Manga publishing is a huge industry in Japan, which has the largest and most diverse comics industry in the world. It’s really beginning to gain a foothold here in the US, if the library shelves and bookstores are any indication. I was introduced to it in Raw Magazine in the early 80s, a special section in #7 that introduced Garo Magazine stalwarts such as Yoshiharu Tsuge and Shigeru Sugiura in English for the first time. I got tipped to some cyberpunk titles such as Akira that my brother brought me to read, and he’s also the one who introduced me to the pioneering anime Cowboy Bebop. I tended to avoid delving into it as I tried to dial back on my collecting hobby when I moved into my current small apartment. But small publishers such as Picture Box and others made a point of publishing landmark alternative manga from Garo in the 60s, and I finally got hooked. Comics by such early pioneers as Seiichi Hayashi and Osamu Tezuka were the first alternative comics (aimed squarely at the adult reader, and cultivating an artistic or literary sensibility) published in the world. At the time, European comics were exploring adult genre such as detective and western stories, and Marvel in the US had taken tentative steps toward adult themes in superhero characters, but the Mangaka such as Hayashi and Sugiura were the ones blending themes of alienation and feminism with influences from French New Wave cinema and Pop Art and psychedelia, along with Japanese folk art and a healthy dose of American film and comics pop culture leftover from the occupation. These are very exciting works, only recently available in English.
To say it’s a fascinating period in comics history really doesn’t go far enough. Japanese pop culture has become a rival to American pop culture in every way. Manga remains a huge influence, with the imagery popping up in J-Pop, K-pop, American cartoons and advertising, and fine art. Manga is where ‘Japanese Disney’ Miyazaki, started, and his appealing style is a mash up of Steampunk ( Victorian retro futurism) with Otomo’s cyberpunk ( punk-inflected, dystopian sci-fi, later epitomized by William Gibson, Bladerunner, and Matrix) as first seen in the Manga epic Nausicca. But there are many sub genres of Manga, and feminist voices such as Yamada Murasaki and Fumiko Takano emerged soon after in the 70s and 80s.
On a whim, I picked up a new English translation of an 80s comic, Miss Ruki, from Copacetic.com. At the same time, I saw a new edition of Akira at the library and decided to re-read it. The two could not be any different, an encapsulation of the variety and genius of Manga,
Miss Ruki, in fact, reminds one of John Stanley’s Little Lulu. Subtle humor, light, clean lines and colors, positive female perspective. Anyone wondering where 1st wave feminism went to ground during the reactionary 50s need look only as far as Lulu, a fierce combatant in the war of the sexes, indefatigable in picking herself up after every defeat, dusting her dolly and herself off, and marching straight back into the fray. Persistence was a necessary component of Second Wave feminists, and pop culture provided entree for woman to a public forum. Comics were an early proving ground for Second Wave auteurs during the 70s and 80s, and many cite Lulu as an influence. A group of women in comics formed a group, Friends of Lulu, to encourage girls to make their presence felt in the then male bastion of comics.
Miss Ruki is a denizen of Second Wave, liberated- but practical, independent and yet still traditional, trying to have it all, a Bento box of sweet and sour silliness, a home body, bookish, with her tea time self possession. Definitely not a Riot Grrl. What she shares with Lulu is a delicate, airy line work, minimalist color and sangfroid. A knowingness devoid of cultural convention, the ability to come up with plan B… C… D…
Akira, Otomo’s post apocalyptic teen gang motorcycle drama, a West Side story for the Nuclear age, is the work where the manga that Americans know, the wide eyed kinetics and speed line dynamism, began. Tezuka’s Astro Boy, as important as he was in Japan, was a curiosity in America, much like Tintin. Miss Ruki, which originally appeared in a women’s lifestyle magazine, would be just as foreign to them. But they both come from Japan’s burgeoning pop culture, and one suspects they will both soon be as familiar as MoMos and dumplings.
Manga is still innovating, if there was any doubt. I recently ordered a copy of Sandbox from the zine kings Kus!, a Latvia company run by David Schilter, who posts open calls to cartoonists for his “A6″ sized anthology ( A6 is about 4×6”, for us perpetually metrically challenged Americans). Associated with that is a series of Mini-Kus zines, featuring one artist apiece. This is No. 134, and the artist is Yuichi Yokoyama, an exciting Mangaka I’ve written about before. Manga has rich relationship with onomatopoeia, as explored by Robert S. Petersen in “The Acoustics of Manga”, featured in the “Craft, Art, Form” section of the sturdy and very useful A Comics Studies Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester. Yokoyama has taken this strength and made it into the star of the show in comics such as Plaza, which features a parade in which the noises of the parade are integrated into the design of the comic in a vivid, literally synaesthetic way.
Plaza (2022) contains no dialog, only large panel-filling sound effects that threaten to subsume its non stop action. Sandbox, like World Map Room (2013), does contain dialog, but the motivations of the surreally conceived characters is not spelled out. Their faces are mask like as they trudge through sand, to the sea. his comics all become a sort of spectacle, played out in the kinetic and sensual imagery, and reading Yokoyama is unlike any other comic. The only artist I can think to compare him to is Gary Panter, in his Jimbo saga, and especially in Jimbo in Paradise, not stylistically, per se, but for a sense of complete immersion in the artist’s built world.
The diversity of manga continues to amaze me. I continue to explore intriguing artists from all eras, and I think the melting pot of influences (from Japanese folk art and songs to American western movies and comics in the occupation era, to French and American art, movie movements during the revolutionary Garo Magazine era, etc) makes Manga the comics culture that comes closest to fulfilling comics’ potential as an art form.
All without losing sight of the fact that sometimes we don’t want an art form, we just want something cheeky, like Little Lulu, or Miss Ruki.
#manga #comics #alternativecomics #
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