At Comic World News, David Welsh talks with Jason Thompson, author of Manga: The Complete Guide, which provides hundreds of reviews of Japanese comics available in English:
When I get the “what manga do you recommend?” question, there’s always the urge to straighten my tie and talk about some “respectable” manga like Osamu Tezuka, or Vagabond, or something. But I don’t want to do disservice to the good manga which are created under formulaic conditions. Roger Ebert talked about the importance of judging things compared to other things in their genre and target audience — I think his quote on Wikipedia goes “When people ask whether the Hellboy movie is good, they’re not asking whether it’s good compared to Lawrence Of Arabia, they’re asking whether it’s good compared to Batman.” So to use a manga example, I think Video Girl Ai has to be judged in comparison with Love Hina and Ai Yori Aoshi. Actually, originally the book had ratings up to five stars, but then I looked at the five-star reviews and I realized that I was mostly giving five-star reviews to “serious” manga like Barefoot Gen and so on. Too predictable. I felt that I was engaging in a sort of internalized prejudice, so I dropped all the five-star reviews down to four stars and lowered and rearranged a lot of the other ratings.
Manga: The Complete Guide (Del Rey) is scheduled for release on Oct. 9.
