from now on, please don’t ask me to do Garo. I’ll do some Garo artists with pleasure, like Mizuki Shigeru, Shirato Sanpei and Okada Fumiko, but generally, it’s really not my thing. It’s not to say that I don’t love alternative manga, because I do and right now I’m living on a happiness trail of Igarashi Daisuke, Ueshiba Riichi and Iwaoka Hisae, but you’ve got to remember that really being cutting edge or alternative doesn’t necessarily have to do with how many people you get out to or who publishes you, which is what I think that the Year 24 Group proves. You can be like Ooshima Yumiko and write manga after manga about neurotic, personified cats like Chibi Neko or Saba, and have those run in magazines like Asuka or Lala. She was also the first mangaka to write about teen abortion, and she published that in one the most mainstream magazines there is, Margaret. Or, you could be like Takemiya Keiko or Hagio Moto or Yamagishi Ryouko or Ikeda Riyoko and be some of the first mangaka to talk about homosexuality. I’m not sure if anyone did before, but I do know that the yaoi/shounen ai/yuri/shoujo ai manga of these four women is and was written in a humanizing way that was able to resonate with an amazingly large audience. Kaze to Ki no Uta ran in Petit Flower and then Shoujo Comic, which was home to manga like Fushigi Yugi and Shinohara Chie’s Red River.
This isn’t an attack on Garo. This is really more of an attack on the way we perceive what alternative comics are. It’s not that simple
Well said opinions on alternate manga.
Sometimes, even genres like shoujo, shounen, seinen, and josei don’t even matter anymore.
