Moto Hagio’s “A Drunken Dream And Other Stories”

  “Perhaps you don’t know shojo manga until you’ve read Moto Hagio.” An avid comic book reader since my youth, there was something that drew me into manga as a middle schooled aged kid: shojo. As much as I loved the diverse and female friendly X-Men and other heavy hitting, well loved characters from both Marvel and DC, there was always a deep set desire to see MORE. A desire to see more girls in comics. A desire to see more women BETTER represented and in the spotlight in the world of comics then I stumbled upon shojo, or shoujo manga. Manga, if you are unfamiliar, is the term used for Japanese comics. Manga is read in a different way than Western comics: some refer to it as “flipped”, the panels are to be read right to left. In Japan reading manga is considered something of a national pastime, where people of all ages can take part in. The loosest definition of shojo manga that I can come up with off the top of my head is “ a genre targeted to girls ages 12-18 with stories centering on human interaction that may or may not have large doses of drama and romance”. But even that definition seems lacking and very one dimensional; for older women read shojo (AND write create it), not only girls read shojo, (boys too, but a far larger amount of girls do) and Not every shojo title ever in existence today confirms to the borders of my narrow definition that I provided above.   ~~~~~ But that’s the magic of shojo manga: it is a genre in manga that continues to evolve and s…