Over at Comics Worth Reading, Ed Sizemore takes a look at the The Society for the Promotion of Japanese Animation Industry Awards Ballot and makes some interesting, genre-centered suggestions on what a manga awards could look like. Over at About.Com, Deb Aoki rounds up a nice list of titles that could have fit in nicely in a number of Eisner Award categories.
Since the notion has been in the back of my mind lately, I thought I would throw out a quick poll on one structural aspect of a possible manga awards program.
The Manga Curmudgeon 
One of the reasons I avoided using demographic categories is because of works like Yotsuba. Some fans say the magazine a series is published in determines the demographic genre of the series, so Yotsuba would be a seinen title. That seems ludicrous to me. Yotsuba is obviously an all ages book. But that raises a new problem, is it shonen or shojo? Is there a Japanese category for a title like Yotsuba?
I generally feel that though I want to *know* the intended demographic in Japan, because it is important information for identifying certain traits associated with those demographics, the demographic categories themselves are perhaps less relevant here, which is why I’d vote for genre instead.
[…] the ASPJA manga ballot, so he made his own. David Welsh follows up at Precocious Curmudgeon with a poll on what readers would like to […]
Ed: I think even with more evident demographics, you run into oddly cluttered categories. As you say, with seinen, you could conceivably have Yotsuba&!, Gantz, Emma and Astral Project. But there’s sports shojo, comedy shojo, drama shojo, fantasy shojo, sci-fi shojo… It just seems cleaner to me to break them down by narrative genre.
Melinda: I think I’m most interested in target demographic when the actual work runs counter to it in some way. 😉 But I agree that in the context of fabulous prizes, those demographics are unnecessarily limiting.
David, great icon. With all the recent discussion of starting a critic’s award for manga, I wanted to propose a format for the ballot. Hopefully, get people thinking and interested in the idea, so we would have enough participation to make it a reality. Of course, we have to come up a good name 😉
I think I’m most interested in target demographic when the actual work runs counter to it in some way.‘
David, I think I agree! 😀
Yotsuba is obviously an all ages book. But that raises a new problem, is it shonen or shojo?
Well, manga for kids under 7 or so is kodomo or kodomomuke. But I think the “place of original publication” criteria is supposed to win out, and as far as I can tell Dengeki Daioh is officially considered shonen, so…
JRBrown, thanks for that information. I didn’t know there were specific terms for those two demographic groups.
The more i think about it, the more i lean toward voting by genre — because it would give allow novice manga readers/mainstream book readers a way to find manga that they’ll like. shojo, shonen, seinen — those are words that are meaningful to manga fans because we’ve immersed ourselves in the vernacular, but mostly meaningless to non-manga readers. If manga readership is to grow in any significant way, we have to show mainstream book / comics readers that manga has a wide variety of stories, themes, artistic styles and moods, and chances are, if they like to read, there’s manga that might appeal to their taste in books.
also, the vast majority of the most innovative, most interesting manga made in japan today falls in the seinen manga category, which often makes that category very, very crowded and diverse. spreading it out by genre gives a variety of titles a chance to be evaluated by their style of story, not by their original intended audience in Japan.
[…] Division by genre is maintaining a fairly consistent lead over division by demographic category in yesterday’s poll. Genre proponents entirely outnumber demographic supporters in the comments, so I’d love to […]