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ALMOST AS SOON AS MANGA BECAME POPULAR OUTSIDE OF JAPAN, creators around the world started borrowing its stylistic and storytelling tropes for their own comics. Some simply incorporated manga techniques [...]

At a time when graphic novels in libraries are under fire like never before, Shira Pilarski has chosen to focus on the positive. Pilarski, the incoming president of the American [...]

IN GRAPHIC NOVELS, AS IN LIFE, GRANDPARENTS ARE COMPLICATED CHARACTERS. Some are simply kind and loving; others carry the trauma of their past lives. Some come bearing unfamiliar foods, such [...]

Fantasy tales are as old as stories themselves, and many modern ones maintain an old-fashioned feel, with fairy-tale creatures, ancient magic, and plucky main characters fighting powerful monsters. Graphic novels [...]

As the middle grade graphic novel category has grown in recent years, the number of graphic adaptations of middle grade books has exploded. That makes sense: graphic adaptations bring new [...]

It's time to sing a (mostly) happy 50th birthday to the modern comics shop, though opinions differ on what the future holds for retailers. The direct market--that is, the group [...]

MOVE OVER, MANGA! With the burgeoning popularity of webtoons, K-drama, and K-pop, manhwa--comics from Korea--have made a big impact on English-language audiences. Chinese comics, manhua, are growing in number as [...]

THERE'S NOT ENOUGH MIDDLE GRADE MANGA. US. PUBLISHERS ARE CHANGING THAT. MANGA HAS NEVER BEEN MORE POPULAR, and the variety never greater. But there's one group of readers that is [...]

THE COMING YEAR will be consequential for the United States, with a presidential election, congressional elections, state legislative races, and important ballot questions. Why not start 2024 with a look [...]

Sports show up a lot in graphic novels, not only because they are a big part of many children's lives, but also because they offer a ready-made set of storytelling [...]

IN THE SERIES 'ELLE(S)' by Kid Toussaint and Aveline Stokart, the main character has dissociative identity disorder. Her hair color and facial expressions change depending on which personality is dominant. [...]

ALICE OSEMAN'S TEEN ROMANCE 'Heartstopper,' Rachel Smythe's A Greek-gods story 'Lore Olympus,' and Chugong's fantasy action series 'Solo Leveling' may not have much in common, but they all have a [...]

PUBLISHERS HAVE LONG KNOWN THAT ANIME BOOSTS THE POPULARITY OF manga. In 2005, for instance, 'Naruto' and 'Fullmetal Alchemist' both became bestsellers after their corresponding anime shows debuted on Cartoon [...]

WITCHES AND magic ARE perennially popular topics for all readers, young and old, and Japanese readers are no exception: There are many, many manga series that put witches front and [...]

SUPERHEROES ORIGINATED IN comics. Yet while superheroes are everywhere--in movies, novels, Little Golden Books, board books, lunchboxes, T-shirts, and video games--actual comics that feature those characters have been harder to [...]

SLICE-OF-LIFE MANGA ARE THE COMFORT FOOD OF COMICS. If action manga are like a mighty torrent that pulls readers through the story, slice-of-life tales are a warm bath, immersive and [...]

Reader demand has driven change in the comics world, including a significant increase in its numbers of Black creators and characters. For proof, one need only look to the graphic [...]

HISTORY IS WRITTEN BY THE VICTORS, the old saying goes, but as Bill Campbell points out in The Day the Klan Came to Town, that means a lot of stories [...]

ANIMAL stories have been around since Aesop told his first fable, and probably before. In the modern era, there's a storied legacy of tales about funny animals who talk, wear [...]

As a child, Mark Fearing used to watch old horror movies with his family. Later, he mused about how he would escape from the different-monsters. 'Werewolves were the worst,' he [...]

WHILE PUBLISHERS TURN OUT an ever-growing array of young adult graphic novels, plenty adult titles have strong teen appeal, too. Adult works can provide a different perspective, explore issues in [...]

JAPAN HAS A RICH AND VARIED HISTORY, filled with tales of love, war, monarchy, and ordinary people, and manga creators have drawn on that history to create some of the [...]

Manga sales have boomed in North America the past several years, but there's one readership that has been left out of the party: children. Manga for readers 12 and under [...]

PUBLISHING IS LIKE ANY OTHER BUSINESS: If the public likes what you're selling, give them more! That may account for manga's skyrocketing sales over the past two years, with sales [...]

