Event News

For folks in Florida looking for something to do *this* weekend,* YNN Correspondent Katherine H. is running a Yuri panel at Mizucon in Miami on Sunday, August 22 at 10AM. She’s pretty awesome, so please join her and show your support!

New York Anime Festival has not approved a Yuri panel (feel free to write them and ask for one to be included) but I will be part of a LGBT comics and manga panel at the event. That panel is being run by a librarian, and seems to be pretty librarian-filled (including myself) so I’m thrilled to be a part of it. Please take a look at the NYAF schedule and join us for a non-otaku approach to things like BL/Yaoi and GL/Yuri.

This is not Yuri-specific, but I have a friend who runs the comic book store everyone wishes existed somewhere: Comic Fusion in Flemington, NJ. The store itself is not huge, well-lit, with big pluffy chairs, but the people are friendly, welcoming, part of the community in a way that comic book stores never are. They look up and say “hello” when you walk in. :-) On October 24, 2010, Comic Fusion runs Superhero weekend, featuring Wonder Woman Day. If this isn’t of interest to Yuri fans, I don’t know what is! People come by in costume, they do a silent auction to raise money for a local battered women’s shelter…. It’s an awesome thing. I hope you’ll drop by.

Last, but my god, not least, is MangaNEXT.

Let me disclaimer about MangaNEXT. I was on the original organizing committee for this event. I have *very* strong feelings about where it should go and what it should do and have, for this reason, avoided being involved with it up until now. I volunteered this year to provide their social media.

I have of course applied to run a Yuri panel there, and also panels on how to read manga (you know my rant about how manga readers read badly…) and how to talk to publishers. Not sure yet whether any or all of them will be accepted.

But that’s not what I wanted to say. I wanted to tell you that comic LEGEND Lea Hernandez will be there. She will likely be running an intensive comics creation class, from blank paper to full story and if you every thought to yourself that you’d like to be a professional artist, you should really sign up for this.

MangaNEXT also has as guests illustrators Juri H. and Dirk I. Tiede and oh my fucking god, filmmaker Nina Paley. Sita Sings the Blues Nina Paley. I know that most of you do not know why this is an OMFG moment, so just go watch the movie. PLEASE. It’s free, online for FREE. It’s genius. Please, just go watch it. Then take a deep breath, blow your nose and think, “O.M.F.G!” and register for MangaNEXT. ‘Kay? Thanks.

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Yuri Manga

Once more on the topic of the Shoujo manga Magazine Yuri Watch, Katherine wants to be the first to let you know that the first volume of Blue Friends is up for pre-order on Amazon JP. Get it while it’s still vaguely Yuri! :-)

Much more Yuri and more satisfying is Mitsue Aoki’s first all-Yuri manga collection, Princess Princess. She was all excited by it, I’m happy for her and for us!

Tokimeki Mononoke Gakuen continues in the current issue of Comic Yuri Hime, and Volume 2 is on the shelves and waiting to be bought! YNN Correspondent Erin S tell us that this is the end of the series, so you don’t want to miss it!

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Other News

Because I can’t stop myself from talking about Twitter, here’s a new resource I’ve found for those of you who like to stare at manga artists’ Tweets – Tanbishugi has an enormous lists of Japanese manga artists who are on Twitter. Some might surprise you. If you do decide to follow any of them, try not to be weird, okay? And if any follow you back, remember to say thanks! ^_^

Have I mentioned my recent obsession with manga that passes the Bechdel test? If I haven’t, let me mention it right now, because I need your help. As you may know, I write a monthly column on The Comics Journal’s Hooded Utilitarian. I try to have topics lined up a few months in advance so we don’t get to the last week of the month and I start running around the house screaming OH MY GOD!!! I NEED A COLUMN!

Well, one of my future columns will be about manga that passes the Bechdel test. The rules are deceptively easy: Mo, from Dykes to Watch Out For would only see a movie in which the following three criteria were filled: (1) it has to have at least two women in it, who (2) who talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man. Movies notoriously fail to meet these minimal criteria. Manga, actually, meets and exceeds them. To limit the things I’m talking about, I want to talk about the spirit of the Test, not just the letter. In effect – not just manga that technically meets these criteria, but might be something Mo or I (i.e., an adult, out, lesbian) might be interested in watching/reading.

So, while Strike Witches, or Ooku *technically* fit the criteria…neither really suit the spirit of the Test. (There’s a back story here, which I’ll tell you in the HU article. Trust me for the moment.)

