Literature of Comics: Day 10

          I was never a big manga reader, but I have watched quite a bit of anime. One of the first anime that I truly fell in love with was Sailor moon. When I was 4 and 5 I dressed up as Sailor Moon for Halloween, had the magic wand and everything. I didn't even know what anime was at the time, but I knew that I cared about the characters, loved that they were magic and there were talking cats which sold me. I also watch Pokemon, but I really didn't truly start getting into anime till about 6th grade. This is when I discovered so many anime to the point where I overloaded a bit and probably watched over 300 different anime over the corse of a few years.

          For class I went and read some of the sailor moon manga to see how similar it is compared to the anime I saw as a child, and I found that there were a lot of differences. I knew that when they brought it to the USA, that it was censored like crazy. But I didn't know that the overall style is a bit different compared to the original anime. The manga is a bit more stylized in the old anime style with long limbs, overly drawn sparkle eyes. I remember as a kid that I looked the most like Sailor Moon and I liked her enough to where I wanted to dress up like her for Halloween twice, but my favorite sailor scout was Sailor Uranus. I thought she was so cool and wish that she was in the manga more, but when I got older I discovered that she did have more screen time, but it was cut to censor her. This was because she was in a gay relationship with Sailor Neptune. I sometimes wish that Sailor moon was created now, so that it would play on american tv again without the unnecessary censorship.

          I never knew that manga literally translated to "playful pictures", that stood out to me for I thought it was just Japan's word for comic. I also didn't know that 50 percent of everything published in Japan was comics and 30 percent of all money made from printed sources was from manga. I had not heard of Princess Knight, but it looks adorable. I didn't know that Yuri was a late development, I had always assumed that it had come out at the same time as Yaoi. I love that the richest manga artist in the world is a woman and I get it for I have seen Inuyasha and I totally get why because her work is very popular.