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SF Manga 101: An Introduction
Glenn Hough (gallyangel) is a nonpracticing futurist, an anime and manga otaku, and is almost obsessive about finishing several of the lists tracked on WWEnd. This is the first of Glenn’s new series on SF Manga where he’ll provide an overview of the medium and the place of science fiction in it.
Hi. How are you? Welcome. Glad to see you. Welcome. Please, sit anywhere. Splendid. Splendid.
A bit ago one of our fearless leaders at WWEnd asked me if I’d like to do a blog concerning SF Manga. I guess he rather liked the short summaries I’d been doing over in the forum section, so why not expand things a bit for a blog? Sure, why not.
My hope is that as we all get more familiar with SF Manga that some of you will will soon have a copy of Nausicaa next to your copy of Dune. Or on your shelf will be The Demolished Man, next to Dying Inside, next to Akira. Or even, on the shelf next to that 1st Pantasia Press hardcover of Neuromancer (you lucky sod) will be a first run flipped and censored edition of Ghost in the Shell, followed by a second run unfliped uncensored edition of Ghost in the Shell. And hopefully each and every title I’ll be blogging about will gain a few more fans from my humble efforts.
But first I think we need an intro to help lay out the landscape we’re going to be traversing together. This is the common starting point, just in case someone is coming to all of this totally cold as I’m sure some of you are.
Manga is the Japanese word for comic book or comic strip. It’s used in America to denote comics specifically from Japan. It also denotes an artistic style. There is a very different visual style between Japanese and American comics.
