Talk:Year 24 Group

More info
There's information in Manga about this group, including critical sources, that could be fruitfully used in this article. Someone more familiar than me with the sources and history should probably do this, though. —Quasirandom (talk) 23:20, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

NPOV
Tone of this article is too complimentary of the group. It talks about about they "revolutionized" shojo manga. It claims: "They are said to have made manga into a type of literature." and "Their actions and success paved the way for the appearances of many female manga artists" without backing these claims with any independent source. --Kraftlos (talk) 20:48, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Also, most of the content is just a poor reflection of the well-worded paragraphs in Manga which describe the group. If they are as notable as it sounds, it shouldn't be hard to flesh out this article. --Kraftlos (talk) 20:53, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks. (All sources I've seen agree with that they did, indeed, revolutionizing the genre, but aside from what Matt Thorne has written about them, I haven't had access to anything I can cite.) —Quasirandom (talk) 21:52, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Yeah, even if the sources phrased it that way, the article needs to have a more neutral tone, while explaining the significance of their contributions. What also caught my eye is that most of the sources were from Matt Thorne (really sure who that is), but I think it probably could use more perspectives.  BTW, how well known is the group?  Would it be as famous as CLAMP?  More famous?  Thanks.  --Kraftlos (talk) 03:50, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
 * It's not a group in the same sense as CLAMP is a group. It's more of a grouping. As for Thorn, he's considered the most knowledgeable English-language source for information about shōjo manga, so it's not surprising that many (or most) of the references are his. ··· 日本穣 ? · Talk to Nihonjoe 04:23, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
 * There is other stuff out there, but it's not as in-depth, and may even be wrong because it's so glossed over. Masami Toku's Mechademia 2 paper may be worth looking up, but I believe Matt Thorn is the only person to have written an entire article on the grouping - in The Comics Journal #269. -Malkinann (talk) 02:35, 2 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Paul Gravett's 60 years of manga book may also include some information about the Year 24 Group. -Malkinann (talk) 00:41, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, I believe it did. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:33, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Norie Masuyama's role?
In the sources listed at the end of the list of the flower group, Norie Masuyama is not listed, and in Matt Thorn's Moto Hagio interview, Hagio describes Masuyama as not being a cartoonist herself, but that she loved cartoons, and she was Takemiya's "brain staff" - which I guess might be something like a muse or person that Takemiya would bounce ideas off. According to that interview, she introduced Takemiya to the idea of male homosexuality for women via Barazoku. Her role may have been more as a support, part of the milieu, like Junya Yamamoto??? --Malkinann (talk) 07:55, 1 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I agree. I've removed her from this page and the template. ··· 日本穣 ? · Talk to Nihonjoe 08:07, 1 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Concur. —Quasirandom (talk) 15:49, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Year 24/ Post-Year 24
The lead sentence


 * Year 24 Group (24年組, Nijūyo-nen Gumi?) refers to one of two female manga artist groups which are considered to have revolutionized shōjo manga (girls' comics).

looks slightly confusing. Isn't the term mainly used for referring to the first group, and the post-group is another, related group? 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 08:47, 31 August 2009 (UTC)


 * (refactored above to fix formatting) It is a little ambiguous, yes -- it could be read as the Post-24 group as revolutionizing shōjo. I think this is a case where guidelines encourage bad writing -- the inherent nature of the subect requires that there are two groups be mentioned in the first sentence, while the guideline that what they are important for also be mentioned there is producing a semantic collision. I'm not sure at the moment how to fix this. —Quasirandom (talk) 14:09, 31 August 2009 (UTC)


 * But wasn't it the original Year 24 group who initiated the revolution? Anyway, thanks for answering. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 21:04, 31 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Right -- the original Year 24 Group were the revolutionizers, the Post-Year 24 were the second generation. —Quasirandom (talk) 21:43, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

Subject matters
The year 24 group was highly influential in expanding the scope of subject matters in shoujo manga, as far as I have understood it. Should be added to the article. Good sources include writings by Matt Thorn, Paul Gravett and Frederick Schodt. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 11:22, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

This...needs work
I hate to say it, folks, but this article is a bit of a mess. I suspect the biggest reason is that there is no widely accepted definition of what the Year 24 Group was or who its members might be.

Right off the bat, the first sentence is a complete mystery to me. What is the other group referred to? As you can tell by the number of times my name comes up, I know a bit about this, and I have no idea what this second group might be. You can imagine my surprise, then, on checking the reference and seeing my own name. Thinking I may have written such a thing and forgotten it, I just reread my intro to Four Shōjo Stories and I can't find any reference to this second group. But here in this article, I see the answer a few sentences down. The second group is apparently the "Post Year 24 Group." This is just...silly. That would be pretty much every artist born after 1949, no? I have sometimes heard references in Japanese to "post Year 24 Group" artists, but that is not the name of group. It's simply noting that those artists came after the Year 24 Group and were presumably influenced by them. I strongly recommend removing this "two groups" business.

