Strange Windows: The Adventures of Tintin in Otherland, Part 1

Posted on June 30, 2010 by Alex Buchet

The children’s comics album Tintin au Congo, by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé, has been much in the news of late– and not in a good way.

In Britain, the Commission for Racial Equality has condemned the book’s “abominable” racism (and proving once more that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, its sales have jumped 5000% on Amazon UK). It’s been banished from the children’s section in bookshops and libraries across America and the UK, in chains such as Border’s.

Finally, following a lawsuit brought by a Congolese student, Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, a court in Brussels is to determine whether the book should be banned in Belgium. Similar lawsuits have been brought in France and in Britain.

So: just how racist is Tintin au Congo?

“And to say that in Belgium all the li’l Whites are like Tintin!”

“Me find Tintin’s machine…”

“If him no come in 1 year and 1 day it for you…”

“And if you no be good you’ll never be like Tintin!”

“Never again me him see a boula-matari [stone-breaker– the title given to Stanley, the white, conqueror of the Congo] like Tintin”

(Dog) “That Snowy…what a guy!”

Note in the upper left-hand corner: fetish statues of Tintin and Snowy before which a Black man kneels in worship.

I could post many more cringe-worthy excerpts, but why bother?

Yes, Tintin au Congo is racist. Whether it should be restricted or banned is a debate I’ll leave to others, although I certainly wouldn’t allow a child of mine near it.

“So what?” the informed comics reader might object.

It’s no new discovery that throughout comics history racist and bigoted content has permeated the art form. The Imp in Little Nemo:

Connie in Terry and the Pirates:

Ebony in The Spirit:

The first appearance of Ebony White; art by Will Eisner

…the list of offensive stereotypes is endless.

One balances a historical approach with a rejection of such inadmissible values, and one moves on.

But the case of Tintin — and of his creator, Hergé — warrants more thought.

First, unlike the vast majority of popular comics with racist elements, Tintin remains relevant.

The series of 23 albums has sold, to date, over 200 million copies in sixty languages and still sells briskly. It has spun off magazines, toys, television shows, feature films; Stephen Spielberg is now in post-production of a blockbuster adaptation of The secret of the Unicorn. Tintin isn’t enjoyed only by middle-aged fans, either; children respond just as eagerly to his adventures today as they did eighty years ago.

So a certain level of scrutiny is justified, simply because of Tintin’s effect on the culture, and on young minds in particular. Tintin au Congo is the most egregiously racist, but most of the other albums have disturbing aspects as well.

I’m interested in Tintin’s racism, xenophobia, and general fear of the Other for different reasons.

Tintin changed over the years. By which I mean that the individual albums were redrawn, rewritten, compressed and otherwise redacted, some more than once: L’Ile Noire (The Black Island) exists in three versions, from 1938, 1943, and 1965.

And in these redactions, the racism has been drastically toned down. Take this example, from (top) the original, and (bottom) the revised versions of Le Crabe aux Pinces d’Or:

And the above shows why I speak of a toning down of the racism, not of its elimination. The caricature of a brutal black is replaced, true – by the caricature of a brutal Arab.

Note that the above change was not made at Hergé’s initiative: it was his American publisher, Simon and Schuster, who demanded it (as well as the ‘whitewashing’ of four Black characters from Tintin in America. ) As Hergé sardonically remarked,

“What the American editor wanted was the following: No Blacks. Neither good Blacks nor bad Blacks. Because Blacks are neither good nor bad: they don’t exist (as everyone knows, in the USA.)”

Thus a racism of caricature is displaced by a racism of denial.

Indeed, the revised editions function as palimpsests—and as with all palimpsests, the ghost of the original text is sensed. Or shall I make a psychiatric analogy and speak of the return of the repressed? Whichever — I find the tension between the clean images and cleaner morals of the modern editions, and the nasty energy of the originals, gives the strip much of its strange and seductive flavor; something subterranean, something I only intuited until I came face-to-face with the older, rougher, uglier incarnation of the strip.

But the other changes in Tintin over time were rooted in the personal evolution of its creator. He progressed from a narrow-minded petty bourgeois stuffed with the ignorant prejudices of his time and caste, to a far more generous spirit eager to engage the world—and the Other—as it truly is. It took him a mere forty years.

In the next instalment (Update: now posted here), we’ll review the background of Georges Rémi aka Hergé, and the shocks to his world that caused his long climb away from simple bigotry; and in particular his meeting with a young artist from China.

____

The entire Tintin in Otherland is here.

All art copyright Studio Hergé/Moulinsart.

Komikusu, Selling Awesome Manga: Belated Conclusion

Posted on June 30, 2010 by Noah Berlatsky

I was originally not going to write a conclusion for last week’s Komikusu discussion. But then I was chatting to Tucker Stone, and he mentioned that he’d enjoyed reading the roundtable.

This took me a little aback, because Tucker’s come out fairly strongly in the past against the “we must read more lit comics!” meme as it applies to Western comics. In an interview with Tom Spurgeon, for example, Tucker said:

There’s a temptation to label mainstream fans as being lazy for not caring about Swallow Me Whole or Blankets, to call them “bone-ignorant” — that’s just a bunch of horseshit. It’s an attempt by boring assholes to assign an overall meaning to a bunch of personal choices made by a group of people that those boring assholes don’t know anything about. On an individual level, I’ve heard a couple of people say they don’t want to read comics that focus on the mundanities of regular life, but I’m more often exposed to people who just like what they like because it’s what they fucking like.

I actually agree with that. Yet, at the same time, I’d like to see some more interesting manga titles succeed in the U.S. So…what’s my problem? Why does the push for more interesting comics make me itch in a Western context and not in a manga one?

