Saturday, March 01, 2008

I have a question.

In Steven Grant's latest Permanent Damage column, he made the following statement:

The crawl back from that has been interesting, with content as artifact getting a whole new lease due to the second coming of the graphic novel, which was influenced by the manga influx – which to a large extent was American readers looking elsewhere for the content (and, yes, the main appeal of manga isn't stereotypical artwork but its content) that American comics had abandoned most pretext to.

Bold text is mine, and it illustrates my question.

Exactly what "content" is Grant referring to?

I guess I could go to the CBR message boards and ask this, but I wanted to see what kind of response I could get here first. I'm not trying to hate on manga; it's a perfectly valid format or genre or whatever you want to call it...but I don't really understand what sort of unique content it offers that American, or Western, if you will, comics don't.

Anyway, the floor is now open.

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