Our post this week is produced by Wendy R. Williams and Fio Moulton. 

​Manga are Japanese comics. These works are similar to graphic novels and are often printed in black and white. They are read from right to left, starting at the top right section of the page. Manga tends to be published as volumes in a series, and many serve as the source material for anime (animated TV shows and movies). Part of what makes manga so appealing is there are many different kinds to choose from. There really is something for everyone! 

Three traditional manga categories include the following:

• Shojo: These stories are geared toward a young female audience. They usually focus on romance and friendship. Some examples are Sailor Moon, Nana, and Cardcaptor Sakura.
• Shonen: These stories are geared toward a young male audience. They tend to include action, fighting, and friendship. One Piece, Naruto, and Dragon Ball Z are some examples.
• Seinen: This category of manga is aimed at adult readers. These stories may contain violence, psychological elements, and more mature themes. Sample titles include Attack on Titan, Death Note, and Berserk.

 However, manga has evolved over the years, and these labels don’t necessarily reflect the current state of manga today. Often category clichés have been used to subvert audience expectations and play with the reader. For example, a series might begin in a typical shojo style and suddenly switch to a much more serious and violent one (e.g., Puella Magi Madoka Magica). Some series don’t even fit neatly into any of these categories at all.
 
We are a mom and son team who both really enjoy reading manga, but our tastes are very different. Below, we each provide our perspective on this form of visual storytelling.

​Reading manga is a wonderful break from the other reading I do for my job as an Associate Professor. These books transport me to other worlds, expose me to new perspectives, and sometimes make me laugh out loud. I am intrigued by the characters, themes, settings, and art.
 
My favorite manga series is The Way of the Househusband, which is about a former yakuza gangster who is now a stay-at-home husband. He approaches domestic activities with great zeal and intensity, whether it is preparing a meal, cleaning, or shopping for groceries. The over-the-top exaggeration of the importance of simple everyday tasks is hilarious. Another series that drew me in right away is Parasyte. In this eight-book science-fiction series, the protagonist is infected with an alien parasite, who gives him superpowers. Ultimately, he and the parasite have to work together to overcome evil forces. These books are unlike anything I have read before. The art style is beautiful, the story is packed full of action, and even the parasite becomes an endearing character as the series unfolds.
 
I have also enjoyed reading Baron: The Cat Returns, which is about a young girl who is carried off to a cat kingdom, where she is to be married to a cat prince. This book is fast-paced and full of action and humor. Not all manga is a good fit for the secondary classroom, but Baron: The Cat Returns is a book that would work. It could also be paired with the Studio Ghibli film, The Cat Returns (Morita, 2005), which follows the manga closely. 

I began reading manga around age eight. The art styles appealed to me due to the unique character designs and attention paid to the eyes and hair. Some of my first series were Sailor Moon, Fairytale, and My Hero Academia. I enjoyed both typical shonen and shojo works. Shonen, I could appreciate for its intense fight scenes, and shojo, for its drama and emotional impact.
 
As I got older, I noticed manga as a medium began to change as well. Stories were beginning to break the mold and challenge readers’ expectations. It didn’t matter whether a series was aimed at female or male readers, and people of all audiences enjoyed all kinds of stories. As I’ve matured, my taste in manga has as well, and I’ve expanded my library. Junji Ito, especially, has been one of my favorite authors and artists because of his detailed style and effective use of horror. He uses Lovecraftian Horror and the idea of a mysterious entity taking over the world (or a city). One of his most famous works, Uzumaki, depicts a town becoming overrun with spirals until the pattern becomes all-consuming.
 
One of my favorite series is Bungo Stray Dogs. The story features characters based on canonical authors as they commit crimes and/or solve them. Something I love about this series is its unpredictable and chaotic nature. Each character is captivating in some way, and even some of the most evil villains end up being likable. Almost no one is “good” or “bad”; rather, they sometimes end up doing “good” or “bad” things, depending on the circumstance. Some authors featured are Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bram Stoker. 

