If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.
You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

Manga

Page history last edited by Bryant Weaver 13 years, 7 months ago

Why Are Comics So Popular in Japan?

$4.2 billion dollar industry
22% of all printed material in Japan
Big as a phonebook, 25 stories of 20 pages each
published weekly
"The paperback editions of Bleach, a series about a ghost-spotting teenager that has been running in Weekly Shonen Jump for the past six years, have sold some 46 million copies (in a country of 127 million people)." Wired

The History of Manga

"Like early art forms in all cultures, Japanese picture scrolls had religious themes."
The 6th and 7th centuries

Buddhist temples marked by cartoons, probably by bored laborers

1192-1333 - Six Worlds of Buddhist Cosmology Scrolls
Hell Scrolls
Hungry Ghost Scrolls
Disease Scrolls
12th Century

the Animal Scrolls
Contained anthropomorphized animals mocking the Buddhist clergy
Farting contest
Phallic contests

Zenga - 1600 Edo period -ish
Edo Period

Political dissent was unacceptable, even in art
contact with foreign nations punishable by death.
Woodblock printing becomes cheap and fast
Subjects include lower class figures - courtesans, sumo wrestlers, Kabuki actors
Rise of merchant class made social classes unstable, and resulted in people demanding entertainment.

The Meiji Era

Surplus of influences from all over.
Increase in satirical comics
Charles Wirgman and George Bigot - big influences from the West who introduced perspecive, anatomy, and shading
Late 19th c. began to adapt US comics for Japanese audience

Pre-WWII to WWII

Modern Boys and Modern Girls
liberal facade / Marxist comics
20'3/30's Peace Preservation Law
Safe havens - children's comics and Ero-Guro-Nonsense
Compiled from magazines, not newspapers
Comic artists did an about-face
3 options: family cartoons (entertainment), one panel strips (propaganda), leaflets (propaganda)
one of the few exceptions

Occupation Japan

Kamishibai
Osamu Tezuka
Pay comic libraries

Boys' Subject Matter

Bushido - the warrior's ethic of loyalty, stoicism, and non-attachment
Samurai comics embodying certain characteristics
Co-opted by the gov't/military in WWII
Revived in a secular way, but then leading to a whole new type of samurai comic

philosophical
historical
violent - a lot of this can be seen in early wood block prints too
brooding
some of the best artwork out there
Sampei Shirato
Goseki Kojima
Hiroshi Hirata

Other comics take the place of/ feature similiarly male aesthetic

Sports
Yakuza
Spies - Golgo 13
School gangs

Girls' Subject Matter

What are the strange conventions (contradictions?) in the layouts or themes of girls comics? How are they explained?
"Compared to Europe and the US, women in Japan have had their sex roles rigidly defined and their socialization with the opposite sex restricted. In feudal times, women were often treated like chattel and until after WWII a woman's place was in the home before and after marriage - which was arranged. Duty and submission to parents, husband, mother-in-law, and in old age to her own male children precluded love in the Western sense. A web of obligation held most relationships together." pp 94
Why are androgynous or sexually ambiguous characters a must in girls' comics?

Work Comics

"From and early age in Japan, children, especially male children are taught that work and the effort put into it are the measure of a man's work." pp. 106
Shugyo - hazing
Apprentices - "The apprentice must learn, not by beaing creative on his own, but by mimicking the master step-by-step until the craft is internalized." pp. 109

What does this remind you of?
Shigoki

Work comics melodramaticize the mundane
Salaryman comics - how has the salaryman changed since 1984? (page 111)

The life of the Japanese salaryman

hierarchy
submission
madogiwa-zoku: "Those who sit beside windows"

Mah-Jongg comics
Pachinko comics
Modern Salaryman Manga - Salaryman Kintaro

Censorship vs. Taboos

1950's Horror Comics
"Popular art for adults in Japan has always had an earthy quality to it, but prior to the 1960's most children's comics were like those of the United States today." pp. 120
Two major reasons for the taboo-busting in comics

gag strips - sexual taboos
pay-library artists - violent taboos

Ninja Bugeicho
Ashura - "Disease Scrolls"

Taboo-breaking in Manga probably comes from:

Overregulation throughout history of what artists have to say
natural inclination to go further into "earthy" territory already staked out by popular entertainment
Eroticism can be linked back to popular woodblock prints in 18th and 19th c.

In the 1950's through the 60's, PTAs in Japan grouped to try to impose regulation of Manga, but were far more unsuccessful than their US counterparts.
Article 175 of Japanese constitution: illegal to sell, distribute, display obscene printed matter
Censorship prohibited by the constitution
Contradictions?

The Comic Industry

Artists

many work non-stop, with little time off

Hard work esteemed in Japan

Productivity defines your popularity (and income)

Men and women paid about equal (not true for most other industries in Japan)
Many begin, few rise to the top
Teams of workers

Publishers

“It is impossible to do business effectively in Japan without a harmonious relationship between all parties.” (pp 144)
Publishing centered in Tokyo
Editors are like shepherds

Profits

circulation of 4 mil., return rate of 2%
manga usually becomes animation

The Future (The present?)

the industry is becoming too popular, too mainstream, and thus its edgy appeal is lost.
Higher expectations of new artists
Pandering to the market share
Decline of the political cartoon
Rise of the Benko-manga and Explanatory manga
“The Japanese frequently bemoan the new visual generation’s lack of knowledge of ideograms, but often this is an unfair comparison of today’s schooled masses with an educated elite of the past, and it utterly disregards the utterly different linguistic environment the postwar generation lives in – thousands of phoneticized English words have replaced older Japanese terms written in ideograms.” Pp 152
illiteracy in Japan – less than 1% / U.S. over 20%
VCR’s!
The rise of Manga in the US

Pages on Specific Manga and Manga Culture

Anime Censorship in America	Astro Boy!	Boondocks and Manga relation	Boogiepop and Others	Hentai	Hiromu Arakawa and Fullmetal Alchemist	Lone Wolf and Cub: Effect and Comparison
Magical Girl	Manga Culture	Akira Toriyama's Legacy	Shojo-Ai	Shintaro Kago	Ties Between Anime and Japanese Mythology	Bleach: A Refleciton of Japanese Society
link	link	link	link	link	link	link
link	link	link	link	link	link	link
link	link	link	link	link	link	link
link	link	link	link	link	link	link
link	link	link	link	link	link	link