Shoujo-a-Go-Go

My latest book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Drawing Manga: Shoujo, Illustrated, was released yesterday, June 3. As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m about as far away from the target audience for this book as you could imagine, but I still had a great time working on this book.

Shoujo, for those not in the know, is Japanese for “girl,” and manga means “comics.” That makes “shoujo manga” code for “best-selling comics that girls around America are snatching up wherever they can find them.” They usually come in books that look like thick, oversized paperbacks, and you can pick them up in most bookstores and many comic-book stores too.

While I’m no shoujo manga-ka (“girls comics creator”), the artist on the book—the terribly talented Tomoko Taniguchi—is. She’s authored many wonderful volumes of shoujo manga, and she showed me around the genre like an expert tour guide threading a gaijin (foreigner) through Shibuya Crossing (Tokyo’s version of Times Square filtered through a Wachowski brothers lens).

If you love shoujo manga and have any interest in drawing—or if you know someone else who fits that bill—be sure to check this book out. It’s in stores now.