MANGA MONDAYS: CBLDF PRESENTS MANGA
One of the ways Dark Horse is observing our 25th anniversary of publishing manga is with a book that’s out in stores this week: CBLDF Presents Manga: Introduction, Challenges, and Best Practices.
Some of you may already know CBLDF Presents Manga from our convention appearances this year. Last week we mentioned that we’d have more to say about Anime Expo, and one of our events there was the sales debut of the book. We were honored to be joined at our AX Dark Horse panel by the executive director of the CBLDF (Comic Book Legal Defense Fund), Charles Brownstein, as well as one of CBLDF Presents Manga’s contributing writers, Ed Chavez, marketing director at Vertical. For those of you who keep up with manga, I shouldn’t need much more than Ed’s name to get you interested in this book. And yet, that’s only the beginning!
Let’s talk about CBLDF Presents Manga itself. If you want the big picture of what manga is, there are several encyclopedic treatments on the market. The idea behind CBLDF Presents Manga was something different—to produce a concise, informed handbook on the subject—a short reference useful to librarians, booksellers, and educators, as well as the general public. In 144 pages, it explains the history of manga, its major categories (shonen, seinen, josei, yuri, BL, doujinshi), and the legal issues it sometimes faces. CBLDF Presents Manga, by the way, was a book produced with a grant from The Gaiman Foundation—Mr. Gaiman being proud to have worked in association with some of Japan’s great creative artists, including Yoshitaka Amano and Hayao Miyazaki.
But is it possible to cover manga well in 144 pages? As you might have guessed, it comes down to selecting the right group of writers to contribute. CBLDF Presents Manga is edited by Melinda Beasi of Manga Bookshelf, who assembled the book’s contributors. We’ve mentioned Ed Chavez, but the authors also include Manga Bookshelf columnist Sean Gaffney, Erica Friedman of Yuricon and ALC Publishing, Shaenon Garrity of Viz Media and Otaku USA, and Robin Brenner and Katherine Dacey of School Library Journal. What makes this group of contributors so interesting isn’t just their abstract knowledge of manga. These are people who also have “real world” knowledge of manga, as publishers, marketers, editors, librarians, and convention organizers. They know not only manga, but how fans in North America have interacted with manga over the last decade and more. The goal of CBLDF Presents Manga is to educate and be useful, and it earns that status through the experience of its contributors.
Until this week, CBLDF Presents Manga has been available only on a limited basis at Dark Horse and CBLDF events. Now everyone can get a copy and support the important work of the CBLDF in protecting the freedom to read manga!
—Carl Horn, Manga Editor