Perhaps the answer is simply that I’m inconsistent. But, appealing as that solution is, I think there’s actually something else going on. Specifically, the way the debate is framed in a Western context tends to be different than the way the folks on this roundtable framed it. As an example, here’s Sean T. Collins discussing his wish that there was more discussion of western lit comics in the blogosphere.

I’ll tell you what my big question is: Why do superheroes dominate the online conversation the way they do? Last week saw the release of Jim Woodring’s Weathercraft and Tim Hensley’s Wally Gropius, two gorgeous and weird books that truly make use of the stuff of comics and contain the kind of material you can mentally gnaw on for days on end, but I guarantee you that no matter which comics blogs you read, you read more about Paul Levitz’s return to the Legion of Superheroes. And chances are good that if you’ve read about Daniel Clowes’s Wilson, what you read prominently featured that page where the character makes fun of The Dark Knight. What gives? If you want to make the argument that sheer numbers justify the choice of what bloggers and comics sites cover, I suppose that’s your prerogative. And don’t get me wrong — I read and enjoy multiple superhero comics every single week, and have lots to say about a lot of them. I also understand the need to make a living, which in Internet terms means unique pageviews.

But so much of the comics Internet consists of individual or group blogs where, presumably, there’s no editorial mandate to maximize hits. Indeed, the major selling point of the blogosphere is its lack of the traditional gatekeepers and incentive structures that bedevil mainstream journalism. Meanwhile, even the big group blogs owned by major communications corporations tend to be personality-driven, reflecting the interests and styles of their writers to a refreshing degree — and those writers tend to be interested in all sorts of comics, in their spare time at least. So yes, the nature of the coverage is often idiosyncratic, which is great. But why is that the comics being covered differ so little from what you’d read about on Marvel.com or The Source? Should those of us in the position to do so make an effort to broaden the scope of what we’re presenting to our readers as the comics worth buying, reading, and talking about?

And here’s Kate Dacey responding to Sean in that comments thread.

There’s a similar divide in the mangasphere as well: a lot of sites focus on mainstream shonen and shojo titles (the manga equivalent to tights and capes, I guess) while neglecting the quirkier stuff. To be sure, there are many sites that cover the full spectrum of titles, or focus on a niche, but the pressure to stay current with new releases and draw traffic discourages a lot of folks from waxing poetic about the stuff at the fringes. Looking at my own site stats, for example, a review of Black Bird or My Girlfriend’s A Geek will attract a much bigger readership than, say, The Times of Botchan.

Which brings me to the argument I’d like to see explored somewhere: how do we interest older readers in manga that’s written just for them? What kind of marketing support would, say, the VIZ Signature line need in order for some of those titles to crack the Bookscan Top 750 Graphic Novel list? Are there genres or artists we should be licensing for this readership, but aren’t?

Kate’s post there is what inspired me to organize this roundtable. And obviously there are close analogies between what she’s saying and what Sean is saying. But I think there are important differences as well. Mainly — Sean makes the dissemination of lit comics into a moral issue. “Should those of us in the position to do so make an effort to broaden the scope of what we’re presenting to our readers as the comics worth buying, reading, and talking about?” he asks, and the answer is obviously that yes, we should. The problem for Sean is that super-hero comics are taking up too much space because the people in the blogosphere aren’t doing their job in educating their readers about better fare.

Kate starts from the same place — how do we get more better manga out there? But she doesn’t bother with the moral question at all; instead she goes right to logistics. Not “you people should be doing more!” but, “presuming there are people who would like to read different kinds of manga out there, how do you reach them?”

Kate’s pragmatic approach was absolutely the one adopted by the roundtable. Erica Friedman tried to figure out how scanlations could be used legitimately to make more and different kinds of niche mangas available. Brigid Alverson, Deb Aoki and Kate herself talked about practical marketing steps that could be taken to reach new audiences. Peggy Burns pointed out some strategies that have worked for Drawn and Quarterly in the past. Ryan Sands and Ed Chavez tried to map out the historical lay of the land, explaining how manga has been categorized and sold in different ways at different times in both the U.S. and Japan. And Shaenon Garrity offered some more possible solutions, while also pointing out some possible pitfalls.

If you read through these pieces, though, what’s almost as noticeable as what is said is what isn’t. Nobody in the roundtable says that the problem is that readers’ tastes suck. Nobody says the problem is that bloggers aren’t doing enough to promote the right kind of manga. Both Shaenon and Deb mention Naruto in a “yep, the manga we’re talking about aren’t going to sell like that” kind of way — but they don’t seem resentful of Naruto’s success, the way Sean Collins seems resentful of superheroes (despite the fact that he reads them himself). In fact, unless I’m missing something, nobody in the roundtable says anything mean about mainstream, successful genre manga at all.

And why should they? The success of mainstream genre manga doesn’t hurt sales of To Terra or A Drifting Life or Travel or what have you. Because, as everybody in the roundtable seems to realize, the people who are buying Naruto — they aren’t the audience for Emma or Tramps Like Us. Not that nobody could possibly read or like all of those series, but simply that the demographic is different. If you want to increase sales of Oishinbo, the way you do that is not to go after readers of Gantz. The way to do it, as Shaenon says, is to get it into cooking stores.

Lit comics have had a lot of success in the U.S. precisely by finding different audiences. But the comics scene here is still so small, and still so defensive, that its vision still seems to be defined to a surprising degree by the mainstream. It’s not just Sean by any means — super-hero crap is, in general, seen as not just bad, but oppressive. There’s only room for so many comics, and the bad forces out the good. It therefore becomes every intellectuals duty to battle against the filth.

