Japan Launches Global Manga Award

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Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 5/30/2007

Manga, the Japanese word for comics—and a multibillion dollar market—recently took a giant step onto the global stage with the announcement of an "International Manga Award" to go to—surprise!—an artist or artists outside of Japan.

Foreign Minister Taro Aso even compared this new award, which has no monetary component, to the "Nobel Prize of manga." And that comparison sat very well with the largest English-language publisher of manga, Los Angeles-based Tokyopop.

"It really signals acceptance," Editor Lillian Diaz-Przybyl says of the new award. "We've been creating original manga in the United States for the past three years or so, actually more than that; and it's been a fight all that time, with purist fans saying, 'If it's not from Japan, then it's not really manga; it's imitation, it's fake, it's phony.'

"So hearing from someone in the Japanese government, having this official [acknowledgement that] there is manga outside of Japan and [hearing him say] 'it's so good we're going to give it this massive award'—that's tremendously exciting."

Tokyopop releases about 500 titles a year, including licensed material and series from Japan, Korea, and other countries, Przybyl says. But more and more original titles in English—5 to 10 each month—are also now being developed, she says.

Manga, which publishers like Tokyopop consider more a format than a genre, dates back to the 1950s and has also generated the increasingly popular anime form of animation. Przybyl says that readers can range from ages 3 to 80, and plots may focus on something as realistic as the story of a working woman to something as fantastical as robots and outer space.

When it comes to the K–12 audience, the editor says, licensing Japanese works for an American audience can be thorny because of the differing community standards. "What's appropriate for a middle school audience in Japan is something that would possibly disturb many librarians and schoolteachers here," she says. So developing original content from the U.S. and other non-Japanese manga storytellers is key, Przybyl emphasizes.

"There are extremely talented artists and storytellers out there who have internalized the way the Japanese style works and are telling stories of their own that are unique," Przybyl says, "not just copying what people have seen before."

The award will go to one foreign artist and three runners-up to be conferred in July.

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