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Forum - View topicINTEREST: Hideko Mizuno's Fire! Manga About American Rock Star Reprinted After 23 Years
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FireChick
 Subscriber Posts: 2401 Location: United States |
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Somebody ought to bring this to the US as well. Since its a pretty influential shoujo manga, I'd love to read it.
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Brainchild129
Posts: 307 |
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I am over the moon at this announcement. Not only do those new covers look great, a modern reprint means that it could potentially be licensed in the US. I did an entire panel (and Anime Feminist essay) on pre-Magnificent 49ers shojo and my biggest takeaway from all that is that Hideko Mizuno and "Fire!" are amazing and immensely influential and it's long since time for the English-speaking world to discover them both.
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OtomeGay
 Posts: 118 |
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I would love for this to get an official English release! More publishers should take a chance on classic shojo, especially one as influential as this!
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drtomoe123
 Posts: 5 Location: appalachia -> bay area |
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Totally in agreement with everyone above. Please, please, please let this lead to an English release! It's short and would be so relevant in a time like now where the world is in increasingly dire straits and the music industry is SO full of corporate BS.
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EricMontreal22
Posts: 35 |
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I've presented at a conference (Pop Culture, not anime specific) about Fire! and Hideko Mizuno, and I agree with you. While the copy this publisher is selling the reprint with is slight hyperbole ("shoujo" as a classification already was well established by 1969,) Fire! really was a game changer. One of the first manga serialized in Seventeen, it trageted an older demographic than even the big young teen aimed magazines like Margaret (where Mizuno had serialized most of her previous hits,) so really "aged up" the shoujo readership. With elements like having the first male lead in a shoujo serial, including sex and drug scenes, and trying hard to give it a firm basis in modern reality, it appealed to a wide demographic that didn't exist for shoujo before (Mizuno says for a while most of her fan male were from male readers in college who could relate to Aaron.) She also experimented with many new visual techniques--and it won a major manga award (one of the first for a shoujo title) as well as being a best seller (with one of the first hardcover editions for a manga.) Honestly, Rose of Versailles deserves all the praise it gets and was a phenomenon, more so than the reaction to Fire!, but much of what Rose of V gets praise for and much of its huge following actually was originally done by Fire! Ikeda has admitted without Fire! she wouldn't have thought to do a story with epic scope set in a tumultuous real world event (Fire! dealing explicitly with how the Vietnam draft affected young Americans.) She also said Oscar's personality was based on that of Fire Wolf. It's also just an exciting, fast moving and extremely moving read (Hideko has said that if she had done it ten years later it wouldn't be so compressed and would be twice as long, but the quick pace actually is appealing--she has also said that the homoerotic elements would have been text rather than subtext but she was a pioneer there too). It's too bad that it marked the end of Mizuno doing long form serials. She herself was a bit of an outsider and rebel, and would spend most of the 70s looking after her son as a single mother (obviously a huge taboo at the time) and doing short commissions of art and one offs. In the late 80s she returned to serials with another dream project, Ludwig II, but the magazine it was published in folded after some 500 pages (two volumes) had been released and no one else had any interest in picking it up (and it's beautiful, so that always shocks me.) I'm glad she's starting to get the attention she deserves--I think honestly she is the first *great* shoujo mangaka and obviously the perhaps given too much credit Year 24 group wouldn't have existed without her, nor would the blockbuster shoujo mangaka out there like Ikeda (who, contrary to what a lot of Westerners think, is NOT a part of the Year 24 group, in fact she used to get nasty hate mail from some of the Year 24 group fanatics--but I digress.) There just is so little belief that vintage manga without name recognition (like Rose of V) will sell. We get every single obscure Tezuka title, but those same publishers seem to have zero interest in a true masterpiece like Fire! And these new editions are indeed glorious. They are the fourth editions I have, but the nicest (I became Fire! obsessed nearly 30 years back when I read about it in Frederick Schodt's Manga! Manga! which at the time was the only English writing that even mentioned shoujo manga.) You all have way more optimism than I do about the possibility of an English edition |
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