Explaining the appeal of manga: what is the point?

So apparently Tom Crippen of The Hooded Utilitarian doesn't like manga and is asking for an explanation of its appeal. I'm not going to provide one, because I find the very question irritating, and Crippen's way of asking it doesn't do him any favours. (Here's a hint: if you genuinely want a helpful response from people with an interest in manga, don't refer to manga's visual style as having a "kindergarten feel".)

The thing is, when someone says "I can't get past the character designs", my immediate reaction is not "but not every manga has that kind of character design" or "that iconography is ultimately derived from Walt Disney" or "it's a form of symbolism related to character traits". My immediate reaction is: Try harder. And if trying harder doesn't work, stop banging on about it.

Look, it's pretty simple: the fundamental storytelling DNA of manga, as well as the more obvious visual aesthetics, are different from those of Western comics. Oh, there's variation within both Western comics and manga, and there are places where they nearly touch -- but any two randomly-selected Western comics will be closer to each other than they are to any randomly-selected manga, and vice versa. This is to be expected; Japan's culture is distinct, complex, unique, and thoroughly different from Western cultures, and the typical manner of producing and publishing sequential art in Japan is radically different from the typical manner in which Western firms and individuals go about it.

This has a number of implications, of which I will focus on two. Firstly, the visual language of manga is different from the visual language of Western comics. All of those half-tones and flowers and dewy eyes and popping veins and splashy layouts -- they have a meaning, or rather a range of meanings, that is not immediately apparent to a reader schooled in Western comics. They're not just noise, which is how they appear if you're not used to them, just as a foreign language sounds like meaningless babble until you learn enough words to understand some of it. This is why I say "try harder": if the visual surface of a manga work puts you off, if it seems to be noisy and slick and all the same, that's probably because you're not reading it right, not properly distinguishing what is meaningful from what is not meaningful. And the only way to learn how to read it right is to keep reading. If you really want to learn to enjoy manga, or at least to understand it, you can't let your initial repulsion or incomprehension throw you out after a brief perusal. That's like giving up on foreign travel because the people talk funny.

Secondly, there are things Western comics can do that manga can't do, and vice versa -- or, more accurately, things that manga don't do that Western comics do. (And I don't exempt so-called "OEL manga" from the category of "Western comics". OEL manga are like haiku in English: they may be very fine short English poems, but they're not really haiku.) As a corollary to this, if the things you look for and greatly enjoy in comics are the things that Western comics do and manga don't, there's no real reason why you would find manga appealing. And that's fine, you know? Not everyone can like everything. There are always going to be cultural conversations that you can't participate in, just because the appeal of the cultural thingamajig in question evades you to the point that you can't stand to look at it.

But if you can't stand to look at it, you have to concede that you don't have much to say about it. As Wittgenstein would say, whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent. Or, as I've put it more crudely elsewhere: if you don't know what you're talking about, shut the hell up. This is a pretty obvious principle that is widely ignored by the comics commentariat, which is one of the reasons why I don't read many comics blogs.

What's more, it irritates me intensely when people stand up and say "I am ignorant; educate me!" when, frankly, the resources are out there for them to educate themselves if they cared to put the effort in. I considered making a comment to Crippen's post, but decided against it, because hey! I don't actually give a damn if he likes manga or not, and it's not my job either to do his homework for him or to defend the honour of manga. Manga needs no defence, from me or from anyone else.

I'll concede that he makes one worthwhile point about a fundamental difference between manga and Western comics -- albeit he makes it a little clumsily, so that it took me three reads of the paragraph to figure out what he was saying. It's true that manga, in almost every case that I'm familiar with, lets the images drive the story with the words assisting; more complex interplay between words and pictures is rare, almost unknown. That's one of the things I mentioned above that falls into the category of "things Western comics do that manga don't do". (It's a factor that contributes to the speed with which manga can be read -- obviously not the only factor, but one of the most important and least-remarked-on.) It doesn't seem to me a good enough reason to give up on manga, but my aesthetic priorities are different from Tom Crippen's, and that's okay.

I should perhaps restate: I don't have any investment in people liking manga. Like it, don't like it; it's all the same to me. I do have an emotional investment in people not talking as if a liking for manga is a charge in need of a defence, or conversely as if a lack of liking for manga is a disease needing a remedy. Like I've said before more than once: different people like different things, and that's okay. Or, to put it more seriously: it is not possible for anyone to read everything. It is therefore necessary to prioritise your reading according to what you think is most likely to produce whatever results you look for from reading -- mostly pleasure, but also intellectual stimulation, vicarious experience, various kinds of aesthetic thrill. If, for whatever reason, you find that one particular segment of all the comics in the world is incapable of producing those results, there's no shame in saying to yourself "this doesn't appeal to me" and not bothering. And there's no particular reason why you should dig deep and try hard to find out if that segment could produce the right results, unless you really think it's likely to do so if you make an extra effort -- life's too short to waste time like that.

But don't assume that the fact that something doesn't appeal to you straight away means it has no value at all. And if you don't want to make the effort to find its value, just admit that you don't want to make the effort. Don't make a half-assed attempt to get others to make the effort for you. That's just not cricket.