Manga for Me! Manga for You!

There are a lot of people in the US or Canada or the UK who read comics who hate manga. They despise it, mostly, I think, because it's not what they're used to. It's not men in spandex and women with huge boobs. It's nothing like what they grew up with or expect comics to be.

Manga is the Japanese word for comics (and, for our purpose here, I speak of them as either comics created in Japan or, increasingly, inspired by it). There are plenty of defenders of manga who say that comics are very popular in Japan, that everyone reads it, not just the post-pubescent males that dominate the US market. They also have to constantly challenge the notion (just like American comics are all super-heroes) that manga isn't only giant robots (mecha) or stuff for kids (ie, Pokemon, Dragonball).

I don't hate manga; I just haven't read enough of it.

When translated manga first started making its way to the US in the late-80s (Lone Wolf and Cub, Area 88, Mai, the Psychic Girl, et al.), I read it all. As I mentioned before, I worked in a comic book store, so I had the time and discount to read whatever I wanted. Slowly, Viz (which was doing much of the packaging and translating of the comics) went out on its own and started to publish English-editions on their own, and I bought much of that (especially Ranma 1/2, Lum, and Nausicaa).

By the time I went to college, however, I didn't have the a) disposable income or b) time to read these comics, and I stuck with those that I had either grown up on (standard super-hero stuff) or the indie comics that I thought would make me seem less geeky ("Sure I read comics, but look at this stuff by Dan Clowes!"). I stopped buying manga.

I picked up a few titles here and there (I bought Eagle, the Making of an Asian-American President, and thought it was one of the dumbest things I've read, and I bought the Astro Boy and Lone Wolf and Cub reprints from Dark Horse), but I missed out on the manga boom, which seemed to have started around the time of the influx of anime on TV (from Sailor Moon, Pokemon, and Dragonball) and has only gotten bigger.

I go into Borders and I see a couple of shelves of "standard" US trade paperbacks and graphic novels next to piles and piles of manga reprints, with teenagers (many of them girls) all sitting down reading them. Bookscan (which is like the Billboard of books) notes that in most months, manga titles are 8 or 9 out of the top 10 graphic novels sold.

They're everywhere.

But I don't know where to start. It seems obvious to me that manga is the new romance comic. That what teenage girls were reading in the 50s (romance comics) are now manga.

So that's where you come in. There has to be one or two of you out there who read manga or know about manga that can tell me where to start. Is Fruits Basket a romance comic? Boys Over Flowers? Are these standard romance comics, or are they more along the lines of teen-humor titles like Archie or Pasty and Hedy?

I've never asked for your help before (nor have I even asked for comments, even though I really would like to see a few now and then, to know that people are actually reading this), but I come to you today.

Enlighten me. Educate me.