Protocols

Short shameful confession: I do not think of All's Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida, and Measure for Measure as comedies -- they're problem plays, on the same lines as problem novels in YA. This analogy won't survive critical scrutiny, but thus my brain works.

For my next trick, I will assert that Shakespeare's sonnets are not a Petrarchan sonnet sequence but a problem sonnet sequence.

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There's a type of manga that bemuses me when I stumble upon it. It's not a genre -- these seem to cross all genres. I've no better name for it but didactic manga -- seeming to exist to instruct, with story and fanservice and soap-opera-y bits tossed in to keep you reading on to the next nugget of information. Or maybe the audience just wants to learn how to cook curries (a recipe in every chapter!) or the mechanics of sex (set-up for that one's a couple married by arrangement who are both virgins -- the page of diagrams explaining how to remove a bra was especially amusing) and are skipping over the plot. Though not, I suspect, the fanservice.*

I've no doubt that somewhere out there are manga that teach automobile maintenance, or all about the natural history and hunting of whales. Uh, wait, that last's a those two are Western comic books and novel. Never mind.


* Random bits of titillation. Poorly motivated nudity and gratuitous panty-shots are especially common forms.

---L.