Word: shojo
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Where Junji Ito represents the classic horror style, Toru Yamazaki's Octopus Girl takes the genre to its comical extremes. Conflating the ultra-cutesy style of girl's shojo manga with outrageously repulsive gross-out humor, the three volumes so far ($13 each) may be the funniest books of the year, as well as the most disgusting. The first story of the first volume starts like a typical shojo book might, with a bunch of school girls tormenting their cute classmate Takako. But in this version, they jump on top her and make her lunch vegetables squirt out her nose...
...creator Natsuki Takaya can now boast of a new generation of devotees worldwide. The creator of Fruits Basket, a best-seller in North America, debuted in the early 1990s with manga in the Japanese magazine Hana to Yume (Flowers and Dreams) to become one of the industry's top shojo authors, creating manga for women that now sell in bookstores across the globe through publishers such as Tokyopop. In the creator's first U.S. interview, TIME's Coco Masters talks with Takaya (a pen name) about her experiences as a manga creator, the television series CSI and what makes manga...
Tokyopop's big release this year will be Volume I of Japanese cartoonist Natsuki Takay's Fruits Basket, due this month. One of the best-selling shojo titles in Japan, it tells the story of Tohru Honda, an orphaned junior high student who discovers that the cutest boy in school morphs into a rat whenever he is hugged by a girl...
...selling shojo title, Fushigi Yugi: The Mysterious Play, by Yu Watase, typifies the genre. It tells of Miaka Yuki, a lazy student with exam nightmares. A strange library book allows her to visit ancient China, where she meets a handsome but avaricious young warrior. Like most shojo, the tale features lush costumes and impossibly beautiful boys. What may surprise new readers are the author's interjections and frequent shifts into goofball humor--both classic manga tropes...
American-born shojo talent has also begun to emerge. Jill Thompson's manga-style Death: At Death's Door was one of DC Comics' best sellers last year. "You can flip through quickly, but you feel a lot of emotion without having to read words," says Thompson. "I've always liked art like that...