As I child, I read the Beano voraciously but after the age of about 11, I rarely looked at comics. And later, when I started getting into Japan, unlike many, it was not through the route of Dragonball etc, (rather more through sushi and the history of the Ryukyus for me). However, since I last lived in the UK a few years ago, the visibility of manga on bookshelves has increased dramatically and as British Japan-spotter, this is too small a trend to ignore. Even small rural bookshops stock at least some manga.
A little digging and I found that this summer in the UK, some manga titles have replaced classics in the top 200 books tables with VIZ Media's Death Note series apparently being the hottest manga on the market here at the moment. Official sites such as www.amimeuknews.net provide detailed reviews and are widely used by the British manga reading community. This interest has in part been fueled by the Japanese embassy who have had a number of exhibitions (like this one) and organised promotions to encourage Brits to read more manga.
A true mark of success must surely be the arrival of "Manga Shakespeare", published by a British company (SelfMadeHero), offering animated versions of the bard. The BBC reported on this last spring and looked at the manga version of Hamlet. The writer observes:
Hamlet's famous soliloquy begins in familiar fashion, "To be or not to be ... that is the question", but then jumps to "To die, to sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream..." - completely dropping the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and the sea of troubles.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/6647927.stm
Seems like he is rather shocked at this particular "outrageous fortune". Seems OK to me if it is helping students get interested. But, I wonder whether after reading a manga version of MacBeth, a British teenager would be more likely to pick up Othello or Naruto?
(I also wonder what it would take to get me more interested in manga than Shakespeare...)
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