Manga maniacs practice art of glint.

Byline: Anne Williams The Register-Guard

CORRECTION (ran 3/30/05): The title of a manga series was wrong in an article that appeared on Page C1 on Thursday. It is "Ranma 1/2."

Twelve-year-old Arris Weaver says her passion for all animation Japanese started with Pokemon, when she was a preschooler, and has been evolving ever since.

Now, she claims, "99 percent" of what she reads is manga, a wildly popular form of Japanese comic books featuring saucer-eyed, dainty-nosed characters with big heads, luxuriant hair and spectacular figures.

"It's different - it's like a cultural shock because it's like a whole different country," the Roosevelt Middle School seventh-grader said. "They're really different from the American stuff."

Weaver and her friend, fellow manga maniac Madisyn Schultz, were among 13 teens and youngsters, mostly middle-schoolers, who attended a two-hour manga drawing workshop Thursday afternoon at the Eugene Public Library.

Demonstrating on a white board with a fat blue erasable marker, graphic artist Marianne Walker had the students eating out of her hand. She was part instructor and part stand-up comedian, at one point drawing tentacles on a character after deciding it looked more like an alien than a human.

She also dropped names, to the delight of her charges: "Rama One-Half doesn't look any different when he's a boy or a girl," she said, evoking the name of one popular character.

Schultz was quick to correct her: "He shrinks! He shrinks!"

A self-described animation geek, Walker showed the students how to transform a picture of a balloon into a manga head by adding cheeks and ears at the bottom. Then came the eyes, the signature body part in manga: "Take a regular eye and cut off the sides, give it a glint of light, then give it another glint of light," she said. "The cuter they are, the more glints they get."

The eight girls and three boys drew along with her, achieving the manga form with varying degrees of success. Schultz and Weaver already were pros; Schultz toted in a folder stuffed with her own, very manga-looking pencil drawings.

"I'm always drawing in my classes," she said.

Walker, who works for a Eugene company that imports Japanese art markers, said more than 20 teens attended her manga workshop at the Sheldon branch on Wednesday, and another session planned at the Bethel branch today was full. She's led similar workshops in other community venues over the last two years.

While many parents are puzzled by the fascination with manga (pronounced MON-guh), Walker said she gets it. Given the popularity of American cartoons among young children, it's no surprise that they're latching on to manga as they get a little older, she said.

"The animes you see from Japan, they have real plot lines and they have characters that have depth," she said. "The stories you get from Japan are very, very involved. The characters have a lot of depth and they tend to cover topics you don't tend to find in general Western media."

At least two Eugene high schools, South Eugene and Churchill, have student anime and manga clubs this year, and book stores are selling the Japanese comics at a fast clip. (Anime refers to cartoons, the animated form of manga.) Borders has given over an entire aisle to manga, separate from the cartoon section, and Barnes and Noble Booksellers has a sizeable section as well.

Selling for $8 to $10, most titles resemble paperback novels in format, and some are meant to be read back to front, Japanese-style. They feature a variety of genres, such as romance, adventure, horror, science fiction and fantasy, and sport titles such as "Sorcerer Hunters," Chrono Crusade," "The Wallflower" and "Angel Sanctuary."

The library has a wide selection of manga in both its young adult and children's sections.

"Kids can't get enough of it," said youth services librarian Maura Scanlon, who attributes the wave of popularity in part to the advent of anime cartoons on American networks.

Emerald City Comics manager Stuart Bracken said manga has changed the profile of the Eugene store's clientele.

"Due to the influx, we have gone from about a 99 percent male audience to about 75 percent males and 25 percent females that come in and buy comics," he said. "There's a lot of girl empowerment stuff."

A fan himself, Bracken cites a series called "Cheeky Angel" among his favorites.

"There's a wider variety of subject matter," he said. "With American comics, the big successful ones are the superheroes. But with manga, you'll have a story about a boy who inherits his grandma's hotsprings spa that has been converted, unknown to him, into a girls dorm. Or a group of fast-food delivery guys who are street racers. ... There's a wide variety of humor and seriousness and sometimes just straight slapstick."

CAPTION(S):

Madisyn Schultz, 12, (left) and Arris Weaver, 12, create their own examples of manga-style animation during a workshop held at the Eugene Public Library on Thursday. Marianne Walker teaches students how to draw a manga head, including signature eyes.