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34 CHICAGO READER | APRIL 14, 2006 | SECTION ONE Art SHOJO MANGA! GIRL POWER! C33 GALLERY AT COLUMBIA COLLEGE What Girls Want Well, for starters, fewer boundaries, candy-coated romance, and lots of gender ambiguity. By Bert Stabler ven in queer culture, being femme is rarely associated E with strength or freedom. Girliness always seems to imply impotence, overconsumption, and passivity, expressed in gossip and tacky melodrama. That may explain why the hyperfeminized scenes and characters of Japanese comics (manga) for adolescent girls (shojo) have had so little appeal to American fans of superhero comics, fine art, lit- erary fiction, and their unholy offspring, alternative comics. Yet the group show “Shojo Manga! Girl Power!” at Columbia College’s modest C33 Gallery has more to say about the future of comics than WHEN Through the work in 4/26: Mon-Thu the all-star 9-7, Fri 9-5 “Masters of WHERE 33 E. American Congress, first floor Comics” sur- INFO 312-344-7663 vey, recently on display in Los Angeles and coming soon to the Milwaukee Art Museum. Including 23 artists from the last 50 years, “Shojo Manga!” features Japanese masters Osamu Tezuka, Riyoko Ikeda, Moto Hagio, JON RANDOLPH Masako Watanabe, and the From Riyoko Ikeda's The Rose of Versailles and CLAMP's X female art-and-writing collective CLAMP and illuminates what’s of Patrick Nagel, the enormous past and future, male and macho skater and graffiti art. ple—most of them women and missing from Western comics. sparkling eyes of soulful orphans female, gay and straight. Writers in the “Shojo Manga!” girls. Thousands of fans create Unlike in the ice-cube-tray in thrift-store paintings, and the Characters and situations swim catalog and in a 2005 edition of their own comics, doujinshi, images of American comics, the occasional unexplained floral in a candy-coated vision of the Comics Journal devoted to based on their favorite titles and panels in “Shojo Manga!” merge blizzard. The same giddy sense romantic glory that should not the form obsessively reiterate its characters. In the USA and the elegant, startling shapes and of boundlessness also informs be stigmatized as disposable or immense popularity in east Asia Canada the sales figures for juxtapositions of Russian con- the storytelling. Distinctions superficial, especially given how and growing popularity here. In manga, most of it shojo manga, structivism with the flat blur between inner and outer long the American art scene has Japan, shojo conventions can recently reached between $110 Eurotrash fashion illustrations states, waking and dreaming, been cluttered with vapid, pack in more than 500,000 peo- and $140 million yearly, roughly half of all comic-book sales in the two countries. Part of the appeal could be the controversial sub- jects: the artists deal with abuse, suicide, and sex in a combined operatic and soap-operatic style. Perhaps the most provocative aspect of shojo manga is the way it explores highly unstable gen- der roles, beginning with the unchallenged master of manga and anime, Osamu Tezuka. His 1953-’56 series Ribbon no Kishi (“The Knight of the Ribbon, or Princess Knight”) features a princess, Sapphire, who has both the heart of a man and the heart of a woman. Since as a girl she’ll never ascend the throne, she’s raised as a boy. But then she falls in love with a prince from a neighboring kingdom and is inspired to refeminize herself with a wig of flowing, flaxen locks. Another major series, the early-70s The Rose of Versailles—by a woman, Riyoko Ikeda—focuses on the daughter of a noble family, Oscar, who’s raised as a boy and serves as a military commander under Marie Antoinette, then falls in love with the son of her wet CHICAGO READER | APRIL 14, 2006 | SECTION ONE 35 this exhibit doesn’t include detail and vivid colors suffer here) in the gallery. These allow graphic examples, it does under the cramped conditions: viewers to see mainstream shojo include yaoi’s tame younger at first glance the show looks manga in its natural habitat— brother, shonen-ai, or “boy like a high-end airbrush studio black-and-white narratives on love,” and yaoi is discussed in specializing in sadomasochistic newsprint—as opposed to the the show catalog. sci-fi wedding portraits. painted images, which rarely With so many artists crowded Still, the art is often beautiful, appear in print but dominate the into one show, their pieces the historical sweep is enlighten- exhibit. Their soft watercolor matted and displayed under ing, and the plot synopses can be washes, collaged textures, and Plexiglas, the exhibit is difficult fun. The one for CLAMP’s 2003 immaculate lines are dazzling up to navigate and see well. The Cardcaptor Sakuraseries close: the aggressive search for titles and explanatory labels are Tsubasa (“Wings”) includes the perfection and macabre sexual confusingly organized and line “One day, when Sakura energy subtly undermine superfi- mounted, and numerous pieces touches some old ruins, she falls cial Western notions of the femi- are hung facing the windows, down, and her memory flies nine. Instead they touch on a dif- probably to lure in passersby. But beyond time and space. To help ferent aspect of femininity: these JON RANDOLPH From CLAMP's Tsubasa once you’re inside, you have to Sakura, Xiao Lion visits a witch comics’ idealized internality and climb into the window display to and begins the journey to find open-ended imaginings evoke nurse. Cross-dressing was just women is the well-established get a good look at some of the Sakura’s memory.” Also, there’s a what psychoanalyst Jacques the beginning. Nowadays one genre of yaoi—explicit excur- images. Though it’s impressive stack of free Shojo Beat maga- Lacan called jouissance, a state of of the central features of top- sions into male homosexuality that someone figured out how to zines (Japan’s premiere shojo bliss outside language, accessible selling comics for girls and aimed at female readers. Though get all the art to fit, the work’s publication, translated and sold only to the female mind. v.

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