[LINK] "Young shoppers edge manga into Europe's mainstream"

[rfmcdonald]

Interesting, if personally unsurprising. I see large and growing manga shelves wherever I go book shopping here in Toronto, too.

Young adults are a growing market in publishing: Walk into a bookstore in a European city on a Friday or Saturday afternoon and you can find teenagers crowded in front of a wall of the comic books – a sight nearly non-existent a few years ago.

On Duesseldorf's Immermannstrasse, an avenue lined with shops catering to the city's Japanese population, is a scene that could come straight from Harajuku, where Tokyo's youth congregate – except the butcher around the corner sells sausages.

German teenagers dressed as Japanese goth rock stars, with multicoloured hair and heavy eyeliner, mingle with Japanese schoolchildren in a bookstore on the street, giggling as they step into “purikura” photo booths that shoot instant snapshots that people decorate themselves and print as stickers.

“They have something special,” said Berenike Schmoldt, whose fascination with manga has turned the German teenager into a full-blown Japanophile at 17, during a Friday expedition with her friends. “I spend hours every week reading them.”

Already fluent in basic Japanese, she is making her fourth visit to Japan this month to soak up the culture, eat her favourite dish of ‘yakisoba' fried noodles, and read manga.

It's a scene replicated in Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris and Rome: local bookshops have expanded their manga sections and feature hundreds of French, Dutch and Italian titles. Often without the credit cards to shop online, these teenagers visit the stores as part of their social life.

“It is something that is much more than a fad,” said Paul Gravett, a publisher and expert on comics in Europe.

“The term ‘manga' is becoming a global word.”