Most of the none shoujo mangas here (and some of those as well) are really worth the read, too. So I’m guessing the chance of me being dissappointed is very low. Although you never know untill you read it. Sorry about the ranting, I just don’t have a lot to do while I’m downloading, and I figured any feedback is better than none.

Keep up the good work guys, I love y’all

@Dirk: Thanks for stopping by and clearing up my confusion. I now see where you are coming from. I know that Kotonoha’s selection seems bewildering at times, and I’m certainly the main person to blame. I guess I’m one those people who’ve always been more interested in stories than they are in genres. Manga is a very dynamic and versatile medium that changes and evolves constantly. New talented artists and interesting stories are popping up every day. I’d like our line-up to reflect this dynamic.

Of course, efforts are underway to streamline our catalog to make it look more consistent, but diversity will always be one of Kotonoha’s prominent quality. Like kids, we always want to play with new kinds of toys.

The refgerence to Dark Horse, therefore, wasn’t in comparison to manga publishers but to other Western comics-publishing houses. There’s a deep divide in the American comic-book stores between superhero comics (which I’ve taken to mockingly refer to as the One True Genre) and, basically, everything else. There’s a further divide between superhero comics fans and fans of “literary comics” — works by R. Crumb, Chris Ware, Dan Clowes and the like — that gets so polarizing that stuff in-between the two extremes gets lost in the argument. Another thing that I have to take into consideration is that a significant portion of my readership tends to turn their collective noses in the air towards anything that doesn’t aspire to the depth and complexity of a written non-genre novel. Manga? In many comics shops, manga doesn’t register at all. Yes, it’s a screwed-up industry, another thing I’m quite fond of mocking, but that’s as nevermind.

Anyway, the comparison was between Mangascreener, which I compared to a more literary comics publisher (Top Shelf Productions) and Kotonoha, which I compared to a company that publishes both well-made genre works and more self-consciously “literary,” esoteric stuff as well (Dark Horse). It’s not a perfect comparison by any means, but it’s one that a majority of my readers will understand, and you work with what you’ve gone.

As I hope the current scanlations tour in the Journal’s weblog suggests, I’m very interested in getting my readers better acquainted with the higher end of the Japanese comics tradition. Back when I was edited the print version, I believe I was the first editor to devote a full issue to manga (the shoujo-manga issue, see TCJ #269 with its Moto Hagio cover), and that was a hard enough sell — it debuted at the 2005 San Diego Comic-Con, and watching typical Journal readers was both funny and slightly discouraging. They’d notice the beautiful cover, pick it up and thumb through the pages, realize that it really was wall-to-wall girly-manga stuff, and set it back down like it had been printed with plutonium ink. It was like I’d produced the perfect reader-repelling issue of the magazine or something.

Still, I’m an obstinate sumbitch, and the current feature on scanlations is my latest attempt to jam the subject down my readers’ throats. Once serialization in the weblog is completed, “A Western Comics Fan’s Guide to Scanlations” will be collated and copy-edited, illustration examples will be added, and the results will be published in the archives of the main body of the website as a single piece. I hope that it does a little to assist the Journal’s readers to appreciate the depth and scope of the manga available today. We shall see.

Fishes of the World, Unite!!!