…in a piece on foreign graphic novels:
Americans don’t buy a lot of foreign novels, but go to any neighborhood bookstore and you’ll find whole shelves devoted to international comics.
The trend began with Manga, illustrated comic serials from Japan, which feature big-eyed, heavily stylized characters. Milton Griepp, who publishes the online comics trade journal ICv2, says that more than 1,500 different Manga titles were published in the U.S. last year. That’s a 25-percent rise over the year before.
They don’t buy a lot of foreign novels?
Sacre bleu!
Exhibit A: Oprah’s “classics” book club:
Love in the Time of Cholera
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Anna Karenina
Daughter of Fortune
(All of which, because of the Big O, were instant bestsellers.)
Then there are the classics, like Thomas Mann and Pablo Neruda. Newer authors like Paolo Coelho(!), Haruki Murakami, Mikhail Bulgakov, Orhan Pamuk, and (ahem) Marjane Satrapi.
Congrats on being on NPR! Hopefully this will be the first of many times.
As for foreign novels, doesn’t the Harry Potter series count? After all, Mrs. Rowling’s from Scotland! ;) And Tolkien and C.S. Lewis certainly weren’t American. Maybe Brits and Scots aren’t considered foreign… ;)
The numbers from the NPR piece also caught my eye, and made me fill in the blanks as to why domestic graphic novels aren’t moving.
As much as I love manga, I am disturbed at how a foreign import is outselling the domestic. While foreign novels or even films are read and viewed, they simply don’t dominate the market the way manga seems to be dominating the sub-market or sub-medium of graphic novels.
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