It’s not surprising, though, that manga is overlooked by adults the medium’s rows and rows of identically shaped books with confusing titles ( Naruto? Hot Gimmick? Fruits Basket?!) are too alien for most adults to treat with anything other than a shrug and an “At least they’re reading, right?” But for typical young-teen readers, graphic storytelling is now as familiar a language as traditional chapter books-and one they expect to find in bookstores, not on spinner racks.Īs barriers to the acceptance of mainstream graphic storytelling are falling, two writers-Brian Selznick, author of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and Jeff Kinney, creator of the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series-have seized on the shift in young people’s reading expectations to make enormous hits out of books that mix comics and literature in clever ways. Manga-pocket-size comics usually translated from the Japanese-are now a driving force in the young-adult market, with sales of over $220 million in the U.S. Unless, that is, you’re 13 years old, in which case it might be the only section you patronize: the manga section. The real sea change in young people’s reading habits over the past ten years has come not from the boy wizard-whose unreplicable success was a lightning strike of fantastic storytelling, canny marketing, and dumb luck-but from a section of the bookstore that you likely ignore. A spread from The Invention of Hugo Cabret.įorget Harry Potter.
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