Josei Manga

The theme for my annotated bibliography is Josei Manga.  Josei manga is defined as “comics for women, pronounced dʑosei, also known as ‘ladies’ ,or ‘ladies' comics.’”  This type of manga is created mostly by women for late teenage and adult female audiences. Readers tend to range from 15-44.  This manga genre began to appear in the 1980’s when girls who had read Shojo during the 1950’s and 1960’s grew up and still wanted manga that appealed to them.  There does seem to be a blurring of the lines between Shojo and Josei manga on occasion.

I searched google quite a bit to find distinctively Josei titles.  The best list I found was located at goodreads.com.  This list contains 142 of the most popular Josei manga titles.  I also used goodreads to check on the customer ratings of each book.  I wanted to read the books that had the most votes and the highest rating. 

There seems to be plenty of Josei manga written and available.  However, what I did find was that about half of the books I wanted to read were not available at my local public library.  So although these books are being written and translated into English they are still barely beginning to be collected within public libraries, at least here in Utah.  I also discovered that even more difficult than finding a copy of the book was finding reviews on the books.  Usually goodreads and amazon contained customer reviews of the books but quite of a few of the books did not have professional reviews.  I used Academic Search Premium to check for professional book reviews of each book I read.

I greatly enjoyed this assignment and learning about a format that I previously knew nothing about.  As I read these ten titles I started to notice themes and characteristics they had in common.  For example, all of the books I read had a romantic plot or subplot.  Actually many of the books I read took place in high schools.  There were also similarities within the artwork.  One of my favorite characteristics of the artwork is when a character gets angry or excited they are drawn completely different from when they are just feeling normal.  It is actually quite funny.  I have included an example below.  In this picture Teru is feeling many different emotions.  It is an interesting art technique that I saw repeated throughout all 10 manga titles.

I hope you enjoy browsing through these Josei manga titles.