Manga is something I essentially grew up with and the type of comic is what I am most familiar with. For this class I read Bakuman by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Ohba. It was a story I was not familiar with, but it was about two young boys who wanted to write a manga. The stakes are high for them to be successful when one of the boys puts his relationship with his potential future wife on the line.
It was a fun and goofy story, a kind of hero story. What I found very interesting is that the people who made Bakuman also wrote Death Note. I've read Death Note before and those two stories have very different tones to them. That is something that is really cool about manga though - it's not genre specific. There is literally a manga about everything because everyone read manga in Japan. In Bakuman it is good to understand the way comics are used in Japan. Everyone reads them, the people who write the really popular ones do "make it big" but the majority of pieces don't really take off.
My generation seems to have been very exposed to manga. I got into it in 4th grade with Naruto and back then most of my classmates thought it was weird. in 6th or 7th grade the Naruto anime began playing on Cartoon Network and suddenly it was the cool thing. Anime and Manga began to get big in America. Towards the beginning of high school I even had a small group of friends I would go to Anime Conventions with and cosplay. Since then manga and anime have become even more mainstream as well as cosplay, I think they even have a television show about it now.
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