At the library where I work we have a small to medium size collection of manga but only in French (very few in English). That’s to be expected since one of the mandates of our library is to foster the learning of French among the city’s (or the province’s) new-comer population. However, since the population we are serving is in majority anglophone, one of the librarians thought that it would be nice to develop a little more our nearly inexistant English manga collection. I am offering a few suggestions…
Most of the manga publishers target their releases toward kids and teenagers (kodomo, shōnen, shōjo) and just a few publishers put out manga really aimed at adults (seinen, josei, gekiga) — and I am not talking here about manga of sensual or erotic nature (LadiComi, yaoi, yuri, etc.).
The more traditional manga are translated and distributed by publishers like:
while the more serious and alternative titles (and unfortunately often less popular) comes from publishers like:
- Digital Manga/eManga
- Drawn & Quarterly (based in Montreal!)
- Ponent Mon/Fanfare
- Seven Seas
- Stone Bridge Press
- Vertical
- Yen Press
For this list, I avoided titles that we already had in our collection in French and — considering that we already had a few gekiga in French, that seinen or josei are also often targeted at teenagers, and that I think we should support local publishers like Drawn & Quarterly — I tried instead to favour more classical or serious manga (hence a selection of mostly gekiga, including mangaka in the likes of Shigeru Mizuki, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Osamu Tezuka, or the more recent Jiro Taniguchi). I am indicating in the list if a title is already available in the Montreal Libraries’s network (even if it is only in French or only in one library).
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Clodjee's Safe-House 