I don’t know that the manga scene in the U.S. is bigger than the Western comics scene. But it’s more demographically diverse, and it always has before it a pretty compelling vision of a possible world in which there are no mainstream comics, because comics themselves are mainstream. As a result, manga critics seem to have figured out what Western comics critics still have some trouble with. Namely, improved morals don’t sell comics; better marketing does.

Of course, just because manga folks have figured this out doesn’t mean that there will ever be more awesome manga available on these shores. But it seems like a good first step.
____________
The entire Komikusu roundtable is here.

Visual Languages of Manga and Comics

Posted on June 28, 2010 by Stephanie Folse

Hello! I’m known as Telophase in various places online, and when I dropped a couple of comments about the visual language of manga on a post a couple of weeks month or so back, Noah asked me to make a guest post (originally during the time that HU was down, and rescheduled for today). So here I am! My day job is an academic librarian, but I wrote a few posts on manga layout back in 2005-2006, when I was trying to figure out how to improve my own comics, and served as Tokyopop’s manga columnist for a while back in the day.

As a convenience, I’m going to use the shorthand of “comics” to refer to American comics, and “manga” to refer to Japanese comics, although there’s a strong argument to be made that “comics” is just “manga” in English translation. (What do Japanese call Spider-Man? Manga!) It just means fewer chances for me to typo “American” and “Japanese.”

I also want to stress that I don’t consider either of the trends I’m going to discuss to be better or worse than the other – they’re both effective ways of telling a story, depending on the needs of the story, the audience, and the industry.

Usually when discussing the visual language differences between manga and comics, manga is discussed in terms of higgledy-piggledy shoujo panels, speedline overload, sweatdrops, and nosebleeds, and nobody pays attention to the way the art elements and speech balloons are structured to steer your gaze through the page, but I think this may be a more defining characteristic of manga than all the sweatdrops and nosebleeds in the world.

Comics appear to have a much less obvious push through the page, often relying on American readers’ style of reading left to right first, then, if needed, secondarily directing the reader’s gaze through the page by use of action lines and other cues in the art.

I think these differences, more than the art styles, form the core of the two visual languages of manga and comics.

Let me see if I can simplify these to some guidelines:

Japan: First, follow where the art and speech balloons are pointing you. If that fails, read right to left, then up to down.

U.S. First, read left to right and then up to down. If that fails, follow where the art and speech bubbles are pointing you.

This is not to say that these guidelines are slavishly adhered to! There are many examples of the rules being broken, but I think they represent a general trend (and, perhaps, fundamental difference) in each industry.

How did this come about? I think the structure of the manga industry is a major factor. Many of the most popular (and thus influential) manga are published weekly in chapters of 15-30 pages, collected with other manga into phone book-sized anthologies called tankoubon. (Edit: I misremembered – tankoubon are the books the chapters get collected into later. Zasshi are the magazines.) Shounen Jump is one you’ve probably heard of if you’ve paid any attention to manga being translated and published in the States. The publishers of tankoubon have an economic motive to get you to consume as much manga as possible as fast as possible, because they want you invested enough in the stories to purchase next week’s tankoubon. Because of this, there’s often strong editorial control over each manga, leading to more uniform layout techniques (and possibly even house styles, although I haven’t done any comparison between publishers).

Here’s an example, a spread from Bleach, one of the Shounen Jump properties and one of the most popular manga in Japan. The first image has the spread itself, while the second traces the action lines through the page, the path your eyes take as you read. Note how every important facial expression and image is included in that line.

Bi-weekly and monthly manga are not as subject to this editorial control, and the mangaka have a greater degree of freedom to diverge from the standard and to experiment. I still see similarity to the weekly manga layouts, though – the biggest of which is that the main action lines through a page tend to steer your gaze across characters’ faces, or across important items or spaces in the art.

You can see this in the following spreads from a manga about ekiben otaku (ekiben = regional specialty bento [boxed meals] you can get in train stations; otaku = obsessive fans). I’m not sure of the title because I don’t read Japanese, but a friend thinks it translates to The Solitary Love of Ekiben. I want you to note how the speech balloons often frame the character who’s speaking, or the piece of food being discussed. (Also note the speedlines of AWESOME surrounding the bento in the second spread. The entire manga is nothing but ekiben porn, train porn, and landscape porn. It is the geekiest and yet best thing ever. And there are four volumes of it!)

Something in manga layout that I have yet to find in comics is the action line forcing you to read backwards through part of a page. Note this spread from Fruits Basket. At first glance it’s chaotic and if you’re not well-versed in the visual language required to read this, you may get lost.

But if you look carefully, you’ll notice that not only are the speech balloons positioned to pull you through the page, often the characters themselves are pointing you at the next stop on the journey through the page. The characters’ bodies and speech balloons break panel boundaries deliberately, not randomly, and drag your eye across the portions of the art that emphasize the characters’ emotions or tell you what is going on. In the third panel of both pages, you even read backwards – left to right – through the panel.

(As an aside: now that more and more Japanese are reading manga on their phones, I expect the layouts are changing to fit the new medium. I visited Japan in 2007 and a Japanese woman showed me a yaoi manga she had on her phone. When you paged to the bondage scene, the phone vibrated.)

In the U.S., until the recent Graphic Novel Revolution the most common way to get comics was by purchasing individual monthly chapters (I am not familiar enough with older comic practices to know what the usual release schedule was before the 1970s and 1980s). There’s no economic motive to push the reader through the book as fast as possible, so the layout doesn’t need to focus on reader speed and the artist can do other things with page composition and action lines. I might even be able to make an argument that there’s a motive to slow reading down a bit, so that the reader feels she got her money’s worth. (That would be one reason I cut down my comics reading when I had to start paying my student loans back after grad school – I couldn’t justify $2.99 for ten minutes’ entertainment!)

