Feisty Librarians

The big news takeaway from Thursday's ICv2 Graphic Novel Conference in New York -- a trade-only offshoot of the weekend's New York Comic-Con -- was ICv2 President Milton Griepp's announcement that in 2005, graphic novels outsold traditional comics for the first time ever, and that the margin widened in 2006. I missed the big news takeaway, though, because I didn't arrive in the overheated conference room in the bowels of the Javits Center until well into the second panel of the day, on nonfiction graphic storytelling. A peek over at the notebook of the earnest-looking young man sitting next me revealed no notes about revolutionary sales data but did reveal, in tiny handwriting:

swedes love manga??

The day's third panel addressed manga ratings, and featured some advanced self-congratulation on the part of most of the panelists for their industry's forward thinking. Mike Kiley, publisher of Tokyopop, started by joking about his company's initial poor response to the issue -- "I publish flesh-eating lesbian zombie manga; I'm the worst possible person to address this" -- but then explained that a librarian, Michele Gorman, had come in and helped the company establish new standards. Gorman, a feisty and outspoken presence on the panel, was pleased that the company followed her lead, and stressed that the new Tokyopop ratings system revolves around laundry lists of description rather than actual ratings -- this despite the fact that the handout we'd all been given specifically broke down the system into Under 13, Teen, etc., a point made pretty quickly by an audience member.

Another audience member -- in fact, another feisty librarian -- asked why, if all the publishers on the panel (Tokyopop, VIZ, Del Rey, and Yen Press) were so committed to being proactive on the issue, they didn't share a ratings system? Everyone sort of hemmed and hawed for a while, and failed to answer the question, when of course the answer is they're not so proactive as they make themselves out to be. Having just watched Kirby Dick's documentary THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED -- which asks some potent questions but sadly abandons most of them in favor of Michael Moore-style windmill-tilting -- I'm particularly skeptical of the efficacy of ratings systems, especially the more standardized and industry-run they become.

I spoke with Gorman after the panel and asked her how Tokyopop's new system dealt with gay themes, surely the biggest upcoming stumbling block in manga's relationship with middle America. She proudly noted that the ratings system didn't differentiate between gay and straight sex: "That was important for me; I told them I couldn't be involved in this if they didn't handle it that way."

But sometime in the next year, some PTA on Long Island is going to get in the New York Post because they find a volume of teen yaoi in the school library -- yaoi without explicit sex, but still exploring a gay relationship, placed there by a hip and feisty librarian, no doubt. And they'll be on every talk show demanding, like, Congressional hearings on the manga menace. What then, I asked?

She didn't really know: "I like to think that publishers like Tokyopop will stick to their guns. I hope they will." Gorman, who recently moved to Charlotte from Austin, is familiar with the ways that anti-gay uproar can derail worthy local arts institutions -- after all, I don't imagine you can live in Charlotte long without hearing about the 1996 Charlotte Rep Angels in America brouhaha. We'll see, I guess, how manga publishers will handle a similar situation. I look forward to the hysterical news coverage such an event will occasion.