From historic tales to the morning news: Manga for everyone

There’s likely very few students who haven’t at least paged through one of the manga versions of the classics, like Essays in Idleness or the great Genji Monogatari, to prepare for their university exams. Indeed, probably number of Japanese people have never even seen classic Japanese literature in any form except for a comic book. And when these tales are typically composed of volumes and volumes of nearly incoherently archaic Japanese script–something akin to Beowulf in English–who could really blame them?

For a generation of manga readers who are accustomed to getting the meat and potatoes of a story from easy-to-understand illustrated dialog, there is apparently also News Manga. While the number of headlines available on a daily basis is as abbreviated as the stories themselves, the slightly satirical roundups do give an amusing rehash of recent events. Check out:

Hatoyama on Twitter

Kamei’s controversial comments to the Emperor

And even

The recent popularity of do-it-yourself testament kits