Here’s a couple of examples from Whiteout and V For Vendetta. I acknowledge that these aren’t quite comparable to Bleach – I should be using a current bestselling comic for a true comparison, but I’m stuck with what’s on our shelves at the moment. I think the general idea will hold, though.

In Whiteout, the speech balloons tend to float to the top of the panels as if they’re filled with helium. In most of them, the reader is expected to read the narration or dialogue and then look at the art in the panel before going on to the next panel. It reads in a more staccato way than the easy flow through Bleach, or even the less-easy but still flowing line through the panels in The Solitary Love of Ekiben. V For Vendetta bookends many of the panels with speech balloons, but the action lines that draw your attention to the important bits in the art are subtle, and the pages as a whole are subsumed to the rhythm of the grid that the panels are based on. In neither of the comics are the faces of the characters or specific pieces of the action deliberately highlighted in the way speech balloons frame characters and items in the manga examples I’ve shown you (forgive my wonky scanning: I’d rather not break the spines of the books).

This isn’t to say that comics don’t use dynamic action lines at all! Witness this spread in Kingdom Come:

There’s a strong zig-zag action line in the artwork on the left-hand page that swings your gaze across and up directly into the splash-page layout of the right-hand page. The only sour note I detect is the placement of the tiny “Indeed,” speech balloon on the right-hand page. I believe it’s supposed to be right in your path as you read through the bottom panel on the left and scan over the faces, but the superhero splash page is so strong that you tend to skip it. (I didn’t even notice it was there until I drew the redline!)

In Transmetropolitan, I often find that cigarette smoke is used to highlight action lines or characters’ faces and emotions, as in this spread. There’s an action line anchored by speech balloons, smoke, and white highlights that drags your view across Spider’s face several times in the left-hand page, but the action line through the right-hand page is not as active, even causing confusion in the transition from panel 1 to panel 2, because the figures in panel 3 are pasted on top of panels 1 and 2. This is a perfect example of “read from left to right first, then read following the cues in the art,” because if you followed the cues in the art, you’d read panel 1, then panel 3, then panel 2. (I like how Spider’s and Yelena’s smoke trails flow off the page. If you look closely, your mind connects them into one flowing line off-page.)

I think that’s a reasonably good illustration of what I see as the core of the different visual languages of manga and comics, and how if a reader is used to one language, it may take a little bit to get into the mindset of the other.

Thanks for letting me blather here!

Monthly Stumblings # 2: Frans Masereel

Posted on June 27, 2010 by Domingos Isabelinho

Frans Masereel’s Route des hommes (men’s path)

In my humble opinion the best Belgian comics artist is not Hergé… The best Belgian comics artist is Frans Masereel…

I vaguely remember mentioning this to a couple of Masereel’s fellow countrymen and I’ve got two different answers (I must add that, in my view, of course, I chose my collocutors well): (1) a nod of approval; (2) something like: In Belgium we don’t view Frans Masereel as a comics artist.

(Needless to say that, besides some puzzled expressions asking “who are those?,” most of my possible Belgian interlocutors would react in a third way calling me a lunatic, or worse, depending on the person’s degree of Tintinophily.)

The first reaction was understandable because said person is an artist himself and what he does is akin to Masereeel’s work. The latter one is more interesting to me at this particular moment because it permits me to enter one of the muddiest territories in comics scholarship once again (when will I learn, right?…), the old conundrum: what is a comic?…

I’m not going to answer that question because it can’t be done. All the answers that one can come up with are rigged because they depend on a previous particular view of what’s essential in a comic (and that’s not only prescriptive, that’s also arbitrary). To Bill Blackbeard, for instance, speech balloons and image sequences are essential so (even if there are older examples, namely, here or even, here) comics started with Richard Felton Outcault’s Yellow Kid in 1896.

Saying this though, doesn’t get us very far (my thoughts on the subject, are here, by the way). What interests me right now are two related points: (1) the sociological side of the problem; (2) anachronism. (1) Words have a (social) commonly agreed meaning. The dictionary tries to stabilize it, but significations aren’t fixed. There’s a reason why we call Maus a “comic.” The sense evolved to include serious work while the signifier stood still. Even so I accept that “comics,” to most people, don’t include Frans Masereel’s oeuvre. Perhaps it will, someday… (2) Frans Masereel didn’t view himself as a comics artist. As far as he was concerned he did wood engravings, that’s all… To call his cycles “comics” is an anachronism. Maybe so, but it seems to me that we are guilty of anachronism all the time and nobody cares. To go back to Tintin, the expression “bande dessinée” didn’t exist when Hergé started doing comics. Why do we continue to say that he did comics, then?… Did the Lascaux painters call what they did “painting?” Is that important? How logocentric can we get?…

As you can see in this 1915 illustration above Frans Masereel was a naturalist. But working for the pacifist newspaper La feuille in Geneva as a political cartoonist during WWI Masereel needed a less detailed, more urgent, style. As Josef Herman put it:

Working for La Feuille posed two main problems for [Masereel], both of a technical nature. One was that the drawing had to be done quickly, leaving no time for the careful, detailed draughtsmanship he had practised until then. The other was how to achieve maximum effect using poor quality paper, on which thin lines were simply lost. He solved these two problems with the true instinct of a man of genius. He avoided drawing with a fine pen and took a thick brush, in the process giving up the search for tonal texture. He now used large planes of intense black, drawing lines wherever needed with a brush. The emotional effect he achieved was staggering.

