He could be a manga monger.

A manga. I actually am. I'm currently, I've recently been hired by Udon Entertainment slash manga classics to do that. Sweet. All right. It is a part-time gig where I tell people about their manga and other manga as well. So I have actually finally been paid. I am being paid to do that.

is now. All right. You are now an official manga monger. Yep. Okay, Matthew, I'm going to put your Twitter in the show notes. Is there anything else you wanted to direct people to? My other podcast, I forgot to mention I have another podcast. Oh my gosh, I should have put that at the beginning. I co-host Book Club for Masicist at Reuters Advisory Podcast where every month we pick a different genre at random and have to read books from that genre, whether we like that genre or not. and then we discuss appeal factors, why people like the genre are experienced at the genre, the books that we read that month.

I am so frustrated that I did not say this at the beginning of this episode. But yeah, it's a podcast that I like. I've read stuff that I've really enjoyed and I've read stuff that I've really hated. If you like listening to me complain about things, you should definitely listen to this podcast. But I have three other co-hosts who are wonderful and complain about things less than I do. And you also do streams. I haven't streamed anything in a while.

And I haven't made any zines in a while. but also yeah, follow me on Twitter, I guess, at Midnight Library, M-I-D-N-I-T-E, and that is where you will find out about stuff I do,

whether it's podcasts or zines or things. Like articles, I've co-wrote a book chapter this year. It's about comics and libraries. Some of the link. It's not out yet. It'll be out. This fall,

maybe I think. I'm not sure exactly when. Well, some of the link then, and I'll retweet it then. Sure. and if you do another stream I want to do another stream with you that was fun

okay thanks thanks for having me on I hope I this helped people understand more about what this thing is and I hope people learn things I want to read something

you mentioned great perfect yeah and Carrie you wanted to buy something for your library so I do yeah I'm gonna fuck up a budget

just kidding I'm gonna do a normal I'm not budgeting just manga this year They're like, that's all we're buying. Honestly, like, I don't buy that many books. Like, we don't need that many books for health sciences. We're database people.

But every now and then I need a book and I'm just like, just give me a few hundred bucks. And so, like, you know, like, I got to wait a few months. But next time I need a roll around, I'm just going to be like buy a whole bunch of these cell books because fuck yeah, they look like fun. They're fun They're very I don't know It's such a creative way To like kind of teach about that stuff

Well and we also Yeah We also have like a pretty big Like Japanese culture program Like Japanese and Japanese culture program At our school So like there's some overlap there That it could fill

So yeah Get two birds stoned at once you know On that note Good night Smoke smoke meat Let's be Damn, son