Shojo Manga! Girl Power!
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Unlike in the ice-cube-tray images of American comics, the panels in “Shojo Manga!” merge the elegant, startling shapes and juxtapositions of Russian constructivism with the flat Eurotrash fashion illustrations of Patrick Nagel, the enormous sparkling eyes of soulful orphans in thrift-store paintings, and the occasional unexplained floral blizzard. The same giddy sense of boundlessness also informs the storytelling. Distinctions blur between inner and outer states, waking and dreaming, past and future, male and female, gay and straight. Characters and situations swim in a candy-coated vision of romantic glory that should not be stigmatized as disposable or superficial, especially given how long the American art scene has been cluttered with vapid, macho skater and graffiti art.
Writers in the “Shojo Manga!” catalog and in a 2005 edition of the Comics Journal devoted to the form obsessively reiterate its immense popularity in east Asia and growing popularity here. In Japan, shojo conventions can pack in more than 500,000 people–most of them women and girls. Thousands of fans create their own comics, doujinshi, based on their favorite titles and characters. In the USA and Canada the sales figures for manga, most of it shojo manga, recently reached between $110 and $140 million yearly, roughly half of all comic-book sales in the two countries. Part of the appeal could be the controversial subjects: the artists deal with abuse, suicide, and sex in a combined operatic and soap-operatic style.
When: Through 4/26: Mon-Thu 9-7, Fri 9-5