I am pretty sure that "two groups" trope comes from the Japanese version of this same article, but you should be aware that that version is in even worse shape than this one. Unfortunately, editorial policy is pretty loose in Japanese Wikipedia. Solid references are often (usually) missing, and original research is rampant. (If you read Japanese, take a look at the discussion. I just complained bitterly about this fact there six months ago. And have yet to receive a response.)

A second problem is this phrasing: The exact membership is not precisely defined, but includes[....]

No. No one can say any given artist is objectively a member of the Year 24 Group. There is no authority here. The artists labelled as such will all tell you they never considered themselves part of such a group. Various critics or fans or scholars make their own lists, and every list is different. I have my own, which, for example, doesn't include Riyoko Ikeda. More accurate phrasing would be, "The exact membership is not precisely defined, but artists mentioned by critics or scholars as possible members include [....]"

But then you would have to find concrete references by critics or scholars. For example, Osamu TAKEUCHI in his 1995 "Sengo manga gojū nen shi" ("Fifty Years of Postwar Manga History" writes "Such talents as Moto Hagio, Minori Kimura, Yumiko Ōshima, Keiko Takemiya, Ryōko Yamagishi, etc." (page 139) But in fact it's rare for a writer to actually offer a complete list. There's always an implied "et cetera." Kuno Nagatani, in his 1994 "Nippon mangaka meikan" ("Directory of Japan's Manga Artists") describes Hagio and Takemiya as members in their entries, and in his entry for Yamagishi describes her as being "Called a member of the Year 24 Group, along with Moto Hagio, Yumiko Ōshima, Keiko Takemiya, and Toshie Kihara." Which is curious, since he doesn't mention the group in his entry for Ōshima, and he doesn't even have an entry for Kihara. And then there's Yoshihiro Yonezawa's 1991 "Kodomo no Shōwa-shi: Shōjo manga no sekai II, Shōwa 38 nen - 64 nen" ("A Children's History of Shōwa-Era Japan: The World of Shōjo Manga II, 1963-1989"), which is ambiguous as well. The subtitle of the chapter on the relevant period includes a reference to the Year 24 Group, but Yonezawa never tries to define that group. The structure of the chapter can be interpreted to mean that he considers Hagio, Ōshima, Takemiya, and Yamagishi to be the group, but then again, it could be interpreted to include Chiki Ōya, Toshie Kihara, Mineko Yamada, Shinji Wada (a man), Sumika Yamamoto, Yōko Shōji, and Nanae Sasaya. And in her essay in that same chapter, novelist Azusa Nakajima includes Riyoko Ikeda. But these are all old references. No doubt there are plenty of others, more recent, that could also be cited. But SOMETHING has to be cited.

Which is a very roundabout way of saying that the term is nebulous and we should make very clear that it is nebulous, including concrete references and avoiding declaratives that we can't back up.

I suppose I could edit in all those references and edit out the statements that can't be supported, but some might feel I am trying to push my own ideas on the article and argue that I shouldn't be involved in editing. But I will just point out that although four things I've written are cited in this article, the one thing I wrote specifically about this topic is not: "The Magnificent Forty-Niners," in The Comics Journal #269, pp 130-133. Matt Thorn (talk) 02:30, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
 * I just posted the text of my 2005 piece to my blog.Matt Thorn (talk) 04:26, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
 * I went ahead and made the changes I recommended, and did some general cleaning up and adding of references.Matt Thorn (talk) 14:05, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Hello Matt! Just saw your message on twitter. :)
 * Just to say that I rewritten the French version of the article months ago for the same reason than you (although our version was even worse). For the members, in addition of mentioning that the members are variable (mentioning few criteria used by the commentators) I basically choose the list you made in your article in Fantagraphic's anthology and I added to it Riyoko Ikeda since she's also often mentioned in the sources I used, most notably by Kayo Takeuchi in her « The Genealogy of Japanese Shōjo Manga (Girls' Comics) Studies » (U.S.-Japan Women's Journal, no 38,‎ October 2010). Those are the two main sources that I used for the French version, since sadly I can't read Japanese yet.
 * Takeuchi's paper is interesting, since she comments the commentators. She also mentions the subdivision of 70's/80's shōjo into three main streams by Miyadai Shinji. With one way the "shi-shōsetsu, intermediate novel style" (otometic) trend, the "canonical Western literature style" (Forty-Niners & co) trends and then the "popular novel style" trend (including Ikeda, thus excluding her from the Forty-Niners). Maybe it could be more interesting to place the Forty-Niners in that logic, especially for cleaning the mess of the post-Year 24 thing maybe? I didn't for the lack of proper article detailing the idea of the 3 trends.
 * Well, the French version of the article I made is still far from perfect: totally incomplete (by the lack of Japanese sources…) and I probably still did some approximations or even errors of interpretations of the sources (I'm particularly not satisfied by the short descriptions of the mangaka or the summary of the 50's/60's decades). But if it can helps you in any way, I prefer to mention it. (especially considering the organization, like having real sections)
 * Good luck with improving the article. And also, I really wanted to thank you about your dedicated work about shōjo manga and all your translations! You really are an inspiring person. --Lady freyja (talk) 07:00, 7 June 2017 (UTC)