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Every Wednesday, Jared Gniewek discusses what feeds his fires as an author of comics, screenplays and radio dramas.

Friends…are you suffering from Manga Guilt?

Okay, you’re at the dinner party and the conversation of course turns to comics and graphic novels. I mean Bang Zoom Pow comic talks are for dinner parties nowadays not for stupid babies! Your friends in publishing start going on and on about manga and you nod politely while replaying through your brain the five issues of Lone Wolf and Cub you read way back in 1988.

This has been happening to comics aficionados for some time now. Ever since someone important noticed that their kids were READING comics. And they were funny black and white books without any superheroes or screwy teenagers in jalopies. There were tentacle monsters doing HILARIOUS things to the main characters and swords the size of skyscrapers cutting down armies of armored combatants. What was this stuff and how could he make a buck off of it?

Well manga is still on the menu for quite a few folks and when many of us admit that we haven’t “caught the wave” of sailor girls and samurais we get looked at like we are…well…fascists? Racists? People NOT IN THE KNOW!?!?!

So you venture into the section of nicely organized little books in the store with funny names and 30 volumes that are never the first one so you will never have a chance to know what the hell is happening in the story.

You ask everyone you know for recommendations. Which armored alien fighter with enormous cans is the best? Which teenage space jockey in moon boots and goggles can best stem off the waves of alien invaders in his spiffy space fighter?

What is manga? Is it just comics from Japan or is there something integral to them that goes beyond their origin of publication? You feel stupid and ignorant and struggle to try to think about accepting these books so you can feel well rounded and knowledgeable.

You feel guilty. By you I mean me…

This isn’t the first time I’ve felt outside pressures to appreciate things I’m not particularly drawn to. Way back in the early nineties my friends all thought I should like the rock band Tool. As much as I tried, I couldn’t stand it. There was something about the bass tone that I couldn’t get past. I went to shows and would watch the videos with friends and listen to the albums on road trips but I just couldn’t get into it. I’ll still watch their videos with the sound off. They were beautiful.

In college, everyone thought I should enjoy Charles Bukowski. You like drinking! He likes drinking! You’ll love it! I didn’t hate it but I’ve never really gotten past Ham on Rye (which is wonderful and worth the read). And I actually feel Bukowski guilt when someone I respect starts gushing about him. I’m more a Theodore Roethke guy I guess.

Now that I think about it there’s tons of things I’m not particularly interested in which could make me a more well-rounded person: jazz, police procedural television shows, the French New Wave of Cinema, religion, opera, soccer, cooking, the outdoors in general, wine, science involving animals that are not imaginary, military technology, politics, the environment, physics, ballet, man oh man the list could go on for pages!

I have come to a conclusion, gang. A brilliant conclusion:

Guilt for lack of knowledge in the face of more accumulated knowledge than ever in the history of mankind comes naturally with living in an ever shrinking world chocked full of more information and aesthetic beauty than any one person could ever truly appreciate in twenty lifetimes. We will never know of all the beauty and art that this world has to offer. We can only follow our individual muses and hope we have experienced a shard of a facet of the glowing crystal of a fully lived life. Like a dolphin.

I was on the phone with our favorite smurfologist today and he confessed that he too was feeling manga guilt and was reading the Battle Royale manga in an effort to get over it.

The last book I bought was the new Yoshihiro Tatsumi book, A Drifting Life.

I started thinking about it and y’know, those Lone Wolf and Cub books I read back in ‘88 were pretty freakin’ good. The panic and guilt started to abate a bit. I thought of all the anime I watched growing up in the 80s. Thunderbirds 2086, Starbirds, Voltron, the other Voltron without the awesome cats. I didn’t need to be an expert on this. I could, for once in my life, accept passing knowledge and just be okay with it.

If we all just keep trying to read and experiment we will all find the books out of the dense and confusing world of manga that will appeal to us. Or not. But then it’s not for lack of trying.

If anyone has any recommendations for more personal and simple stories with ambiguous and dark endings drawn and written by a Japanese creator; I am all ears. You can keep the tentacle monsters and armored breasts of lasersword wielding bombshells though.

Well…unless it’s good.

Fight the guilt with books, kids…fight the guilt with books All the Best!

Jared Gniewek works in the music industry as a back line technician, performer, and promoter. He is also a freelance writer whose work can be seen in the recent re-launch of Tales from the Crypt and heard on The Dark Sense, an audio anthology of the macabre for which he is also the story editor — http://www.earstage.com/darksense.htm.