Forum - View topicJames Patterson and manga
|
Goto page 1, 2 Next |
| Author | Message | ||
|---|---|---|---|
The Xenos
 Posts: 1519 Location: Boston |
|
||
|
So I hear James Patterson has a 'manga' / 'Amerimanga' coming out soon based on his Maximum Ride series. I wanted to check it out from Free Comic Day, but I missed it.
A roommate is reading Patterson's new book "7th heaven". In it, the protagonist is looking at a book that might have inspired a murderer. "The drawings were stark black and white. The figures had huge eyes and called to mind the manga style of violent borderline pornography imported from Japan." Gee. As someone coming out with a 'manga' soon, that's a very odd thing to say in his book. |
|||
|
|||
HitokiriShadow
 Posts: 6251 |
|
||
It's going to be serialized in Yen Press's upcoming magazine, so I don't think there would be any comic book for you to get yet. |
|||
|
|||
|
The Xenos
Posts: 1519 Location: Boston |
|
||
|
It was a freebie sample out for Free Comic Book Day. I saw it at one store. I thought my hometown store was holding it, but he didn't get too many overall. (There's a main set of free comics and a secondary one. It costs more to get all of them. Even if the comics are free to us, there's not free to retailers.)
|
|||
|
|||
abynormal
 Posts: 427 Location: Louisiana |
|
||
Generalization ftw. At least it's a change of pace from the usual conception of Manga being little more than Dragonball and Naruto. |
|||
|
|||
einhorn303
 Posts: 1180 |
|
||
|
They're generalizations, yes, but they're all generalizations that are pretty much true when you compare the average American comic to the average Japanese comic.
The great majority of manga is printed in black and white (except for Robot), while the great majority of American comics are printed in color. Japanese attitudes towards sex in comics allow for much more sexual material, even in children's comics...just look at Naisho no Tsubomi, all those fan-service heavy shounen titles (He is My Master, anyone?) Oh, and: Kodomo no Jikan. And ero manga is FAR more popular in Japan than America. And if you compare the two most mainstream style of both cultures (Shounen/Shoujo vs Superheroes), you will find the eye thing is most definately true. Do an academic study on it, I dare you. |
|||
|
|||
|
The Xenos
Posts: 1519 Location: Boston |
|
||
|
Um.. how are you missing the comment saying that manga is violent pornography?
Maybe you're too young to remember it, but there was a time when anime and manga were written off as either porn or Pokemon. I was very sad to hear this negative stereotype of manga as porn pop up in a popular author's book. I think it's even worse as this same author seems to be trying to get into the 'manga' market in America. Hell, even the big eyes comment, while much more benign, is still a stereotype I am offended by. I don't like it when Japanese comics are stereotyped as one single type. Funny, it's rather ironic. We used to wrongly stereotype the Japanese as being 'slant eyed'. Now we're stereotyping their cartoons as being large eyed. Though really, the author calling manga pornographic disturbs me the most. Maybe he was writing in character, as the character was ignorant to the manga scene, but such words still don't help manga publishers and fans in the slightest. |
|||
|
|||
BellosTheMighty
 Posts: 767 |
|
||
|
SPOILER: You're a bunch of idiots.
I don't read Patterson, but I've heard the name. I believe he writes mystery novels? And the first person narrator too? Well, in that case, it's a good bet that the narrator is a flawed character to begin with. But more importantly, I'm assuming said roommate just started reading the book? If so, then the manga doesn't mean what it seems to. And while I'm on the subject, dollars to donuts says the manga's owner isn't significant either. Really, now. Take a single line from a story in a genre built almost entirely around misdirection and hidden significances, without having READ THE BOOK IN THE FIRST PLACE, and extrapolate wild speculations about the authors state of mind and/or prejudices? You get an F in English. All of you. Grounded until the make-up exam. |
|||
|
|||
|
The Xenos
Posts: 1519 Location: Boston |
|
||
|
Actually this was at the end of the book and spoiler[it turns out that the author and artist of this web comic / 'oel manga' thing were the arsonist murderers after all. One of them even murdered their parents and stashed their bodies away. ] My roommate told the ending to me. I'm glad I didn't read it. I would have been so pissed off.
It came across as an older author taking something topical that kids are into and applying it to his teenage characters in an ignorant way. It reminds me of some bad law show I caught when they did a GTA knock off and was totally biased and inaccurate of how things actually work. And yes, I know that it was the narrator and not the author himself saying that line, but it does propagate the stereotype. There's no counter point, it just propagates the Japanese comics / manga = porn stereotype that I think most fans are sick of. It's like having a narrator complaining that black people steal or that Asians.. I dunno.. are good at math. Sure it might be the character talking, but is it responsible for the author to propagate such stereotypes? |
|||
|
|||
|
BellosTheMighty
Posts: 767 |
|
||
You've got it wrong. Ever seen Twelve Angry Men? The best scene in that movie, in my estimation, is this point near the end where the loudmouthed juror ten goes into a bitter, racist rant against some unnamed minority. As he goes on, one by one each of the other jurors turns away from him. Some leave the table to look out the windows, some focus on newspapers, some just stare off into space. Everyone can hear him, and you can see the utter disgust in their faces. Finally he realizes he's yelling at a bunch of people who are bound and determined to show contempt by pretending that he's not even there. Pleadingly, he looks over to number 4, the reasonable one, and asks "You hear what I' saying, don't you?" 4 says calmly, "We all heard you. Now sit down and shut up." See, just because a character holds disreputable opinions doesn't mean the author is advocating them. In fact a lot of literature (most of it fairly intolerable, but the point remains) try and argue against some idea by putting it in the mouth of a character who is either comically inept, villainous, or just destined to fail spectacularly. A good example is Death of a Salesman- Willy spends the entire play wallowing in his own delusions. And if you listen to just him talk, you might be swayed into falling for it (well, except for the points when he makes two directly contradictory statements half a page apart)- but if you look at the things going on around him, read between the lines, you see he's full of it. It's not wise to take the opinions of a character at face value, because with few exceptions all characters in literature have flaws of some kind. If you're fooled into accepting what they say wholesale, you run the risk of missing the author's point. And that's exactly how to handle the situation you're afraid of if it comes to pass. If someone takes the lines out of context to bash anime, then it's their fault for not seeing what the author was really saying. Or perhaps they knew what they wanted it to say before they started reading, and wound up seeing exactly what they wanted. In which case, it's their fault again for not having an open mind. You can't fault an author for the meanings attached to his work by idiots who missed the point. And that's as far as I can go on the subject, because the most fundamental rule of discussing a text is that you must read the book first. I haven't, nor have you. So there we are. |
|||
|
|||
|
The Xenos
Posts: 1519 Location: Boston |
|
||
|
Well, imagine that scene and the bitter racist guy is the only one narrating the story and it turns out that the black guy he's talking about was the murderer after all. That's more like what happened here. There is no one arguing a different point. The book flatly states, with no opposing view, that the kids are into"the manga style of violent borderline pornography imported from Japan".
