I was just trolling through the interwebs today, as I often do, and found an interesting LiveJournal post from Jason Thompson (aka khyungbird), author, manga fan and artist of the webcomic The Stiff. In this post he poses an interesting question: Where are the OEL manga targeted to boys?

From his post:

Where is the shonen OEL? When I was the editor of Dragon Ball/Dragon Ball Z, we got tons of wretched fan art from 8-year-olds, who presumably did not die in a plague, but years have passed since then and I am still hard pressed to come up with the name of a really solid OEL comic showing a Dragon Ball influence. Considering all the people reading Naruto and Bleach and other Shonen Jump manga today — or Dragon Ball and Yu-Gi-Oh a few years ago — why are we not seeing a vast boom in people drawing “boyish” battle comics?

It’s an interesting short read that provides theories on how the OEL scene became practically devoid of the big robots, ninja battles, super-powered heroes, and fast cars that would attract male readership (for those that don’t know, OEL = original english manga, i.e. manga that was created in the West)

Anyways, if you’d like to read more you can visit Jason’s LJ blog, Where are the Shonen OEL Artists?

Technorati Tags: manga, shonen, OEL, jason thompson, dragon ball

Popularity: 4% [?]