Maybe the times weren’t right for nuanced views of the world (?). I love Frans Masereel’s verve and variety (he did manga in the original sense of roaming drawings), but his ideological views and Expressionist style push him into a less than complex view of the world sometimes (the fat, jeweled, cigar-chomping capitalist, for instance, is a regrettable stereotype). You can see one of Frans Masereel’s political cartoons as published in La feuille below:

Frans Masereel was 75 years old when he published Route des hommes (1964). He did “novels without words” all his life (more than 50, according to David Beronä). Route des hommes is far from being one of his best (that would be Passionate Journey – 1918 – and, my personal favorite, The City – 1925).

Route des hommes is about the horrible and great things that happen to humankind. We find in the book Masereel’s usual topics: war, famine, exploitation, but also progress, team work, joy, etc…

The greatest thing about this edition of the Musée des Arts Contemporains au Grand-Hornu and La Lettre volée (2006) is that it shows both Masereel’s prep drawings and his wood engravings. In this way we have access to the artist’s creative process as never before.

We can see above how Frans Masereel cites another Belgian painter, James Ensor (ditto Jacques Callot at some point). It’s interesting how what seems to be a tree in the foreground of the drawing becomes a sinister figure in the wood engraving (death waits us all at the end). His composition changes (increasing the two background figures’ size) greatly improve his work.

Masereel used allegory a lot. In this drawing the cars represent careless rich people. The city lights aren’t just that, they connote poor people’s acceptance of the status quo: they’re hypnotized, alienated (as Marxists liked to say)…

…But, to tell you the truth, I prefer allegoryless Masereel. He could be very poetic, as we can see above…

Utilitarian Review 6/26/10

Posted on June 26, 2010 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

This week at HU was devoted to Komikusu, a roundtable on selling awesome manga. Contributors included Erica Friedman, Kate Dacey, Brigid Alverson, Ryan Sands, Ed Chavez, Shaenon Garrity, Deb Aoki, and Peggy Burns. Also lots of insightful comments from folks like Xavier Guilbert, Melinda Beasi, Sean Michael Robinson, and more. Thanks so much to all those who posted, commented and read. I learned a bunch.

Utilitarians Everywhere

Over at Madeloud I provide an introduction to doom metal.

Dooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom. It sounds threatening and, well, doom-like, but in fact doom metal is a giant furry mammoth that just wants to cuddle and roll all over you…inadvertently crushing you into a gelatinous blot of assorted fluids.

Maybe we should start over.

Other Links

When people think NSFW, they think of things like this.

Thinking Outside the Comic-Shop: Exposing Great Manga to Grown-Ups

Posted on June 26, 2010 by deb aoki

(or “Can Manga Muster Up Its Maus / Watchmen Mega-Crossover Hit?”)

As a reader of Hooded Utilitarian, you’re probably a little like me: you spend so much time in the world of comics and manga, you’re a little weirded out when you remember that the vast majority of readers in America still think that “comics are for kids.” Why do you think there are still magazine / newspaper / TV news reporters who trot out that tired headline “Pow! Zap! Comics Aren’t For Kids Anymore?” It’s because it’s news to them that there are lots of comics (ahem, “graphic novels”) that are written by grown-ups, for grown-up sensibilities.

Even now, if I mention that I read graphic novels to my friends, co-workers, family members and acquaintances who are non-comics readers (there are a lot of them), only 1-in-5 (maybe 1-in-10) will mention that they’ve read and enjoyed a graphic novel. They’ll usually name-check Maus by Art Spiegelman, or maybe Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. But it’s extremely rare that I’ll hear a manga title mentioned in this short list of grown-up graphic novels that reach non-comics readers. That’s really a shame, because manga has a lot of variety, and a lot of original and fascinating stories to offer to readers who normally shy away from superhero fare.

MANGA ABOUT ALMOST ANYTHING FOR ALMOST EVERYONE

I love lots of things about manga, but there’s one thing I especially love: it’s so incredibly diverse. There’s manga about almost any subject you can imagine. There’s manga written by and for men AND women. There are stories for adults, teens, tweens, girls and boys — almost any reader of any age, and about almost any subject under the sun. This year alone, I’ve read manga about:

Cats, dogs, fish, rabbits, dinosaurs
Cooking, wine, bacteria and fermentation
Basketball, football, ice skating, mountain climbing
Rock music, classical music, kabuki, acting, ballet
Fine art and fashion
Space exploration, astral projection, oceanography, medicine, religion
Autism, alcoholism, drug abuse, homelessness, serial killers
English maids, Spanish bullfighters, Turkish nomads
Gay, straight, cross-dressing, transgendered and transsexual characters
Single parents, office workers, soldiers, librarians, pastry chefs
…Even comics about making comics!

And that’s mostly just the manga I’ve read in English. If we open it up to manga that’s available in Japan, the variety of stories and styles is even greater.

Really great manga creators draw about subjects that they’re passionate about – and their enthusiasm, diverse art styles and points of view make their comics a joy to read. “Manga” is not a style – it’s a genre, just like “rock music” is a genre that can be expressed in a variety of ways for a variety of audiences.

So why do people have such a narrow perception of what manga is? As Ed Chavez mentioned in his essay, in Japan, “manga” just means “comics.” I say we need to think beyond that. In North America, calling manga “comics” limits a book’s appeal to just comics readers. Calling it “comics” forces a book to try to overcome what mainstream book readers assume “comics” are – they think comics are kids stuff.

TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING: FIGHTING FOR COMICS FANS’ ATTENTION

If American comics have to deal with the “comics are for kids” stigma, imagine what manga has to endure. Not only does manga in America have to deal with the “kids stuff” label, it also has to fend off assumptions held by mainstream comic book readers.

“Manga? Isn’t that girly stuff?”
“Manga? What, like Pokemon?”
“Manga? I can’t read that backwards crap.”
“Manga? Nah, I’m not into tentacle porn.”

As things stand now, a lot of manga that’s published in the U.S. is geared to appeal to people who already “get”manga: the fans who watch anime, or have already been introduced to the joys of manga, via the classic”gateway drug” manga titles like Akira, Lone Wolf and Cub, Fruits Basket, Naruto, Death Note and Ranma ½. But by focusing on the already “converted,” are we missing out on an opportunity to reach out beyond the comics shop, the manga aisle or even the “graphic novels” section of the bookstore?

Where there was once only a handful of manga titles published in the U.S., there are now hundreds – and a lot of them are targeted at teen readers. As a result, a lot of teen manga fans are overloaded with choices. There’s so much great manga for them to choose from nowadays, they despair because they can’t afford to buy everything they want to read. So faced with so many desirable titles, what do budget-strapped manga readers do? Some (okay, lots of) fans download it for free by any means necessary (Erica Friedman dove into the scanlation issue in her essay for this roundtable).

Meanwhile, on the other side of the comics shop, a lot of diehard superhero comics fans have a hard enough time keeping up the various crises on Infinite Earths, Darkest Nights, Brightest Days and Marvel zombie invasions. Why would they invest their spare time sifting through the hundreds of similar-looking manga on the shelf to find one that they might enjoy reading, much less consider buying, with their already tapped-out comics-buying budget?

These clichés of comics fans have tons of manga / comics titles fighting for their attention and their dollars. So why bother trying so hard to sell “arty,” “indie” or “grown-up” manga to this crowd? I say think bigger – and think outside the comic shop.

LET GO OF LABELS THAT LIMIT MANGA’S APPEAL TO NEW READERS

To break out of the comic shop/manga aisle “walled garden”, we need to stop focusing on selling this kind of comics for grown-ups merely as “manga” (or “seinen manga,” “josei manga” or even “indie manga”). Clinging to Japanese classifications may give a diehard fan a degree of satisfaction that they know that a particular manga was published in XYZ magazine in Japan, but classifying a particular manga title as a “shojo,” “shonen,” or “seinen” title isn’t all that helpful to a reader who doesn’t understand Japanese; it just adds another potentially off-putting “code word” for new readers to decipher.

Using Japanese labels to describe a book tells new readers that they have to take Japanese lessons or earn their “otaku cred” before they’ll be allowed into the “manga clubhouse.” As Shaenon Garrity pointed out, and as Ryan Sands also mentioned in his essay, what we consider to be “indie” in the U.S. doesn’t always jibe with how Japanese readers perceive the same series anyway.

Trying to sell manga based on how they were sold in Japan can cut off worthwhile books from the readers who might potentially appreciate them most. For example: Emma by Kaoru Mori is an exquisitely-drawn, painstakingly-researched, beautifully-told historical romance. It was first published in Comics Beam, an eclectic “seinen” or “mens'” manga magazine. Based on its romantic storyline, Emma was marketed in the U.S. as a “shojo” or girl’s manga series. Naturally, its “girly” look and subject led a lot of “sophisticated” comics readers to turn up their nose at this series. Although it was submitted for consideration, it was snubbed for the 2010 Eisner Awards.

That’s a shame, because I’d argue that Kaoru Mori is probably right up there as one of the world’s true masters of graphic storytelling. Her ability to capture nuances of character, emotion and relationships with just a few strokes of her pen is astonishing. Mori’s current series Otoyomegatari (The Bride’s Stories), which is as yet unlicensed in the U.S., has one of the most stunning, heart-pounding hunting scenes I’ve ever seen in print.

Why should anyone who loves comics deny themselves the pleasure of reading such a wonderfully-drawn, masterfully-told story just because it looks “girly” or (gasp) just because they have a thing against what they think “manga” is?

EXPOSING MANGA TO NON-MANGA READERS

Breaking out of the mainstream mindset that “all manga is Naruto” requires savvy and imaginative marketing on the part of U.S. manga publishers.

Manga is incredibly diverse. Selling every manga title with a “one size fits all” approach to readers is a grave disservice to these comics, and it limits their potential readership. I know it’s time-consuming to do so, but it’s probably more effective to sell graphic novels to various types of readers based on the various titles’ individual art styles and subject matter.

If we can’t get new readers into the manga section, then it’s up to us, publishers and people who want to see more “grown-up” manga get the attention it deserves, to put manga in front of new readers by bringing manga to where these prospective readers are getting information now: non-comics magazines, newspapers, blogs, TV shows, radio shows – anywhere they turned on to new ideas. One way to do this is to focus on the subject and style of the manga, and as Brigid Alverson suggests in her essay, pitch these unconventional graphic novels to non-comics media outlets.