Whether you are new to manga or an experienced reader of this form, we believe there is much to enjoy in the artwork and narrative features of these texts. In his book, Making Comics, Scott McCloud (2006) lists eight storytelling techniques commonly used in manga:

1. “Iconic characters”
2. “Genre maturity”
3. “A strong sense of place”
4. “A broad variety of character designs”
5. “Frequent uses of wordless panels, combined with aspect to aspect transitions between panels”
6. “Small real world details”
7. “Subjective motion using streaked backgrounds”
8. “Various emotionally expressive effects such as expressionistic backgrounds, montages, and subjective caricatures” (p. 216).

McCloud’s list helps to explain what makes this Japanese form of storytelling so unique.
Regardless of your age or interests, there is probably a manga series out there that you would enjoy reading. We hope you enjoy exploring the world of manga! 

​McCloud, S. (2006). Making comics: Storytelling secrets of comics, manga and graphic novels.
William Morrow.
Morita, H., dir. (2005). The cat returns. Studio Ghibli.

Until next time.

Roots and Leaves by Dr. Chris Crowe

I’m old (next month I’ll begin my 48th year of teaching), and I like YA books, and I like history, and I like finding ways to bring all that stuff together. 

Don’t worry, I’m not going to wax nostalgic about the good old days of YA literature, but because I’ve been teaching—and reading and writing–for so very long, I’m going to share some important stuff about the past, stuff that I believe every scholar or teacher of YA literature should know. In the 4th edition of their YA literature textbook, my old friends Ken Donelson and Alleen Nilsen wrote, “professionals ought to know the history of their own fields” (545), and maybe because I am a Boomer with one foot planted smack in the middle of the 20th Century, I agree. In a field that tends to focus much, if not all, of its attention on what’s new and current, we shouldn’t forget the roots of all these new and current books.

About 23 years ago, I wrote an article for English Journal that traced the family tree of the people who had shaped the teaching of YA literature. In a chapter I have in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook to Young Adult Literature, I took a different angle and wrote about the origin and evolution of our field. In this blog post, I’m going to discuss significant books in YA history that are, whether we recognize it or not (and, of course, I think it’s essential that we recognize it) are foundational precursors to some of the best of today’s YA books.

My YA literature course this fall is entirely based on this premise because I don’t want my students to be like the urban children we sometimes hear about, and laugh at, who don’t know that eggs come from chickens or that milk comes from cows. The first item on my course syllabus is a quotation from Michael Crichton’s novel Timeline (1999): “If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.” I won’t have time in a single semester with a bunch of undergraduate English majors to cover all of the history of YA literature, but I can make sure that my students know where this semester’s books come from (and, no, it’s not Amazon). By the end of this course, I hope my students know that the contemporary books they read in my class are leaves from a robust noble, old tree.
The tree of literature has very long and deep roots, and it would be impossible and foolhardy to start a YA literature course with Beowulf or Pamela or even Oliver Twist, Little Women, or Seventeenth Summer. My not-so arbitrary starting point for my YA literature course is The Outsiders, a novel I consider to be the main branch of contemporary YA literature. I’ll have my students read that novel as a genre-defining text whose influences can still be found in nearly all YA novels published today. With each book we read after that, students will look for The Outsiders’ fingerprints in the book they’re currently reading.
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I started thinking about using this approach in my YA literature class some years ago when dystopian YA stories dominated bookstores and movie theatres. It seemed that many people believed that the dystopian trend started out of nowhere or out of the creative genius of its authors, and I was surprised that anyone rarely suggested that The Giver (1993) might be a precursor to that current YA dystopian literature trend. ​

My approach this semester is kind of an adaptation of a traditional assignment called the classic bridge where students had to match a YA novel with a canonical one and then explain the connections (plot, setting, theme, whatever). Rather than matching a single YA novel with a classical work, my students will read pairs of YA: the antecedent matched with one of its prominent descendants. Nearly the entirety of our semester’s required reading will be paired books that I selected. 

