Manga Shakespeare

This caught my attention in a Wired Magazine report. British publisher, Self Made Hero, is bringing out manga editions of several Shakespeare works, including Hamlet. And Danish prince lives in the year 2107 on an
Earth ravaged by global warming.

And in the article How Manga Conquered the U.S: a Graphic Guide to Japan's Coolest Export, Jason Thompson takes a five page look inside the 'manga industrial complex' in Japan. You want more? Wired's visual history of manga in America is a 1.9meg pdf download with the whole story told in the form of a manga, complete with right to left Japanese panel layout.

In short expect manga to be sweeping the world sooner rather than later. The report says 'manga sales in the US have tripled in the past four years ... with titles like Fruits Basket, Naruto, and Death Note, and in some bookstores 'the manga section is bigger than the science fiction collection.' Europe has, apparently, caught the bug, too. 'In the United Kingdom, the Catholic Church is using manga to recruit new priests’ and one British publisher 'has begun issuing manga versions of Shakespeare's plays, including a Romeo and Juliet that
re-imagines the Montagues and Capulets as rival yakuza families in Tokyo.' Wow! We must try and get hold of those.

But in Japan there is a feeling that the best days of the US$4.2 billion-a-year industry, which started in the shadow of its defeat in the second world war, have passed. Still, it is reported that the paperback editions of Bleach, from a series about a ghost-spotting teenager that ran in the Weekly Shonen Jump for six years, have sold some 46 million copies (in a country of 127 million people). And 'manga isn't just for freaks and geeks' the report says. 'Ride the Tokyo subway and you'll see greying salarymen, twenty-something hipsters, and schoolgirls all paging through a manga weekly or a graphic novel.'

We have seen some graphics novels, mostly from America, creeping into our bookstores in Kuala Lumpur. But these are still novelties and can be expensive. In Japan, manga ranges from those that come in the size of big-city phone-books printed on cheap newsprint to those on glossy art paper. 'They're teetering in messy piles at convenience stores, stacked in neat slabs at every subway station, and for sale just about anywhere someone might be inclined to pull a couple of hundred yen (US$2 to US$4) from their pocket ... The most popular series then get repackaged as paperback graphic novels.'

Full story: http://www.wired.com/special_multimedia/2007/1511_ff_manga