While rare, several manga titles have gotten some attention from non-comics media:

Basketball manga by Takehiko Inoue (Real and Slam Dunk) was reviewed and Inoue was profiled in the L.A. Times during the Lakers – Celtics NBA Finals.
Kami no Shizuku (Drops of God) by Tadashi Agai (a.k.a. brother/sister team Yuko and Shin Kibayashi) has been written up in the New York Times, CNN and Decanter Magazine, and wine blogs. Alas, while it has been published in French, it’s not yet licensed in English.
Oishinbo has been featured in the pages of Bon Appetit, the food section in several newspapers and numerous food blogs. As a result, I’ve seen Oishinbo sold at cooking specialty shops like Omnivore Books in San Francisco and Good Egg in Toronto. Seven volumes of Oishinbo, each focused on a different food, are available from VIZ Media.
LA Weekly columnist Liz Ohanesian regularly writes about anime and manga culture with a hip, street-smart voice and perspective that’s not just “otakus writing for otakus” – check out her fab article about former Bratmobile singer Alison Wolfe’s role in localizing Ai Yazawa’s rock ‘n’ roll drama, Nana.
Whitney Matheson, from USA Today’s Pop Candy blog gave a shoutout to Detroit Metal City, Kiminori Wakasugi’s crass, brash and outrageous heavy metal comedy – and even named it as one of the top 10 best graphic novels of 2009, along with A Drifting Life and Oishinbo

Summit of the Gods by Jiro Taniguchi, a manga about climbing Mount Everest got a nice write-up in Outside Magazine. (Available from Fanfare-Ponent Mon)
Section Chief Kosaku Shima, one of the most popular “business manga” titles in Japan was written up in The Economist. Unfortunately, only a few volumes of the Kodansha bilingual edition of this series is available in English.
With the Light by Keiko Tobe, a series from Yen Press about a young mother’s struggles to understand and raise her autistic son has been featured on a few autism-focused parenting blogs.
GoGo Monster by Taiyo Matsumoto (VIZ Media) was nominated for the L.A. Times Book Prize alongside Asterios Polyp, Scott Pilgrim, and Footnotes in Gaza.
Ooku by Fumi Yoshinaga (VIZ Media), won the 2009 James Tiptree Jr. Literary Award – an “annual literary prize for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender.” Ooku certainly fit the bill, as it examines an alternate reality where most of Japan’s male population has succumbed to a mysterious plague, and the shogun is a woman.

Meanwhile in Japan, manga is featured in fashion magazines, alongside fashion photo spreads and celebrity interviews:

Manga creator Erica Sakurazawa (The Aromatic Bitters from TokyoPop) recently did a 6-page short story adapting the characters of Sex in the City as manga characters. This full-color comic was featured in the Japanese edition of Harper’s Bazaar as a showcase for both the Sex and the City 2 movie and the latest styles by Louis Vuitton, Prada and Versace.
Ai Yazawa’s Paradise Kiss (TokyoPop), a story about an aspiring model and fashion design students, was serialized in the pages of Zipper, a fashion magazine.

As Kate Dacey asked in her essay, why aren’t we doing more to reach the one audience that the U.S. comics industry has been ignoring or failing to reach for years: young women? If we can have manga versions of Twilight and Gossip Girl, why not Sex and the City comics? Why isn’t a series like Suppli, a series about the professional and romantic tribulations of a young woman working at an advertising agency reviewed or serialized in Glamour or Marie Claire? Why not have Bunny Drop, a completely relatable series about a single father and his young adopted daughter discussed in parenting blogs or magazines? And what if (as Shaenon Garrity suggested in her essay) Oprah actually plugged a manga series on her show or magazine? The mind boggles.

WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO TAKE IT TO THE NEXT LEVEL?

There are so many possibilities out there to explore. I’d love to see a regular columns about indie manga – or even have have manga featured more prominently in hip, artsy and pop-culture savvy magazines like Giant Robot, Hi-Fructose, Spin, Juxtapoz and VICE. Artistically edgy, smart and witty titles like Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu (Last Gasp), AX: Alternative Manga (Top Shelf) and I’ll Give It My All… Tomorrow (VIZ Media) are all appealing choices for these magazines’ readers.

Websites like SigIkki.com make it easy for new readers to sample manga online before they buy them; it’s a painless way to turn new readers onto manga they might not ordinarily be exposed to. It can only get better as more manga is available for sampling and reading online or for download via eBook readers like the Kindle or iPad.

It’ll take a lot of effort and outreach to get to the point where we have a manga title that’s as widely read as Maus or Watchmen. It won’t be easy. Books like that achieve a high level of attention and acclaim because they have a rare combination of factors going for them:

a great story that’s well-written, enjoyable to read and accessible enough to captivate even non-manga/non-comics readers
strong and consistent marketing support from publishers and creators
lots of great word of mouth from readers.

One only needs to look at the attention and care that Drawn and Quarterly put into promoting the work of Yoshihiro Tatsumi to see how it could be done. There are lots of good reasons why A Drifting Life made it onto more “Best of 2009” lists than any other manga title put out last year (It’s just an amazing book, period) – but I’d have to say that D&Q’s thoughtful and consistent marketing efforts made a huge difference too.

I think that manga’s version of the Maus/Watchmen “cross-over hit” will happen eventually – but it won’t if we content ourselves with just promoting manga to the already converted.

I believe in putting my money where my mouth is, so on a 1:1 basis, I recommend manga to friends based on their interests.

I gave a copy of Kami no Shizuku to a sommelier pal (he actually heard about it from the Decanter article, and he found it to be completely fascinating).
I’ve given copies of Solanin, GoGo Monster and Children of the Sea to friends who normally just read “indie” comics (they’ve come back to me asking for more recommendations).
I’ve turned on girlfriends to Emma just by describing it as being like a Merchant-Ivory film, or similar to Jane Austen books.
I gave Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture (Del Rey Manga) to a friend who is a technical editor who writes about waste-water management (she’s always asking me when the next volume will be coming out).
My cat-loving sister who hasn’t read a comic book since she stopped reading Archie comics 30 years ago is loving Chi’s Sweet Home by Konami Konata (Vertical).
And I’m pretty stoked at the reaction I’ve gotten when I’ve recommended Biomega to this particular friend.

