You want a new term for English-language “manga”?
Japonisme Comics. (should I go register that as a trademark or company name, like, right now or what.)
That work for ya? Or is the fact that it was originally a French term poison it for you?
(the last time this came up I recycled a couple of acronyms from a comicsnob post for a response to Gia @ Anime Vice — GnoMiE, anyone?)
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if I win the lottery, Bradley Schenck will be getting a pile of cash to redesign this site from scratch.
In my head, I sound like Yahtzee (quite a feat, given my inherited U.S.-flat-midwestern-accent.)
where I start my browsing day...
...and one source I trust for reviews, reports, and opinion on manga specifically...
...and where my casual browsing usually ends, past the research for various articles that I have to do each day.
Note: NSFW. Icarus, best described as "the Thinking Man's Porn Manga." Simon does me the undeserved favor of dropping free review copies my way, which I have callously ignored to date. Simon's blog is also a must-read, for a look at the manga industry from a small indy publisher's perspective. Plus, porn.
Sounds good, but will the kids bite this obscure term?
Comment by Oliver — 6 May 2009, 11:49 #
Shonen, Shoujo, Seinen, Josei, Yaoi, Yuri, Chibi, Gekiga…
Yep, kids sure hate them foreign words. No way they’ll get around to using them.
the trick is fooling ‘em into thinking it’s a Japanese word, rather than French.
I might advocate the use of Japonisme Comics as an ‘official’ term for reviewers and those of a more academic bent, as opposed to one more way of marketing the stuff to kids. The kids will buy it (or they won’t) based more on the quality of the work or association with a brand name, not just because some guy with a head for trivia remembered a term from a college art course taken a decade ago.
Comment by Matt Blind — 6 May 2009, 12:37 #
If I win the lottery (and you know, after I open up my Dream Bookstore and buy a printing press & start my own publishing concern and all the rest of that) I think I’ll have to start a comic anthology mag called ‘Japonisme’
Comment by Matt Blind — 6 May 2009, 16:45 #
What, you don’t like “mangaïsme”? I mentioned it in the roundtable you link there — Paul Gravett coined it by analogy to “Japonisme”. I think it’s better, partly because it’s specifically manga that “global manga” artists are responding to, not Japanese visual culture as a whole.
On the other hand, it’s harder to spell, what with the umlaut and everything. Hey, we can just call it “mangaisme” unless there are French people reading…
Comment by Katherine Farmar — 7 May 2009, 12:44 #
@Katherine:
bump.
Comment by Matt Blind — 7 May 2009, 18:43 #