#marginal

Content warning: mentions of sexual assault and childhood sexual assault in the material of some comics discussed

Minor spoilers for The Poe Clan, Marginal, A Cruel God Reigns, and The Heart of Thomas

Like a lot of people, before I ever read a shoujo manga, I used to think of shoujo as “romance comics.” For me, the word would evoke a mental image of an unserious, weepy soap opera about girls with curly hair and very shiny eyes, with a lot of sparkles and stylized roses around the panel borders. In other words, not for me—a butch, working through a lot of internalized misogyny about not liking “fluffy romance stories for girls.” I assumed that all shoujo manga was melodramatic and over the top, and that I, a “serious comics reader,” wouldn’t enjoy it very much. 

Several years ago, though, I stumbled into reading some of the work of the Year 24 group—a group of female artists who were incredibly influential on the evolution of shoujo manga in the 1970s—and fell in love, not just with their series but with shoujo manga itself. I discovered that shoujo was so much more than I had first assumed: not a genre, but a demographic category (manga aimed primarily at a young, female audience) and a style—and a set of tools and conventions for telling stories. Shoujo manga is all about focusing on melodramatic emotion, and using expressionistic linework to depict a character’s internal emotions as images on the page, and what I thought of as just that “sparkles and roses” style was used even from the demographic’s earliest days to tell stories to all kinds of emotional effects. Manga artist Hagio Moto’s work in particular opened my eyes to how versatile the iconic shoujo style can be as a storytelling tool—not just for romance, but for horror, mystery, and mind-expanding science fiction. Her classic work is emblematic of the exciting range of stories under the shoujo umbrella, and how the visual and narrative hallmarks of shoujo itself can be applied to great effect in many different genres. And if you’re like me, and think you won’t like shoujo manga because you’re not a “romance person,” I think checking out her work might be worth a try.