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have been hugely influential in the comics industry, from creators of traditional comics such as Larry Hama ('G.I. Joe'), Whilce Portacio ('Iron Man,' 'The Punisher'), [...]

HISTORIAN REBECCA HALL begins and ends her graphic novel Wake (S. & S., 2021) with a revolt on an 18thcentury slave ship. In between those two points, much of the [...]

Very little was clear in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began, but one thing was certain: We would be living through a historic event, something that people would be [...]

MANGA IS MORE POPULAR THAN EVER before, as this year's SLJ survey revealed, and the explosion in popularity has brought a wave of new titles, some in familiar genres and [...]

Always exhausting and more exhilarating by the year, New York Comic Con returned to the Javits Center Thursday-Sunday, October 12-15, for another packed celebration of comics and pop culture, with [...]

MUSIC AND MUSICIANS are perennially popular for all forms of teen media, including manga. Readers feel strongly about these themes, but they're a challenge for creators: It's difficult to depict [...]

For centuries, the Japanese explanation for things that go bump in the night has been yokai, sometimes called ayakashi or mononoke. These strange spirits occupy the dark spaces and lonely [...]

Graphic novels for early readers? It's been a banner year. THE MIDDLE GRADE GRAPHIC NOVEL BOOM brought with it two consequences that have coincided neatly: Publishers had an incentive to [...]

There's a thrill in learning about passed-over history or underexamined phenomena. Lately, graphic novels have been diving deep into areas of history and science that are little known or have [...]

THERE WAS A TIME in America, from the 1980s through the late 2000s, when graphic novels were still a novelty and children's comics were almost nonexistent. Meanwhile, in France and [...]

ONE OF THE MOST POSITIVE DEVELOPMENTS IN THE MANGA WORLD is the way that manga with queer characters have escaped from the standard tropes of the past. As attitudes in [...]

WHEN IT FIRST started appearing in North America in the late 1990s and early 2000s, shoujo manga gave American girls something they hadn't seen in decades: comics that were just [...]

GRAPHIC BIOGRAPHIES have long been a staple of school and library publishers. Even in the dark ages of the 1980s and 1990s, when graphic novels for young readers all but [...]

If there is one notable development in recent LGBTQIA+ graphic novels, it's that they are following the rest of the medium in becoming more diverse in terms of characters and [...]

ISEKAI MANGA ARE SOME OF THE WILDEST FANTASY STORIES on bookshelves right now. Lengthy titles such as 'I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level' or [...]

IN THE WORLD OF AMERICAN GRAPHIC NOVELS, memoirs such as Raina Telgemeier's Guts (Graphix, 2019) and Cece Bell's El Deafo (Abrams, 2014) have presented firsthand accounts of the lives of [...]

WHEN REP. JOHN LEWIS DIED in mid-July at the age of 80, he left behind not only a legacy of activism, but also a road map of how to mobilize. [...]

Harmony Becker's YA graphic novel Himawari House (First Second) follows a year in the life of five young adults from four countries, who live together in a group house for [...]

WHILE THE POPULARITY OF MANGA TICKED up sharply in 2020, it really took off in 2021. Sales exploded to the point where some volumes sold out completely and were unavailable [...]

The best-selling manga in the United States are almost all shonen series, and all of those top titles are published by Viz--which, as we will see, is no coincidence. 'Shonen' [...]

When Raina Telgemeier's Guts debuted in the number one slot on the USA Today best-seller list, it was considered remarkable that a middle grade graphic novel was the most purchased [...]

In the early 1900s, when comic strips became a mass medium, Black cartoonists flourished in Black-owned newspapers. There were 2,700 of these papers in the United States in 1900, and [...]

As sales of middle grade graphic novels continue to grow, publishers are bringing the format to a younger audience, with a new wave of graphic novels for early readers, ages [...]

THE POPULARITY OF MANGA continued to increase in 2022, with a strong boost from anime adaptations of series, such as 'Spy x Family' and 'Chainsaw Man.' That enabled manga publishers [...]

There are few statements as compelling as 'It happened to me.' Increasingly, that's the message that many powerful graphic memoirs convey. Recent classics such as Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Rep. [...]

This year's list of the 10 best graphic novels for young people is evidence of how the format has blossomed in recent years. Comics were once criticized for flat characters [...]