So after setting the stage with The Outsiders and a lecture on the history of YAL, students will read A Wizard of Earthsea as the precursor to YA fantasy, and they’ll watch a brief PBS interview with Neil Gaiman where he claims, “I don’t think Harry Potter could have existed without Earthsea having existed. That was the original, the finest, and the best.”

This proclamation will surely rile my students, most of whom are ardent fantasy readers, and I hope that will set them thinking about elements from Earthsea that appear in their favorite fantasy novels. They’ll then get to choose their own YA fantasy novel that is a leaf from the Earthsea tree.
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After this opening pairing, we’ll continue our reading with Lisa, Bright and Dark (1969), one of the first YA novels to directly address mental illness/neurodivergence, with Francisco Stork’s Marcelo in the Real World (2009), a novel that broadens the issue of neurodivergence while at the same time addressing other contemporary issues.

The next pair matches A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich (1973) with Jason Reynold’s Long Way Down (2017). Both novels examine the plight young Black men face in the inner city and the importance of loyalty and family. Reynold’s novel’s ambiguous, provocative conclusion mirrors the conclusion of Hero in remarkable ways.
Long a mainstay of my YA literature course, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1977), is the first book in the next pairing, and it sets the stage for The Hate You Give (2017). Both books feature strong families with fathers and uncles who complement each other with plots thickened by the unrighteous challenges fomented by racism and racists.

We then take a break from reading pairs to read a handful of Robert Cormier novels in literature circles. Cormier’s unforgiving, unflinching realism pushed back boundaries that made space for scores of realistic, even bleak, YA novels that would appear in later decades.
Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes (1983) and The Serpent King (2016) are the next pair, both books benefiting from the space created by Cormier’s bleak books. Central to these two novels are close friends relying on their friendship and their own courage to face the conflicts imposed upon them, with Crutcher’s creating a model that’s magnified by Zentner’s book.
YA books in verse have a fairly long history, with Mel Glenn’s books setting the stage for full, unified narratives in free verse, and my students will read Make Lemonade (1993), a novel that raised the stakes and the complexity of verse novels; alongside it they’ll read what may be the pinnacle of YA verse novels, The Poet X (2018) to see how wonderfully the field has evolved in 25 years.

English majors tend to be ignorant of narrative nonfiction, so our next reading combo will be Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World (1998) with Steve Sheinkin’s Bomb (2012). Nearly any one of Sheinkin’s books would serve well in this pairing, but the current blockbuster movie Oppenheimer makes Bomb especially relevant this semester. Both books rely on narrative technique to tell amazing stories, but Sheinkin’s book shows how the expectations for research and the inclusion of extra-textual features have changed.

Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (1999), is such an important, foundational work that students won’t have to read a matched novel. Instead, we’ll discuss all of our reading to date with an eye for Speak’s influence throughout the field.
Graphic novels are another genre that’s unfamiliar to most English majors, and while it might make sense to point to Maus as the root of all YA graphic novels, I choose to have my students read American Born Chinese (2006), a book that’s more explicitly YA, as their intro to the genre, and then students are allowed to select a more contemporary YA graphic novel to pair with American Born.
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The final required reading is what might be the pinnacle of recent YA fiction, All My Rage (2022). Students will consider that novel with the perspective of all the YA books sthat have come before it—at least all the YA books we’ve read in the semester.  After discussing the merits of Tahir’s award-winning novel, we’ll look for traces from the past, for evidence that shows how this fine novel is a leaf from the grand old YAL tree. 

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Of course, students will read more than just these pairings. Next semester they’ll end up reading at least 32 YA books, but the takeaway, I hope, will be an awareness of the long and excellent history of YA books that have been published since 1967. With each YA book they read after my class is done, I want them to remember that new books have antecedents, books that opened doors, paved paths, and made possible the new, exciting books we’re reading and celebrating today.

Check it out! You won't be disappointed.  Gia and I had a great time, we hope you do as well.