I haven't had any odd looks in quite a while. When I purchase manga at a corporate store or special order it from a smaller operation, I'm just as likely to have an employee say something like, "Oh, cool. Have you read <fill-in-the-blank>?" as anything else.
It might have to do with location. New Orleans has a wide range of social classes and a number of college students, and it has a lot of older people who are into science fiction and fantasy.
Thanks to better distribution, better translations and dubs, and a bigger share of the marketplace, more folks are growing up with manga and anime, and people are getting some exposure to Miyazaki, etc. courtesy of television programming and word-of-mouth.
I find that manga- and anime, and comic books- are useful for cutting through certain alleged boundaries. I've had great conversations about manga, anime, even martial arts films with people of different races, socio-economic backgrounds, etc.
Miyazaki has an Oscar, and
Howl's Moving Castle earned him another nomination. The second
GitS movie was in competition at Cannes. A recent Absolut ad uses images from
Akira. New York's Museum of Modern Art had an anime exhibition in 2005; you'll notice that the program lists manga creators as well as the directors.
http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/film_me ... anime.html
Anime's far more respectable than it was, at least in the States. And I think the same can be said of manga.
I'm glad the creators of anime get awards and whatnot. Not because I care about respectability in itself and for its own sake, but because I imagine it's satisfying for them to see their efforts getting honored outside of Japan, and because it makes it easier for me to buy product.
Still, I had to deal with the dirty-look factor back in the early Nineties, and I realize that bias against anime and manga still exists. I don't think it has to do with anime or manga per se. It has far more to do with genre snobbery, with the notion that comics and animation are for kids, with the preconception that science fiction and related genres and paraliteratures are always adolescent in content.
Best solutions for that kind of snobbery, when you experience it: Get the person to read MAUS, PERSEPOLIS, Los Brothers Hernandez (sic), or Joe Sacco's "comic journalism" from Palestine and Sarajevo, or hand them Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's FROM HELL. Or pick the coolest anime or manga you can think of, and tell the person about it. Or, the simplest solution of all, ignore the person.
And if you haven't read Art Spiegelman's MAUS or Marjane Satrapi's PERSEPOLIS and EMBROIDERIES, shame on you.
P.S. to shadowferret- Just remember, if other kids give you funny looks, that probably means you're cooler than they are.
(You're looking at another nation's popular culture, digging artwork, getting involved in the stories, etc. And doing so makes you happy. To me, that's pretty nifty, pretty darned cool. If somebody else doesn't get it... well, just keep doin' what you're doin'.)