Sure, it's not as bad as a race issue, but it is the stereotyping of manga as being pornographic and violent. It's a bad and cliched and prejudiced as a murderer who was going to shoot his school turned out to be an aficionados of first person shooters. Of course maybe there is a racial issue here because it's saying that manga imported from Japan is "violent borderline pornography". A stigma fans have been trying for years to shed. I think that's some pretty damn harsh and loaded language to refer to manga as. It's a very bad stereotype and there is no opposing view pointing out that not all manga is like that. And all this is coming form an author whose book is being adapting into an 'American manga'? What's up with that? |
|||
|
|||
|
BellosTheMighty
Posts: 767 |
|
||
|
Again, Xenos: have you read the book?
|
|||
|
|||
|
The Xenos
Posts: 1519 Location: Boston |
|
||
|
Again, my roommate did and explained the context pretty damn well. He read out loud the one and only comment about manga. It was derogatory. He finished that last chapter and told me how things turned out. What more is there to understand? The statement was propagating a negative stereotype about manga and totally unneeded to tell the story.
|
|||
|
|||
|
BellosTheMighty
Posts: 767 |
|
||
Okay, I started off pretty mean in this thread, then tried to calm down and be more reasonable. But at this point I see that being reasonable was unnecessary. You really ARE an idiot. If you honestly believe you can evaluate a full novel based on something it took your roommate a few minutes to relate to you, and, from what I'm hearing, you never even bothered to confirm with the actual text DESPITE the fact that doing so would be as simple as borrowing the book from your roomie and spending a few hours reading it, then you are so unbelievably ignorant that we can't trust anything you have to say. Hell, for all we know your roommate was lying through his teeth so that he could have a big laugh at the way you made an ass of yourself ranting on internet message boards that an author who's work you've never even read is obviously an incorrigible racist. Christ... Let me present some similar examples to demonstrate just how stupid it is of you to jump to conclusions like this. Hopefully, as a bonus, I will be able to entertain others reading this thread as well: "Godannar is about a young woman who marries a rather older man who is in the military, then moves to live with him on the base where both her mother and her new husband works." -Therefore, Godannar is a serious, if just slightly contrived drama about family and civilian life on a military base. "Josh Whedon's Firefly is a "Space Western" about a diverse crew of individuals traveling around in a spaceship doing jobs that lead them on a variety of adventures. The first episode sets the stage for much of what is to follow when the crew discovers that a container they're transporting actual contains the body of a naked girl, curled up into a fetal position and acting quite strange once awoken." -Therefore, Firefly is blatant and utterly uncreative attempt to steal the thunder of the popular anime Outlaw Star. "Card Captor Sakura is about a young girl who uses the aid of a mischievous imp to hunt down and recapture the spirits of a magical deck of cards, while competing with several other individuals attempting to do the same." -Therefore, Card Captor Sakura is yet another Yu-Gi-Oh! ripoff. "Son Goku, the hero of Dragonball Z, is the last member of a vicious race of alien warriors who have been known to destroy whole planets. He killed his adopted grandfather as a child, and at the end of the first storyline nearly kills the last other survivor of his own race." -Therefore, Son Goku is a brutal, coldhearted antihero and the narrative cannot possibly be appealing with him as the main character. Notice a number of things about these quotes- they all describe aspects of the respective series' accurately- there is not a single false statement within the quotation marks. The conclusions drawn from them are quite reasonable given the knowledge the quotes present, and are expressed in a fashion that would not be unusual for someone to speak of them. And, if you checked the source, you would immediately realize that they are all completely, totally, and fundamentally: 
You get me? Read the book, or your suppositions are worthless. |
|||
|
|||
|
The Xenos
Posts: 1519 Location: Boston |
|
||
|
Those are poor examples. I was read an excerpt from a book and I am judging that excerpt. Then I received a summary of what happened to those characters in later chapters.
Meanwhile, you straw man it up by loosely summarizing an entire TV series by a paragraph. That's very different. I did read, or at least was read, a relevant section of the book word for word. I am talking about a specific reference in this book. That's completely different than the examples to give to prove me, as you say, WRONG. I'm telling you, everyone, a reference to manga in a best selling book. I even quoted part of the book. Not quite all of what my roommate read, but that was the main reference. |
|||
|
|||
Keonyn
 Subscriber Posts: 5567 Location: Coon Rapids, MN |
|
||
|
Alright, the temp seems to be going up here so let me just remind people to keep it civil before the flames start shooting out.
|
|||
|
|||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group