I’m not looking for Yuri specifically, (in fact, most Yuri fails as being girls obsessing about other girls endlessly) if you can think of a manga that features adult women who discuss more than just men (or women) then by all means suggest them in the comments. I have a list already, but your help is much appreciated!

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That’s a wrap for this week.

Become a Yuri Network Correspondent by sending me any Yuri-related news you find. Emails go to anilesbocon01 at hotmail dot com. Not to the comments here, please, or they might be forgotten or missed. There’s a reason for this madness. This way I know you are a real human, not Anonymous (which I do not encourage – stand by your words with your name!) and I can send you a YNN correspondent’s badge.

Thanks to all of you – you make this a great Yuri Network!

Garo was an experimental, independent manga magazine that ran from 1964-2002. The Center for Book Arts Exhibit covers the first decade of publication.

I attended the exhibit with manga artist Rica Takashima, who provided some interesting perspective on this influential magazine during it’s first decade of existence.

To understand where we are, it’s important to see where we’ve been. The Garo exhibit allows one to see and experience the turbulence of the 1960s and early 70s through the eyes of young Japanese artists. Intensely personally narratives, side-by-side with historical drama and tales of the eerie, provide a fascinating insight into a formative period of independent Japanese manga art.

Rica and I spoke about the magazine and about our lives as we walked around the space.

ELF: What are your impressions of Garo?

RT: I first encountered Garo when I was about 10 years old, in a book store. Manga artist Tsuge Yoshiharu was very popoular at the time, so I wanted to try it. It was very strange and weird – which was attractive to me. I tried to read it, but I couldn’t understand it. I decided to try again in a few years. When I was in middle school, I bought a few issues, but again, I really couldn’t understand it. I tried again in high school, but at that time June magazine was beginning to be published, and I ended up reading that instead. At that time, there was a New Wave in music and also in manga. Punk and New Wave music magazines were strongly linked with manga. Like Nagai Go’s work in Heavy Metal magazine, it shifted the focus of manga into new territory.”

Standing in front of a case that showed covers of the “Legend of Kamui,” we realized that, as groundbreaking as Garo was, we had no idea that it featured “Legend of Kamui” and some of Mizuki Shigeru’s “Kitaro” stories as well as the more well-known gekiga artists like Tatsumi Yoshihiro.

“Because I was so young when I tried to read Garo,” Rica said, as we observed many pages that showed violence against women, “I didn’t understand it, but it scared me.” Even though these manga stories were meant to be seen as non-pori – non-political – as adults we couldn’t fail to see the gender politics built into them.

We looked at stories that chronicled the Vietnam War protests in universities across Japan. “Something always blew the protests up into riots. At the time, I wondered why people couldn’t just calm down a little, but there were riots all the time in the news,” Rica said, pointing out an image that an American might think showed riot police, but in Japan represented the student forces, armed with a sword and wearing a helmet with a face shield. “To me the protests seemed so weird, since the college students were angry about different things, like Vietnam and the American presence in Okinanwa, but they would become the same thing.” We agreed that it’s human nature to conflate issues and anger at change becomes anger at many other things.

There were few women who contributed to Garo and only one regular contributor who was a woman. Both Rica and I noted that sex was a prominent theme – not surprising for a magazine created by young men. But the boy’s club atmosphere began to wear on us, as we realized that stories of female experience were mostly absent. Even in scenes where pro- and anti-Vietnam arguments were presented, the absence of women in the conversation was pretty noticeable. Curator Ryan Holmgren mentions “how, despite its commitment to political activism between 1964 and 1966, its continuing sympathies with the left until about 1970, and its experimentation with form and theme, Garo was highly regressive when it came to gender and sexuality issues, more and more so in the early 70s. “

As Rica and I walked the room for the second time, we talked about how Garo was chronicling what I think of as my “shadow childhood.” These events were all happening, I said as I pointed to a copy of Abandon the Old in Tokyo, while you and I were alive. Watergate, Vietnam….but we were very young, and so while it was always there, we weren’t old enough to understand. These are the stories of the shadows behind our youth. She agreed.

Surrounded by the past, we both are of a mind that that this is the best of all possible times to live – we still have access to the roots of manga, we can enjoy the present and we can look forward to a future of new stories that have yet to be told.

The Garo exhibit was small – but the conversation we had there was huge. If you are at all interested in manga, in independent art, in the way that past and present connect through books, printing and/or art, this exhibit comes highly recommended.