So I’m doing my part – what are you doing to turn on new readers to manga that they might enjoy? Try it – you might be pleasantly surprised by the results.

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Update by Noah: The entire Komikusu roundtable is here.

Selling Awesome Manga

Posted on June 25, 2010 by Shaenon Garrity

As other people on this roundtable have pointed out, we’ve been using “arty manga” as a catchall term for a variety of niche manga with potential appeal to older readers: genuine alternative and underground manga (gekiga, the work of Junko Mizuno), offbeat manga similar in content to American indie comics (Viz’s SigIkki line, pretty much everything Fanfare/Ponent Mon puts out), mainstream manga aimed at adults (Ooku, A Drifting Life, Oishinbo), and basically any manga published before 1980. In Japan, a manga’s publishing category is usually determined by the venue where it first appeared, whether a mainstream magazine like Shonen Sunday, an edgier but still basically mainstream magazine like Ikki, an indie publication like Comic Beam, AX or the defunct Garo, or a totally alternative venue like self-published doujinshi or CD liner notes. This system is problematic in its own way (Comic Beam‘s “alternative” lineup runs the gamut from underground trip-outs like Junko Mizuno’s Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu to the mainstream-friendly Victorian maid romance Emma), but it does keep things simple.

In the U.S., the established categories are less clear. Jason Thompson has pointed out that, in terms of popularity and sales, manga in America can be divided into Naruto and everything else. Aren’t most comics “alternative” to most of America? So what the hell. For the purposes of this post, the manga under discussion are Awesome Manga, all the titles that are too smart, too weird and/or too old for the established comics audience.

They’re hard to sell. For years, it’s been a truism in manga publishing that alternative, adult and classic manga have to clear nigh-insurmountable odds to find an audience. Personally, I knew it was going to be an uphill climb when, in 2004, I heard the shojo manga Boys over Flowers, originally published from 1992-2003, dismissed by manga fans as “too old.” Most manga fans are lukewarm toward alternative or classic comics, and most fans of alternative and classic comics actively hate manga. This is slowly changing as manga permeates the larger comics culture and the manga audience ages, but we have yet to reach a tipping point where autobio manga or Black Jack reprints can reach American shores with expectations of a built-in audience. It still takes a ton of effort to get people to read awesome manga, and often you have to go outside the usual manga/comics venues to do it.

Many of the previous posters have suggested ways to market these titles. Based on my ten years of experience working for manga publishers, talking to people at manga publishers, and generally obsessing over manga publishing, here’s my take:

1. Selling outside the established comics readership. A great strategy if you’ve got a title that can sell that way. If you have the only comic in a non-comics section of the bookstore, you’re golden. Viz has been successful in getting Oishinbo stocked in cooking and food sections of bookstores, and even in cooking specialty stores, where it stands out. It helps that, for bookstores, Oishinbo has an easily grasped high-concept pitch: it’s the manga about food. Obviously it belongs in the food aisle! It may be harder to get, say, Ooku shelved in historical fiction, sci-fi or romance, even though it fits all these categories. But nonfiction manga–history, autobiography, instruction–can often escape the comics ghetto.

This is, of course, the same strategy followed by American alternative and small-press comics. Titles like American Born Chinese and Fun Home attracted only lukewarm interest in “mainstream” comics fandom at the same time they were making bestseller lists in the book market. Every alt-publisher dreams of making this strategy work.

2. Selling to libraries. At this point in the manga game, this is a no-brainer. Manga loves libraries and libraries love manga. Librarians tend to do a fair amount of research before purchasing new manga, so you can sell them with a more detailed pitch that explains the work’s artistic/literary/historical value. As far as I can tell, Tezuka’s Buddha has been the champ in this category. It’s got a double-barrelled claim to legitimacy: a work by the undisputed master of manga covering a Serious Historical Subject. (If you actually read Buddha, you’ll find that it’s more of an action-and-comedy-packed Classics for Children take than a reverent history, but whatevs.) In the dawn times of the manga business, Tezuka’s Adolf sold well to libraries for the same reason. Hitler equals Serious Literature.

The challenge, for titles that aren’t Buddha or Adolf, is convincing libraries that a manga they probably haven’t heard of, by a creator they probably haven’t heard of, covering an esoteric subject that may or may not be of interest to their patrons, is a must-buy because it’s awesome. At this point, most librarians have heard of Tezuka, but they may not be familiar with the Year 24 Group or care about its role in shaping shojo manga. They may not have heard the term gekiga. They may not see the literary value in a pulpy horror manga like The Drifting Classroom or Cat-Eyed Boy. And manga with graphic adult material is going to get them into trouble with parents no matter how carefully they shelve and label it, so they need to be convinced that it’s pretty damn great. That said, libraries are a manga publisher’s best friends, especially for titles with value beyond their immediate mainstream appeal.

3. Sweet book design. Again, a no-brainer at this point. Give manga publishers credit for picking up on Vertical’s initiative and putting a lot more effort into the design and presentation of awesome manga. Even Viz, which for years was reluctant to deviate from the 5 x 7.5″ glossy standard, has been publishing its Signature and SigIkki books in eye-catching outsize editions with matte covers, gatefold flaps and interior color pages. Fantagraphics’ cover for A Drunken Dream suggests that their new manga line will be a good-looking one, although the logo for the imprint is kind of spidery and weird.

Does good book design sell more copies? In some cases, yes. Chip Kidd’s line-up-the-spines design for Buddha makes the series look like a must-have, as does Drawn & Quarterly’s intimidating doorstop presentation of A Drifting Life. In other cases, not necessarily. In addition to Buddha, Chip Kidd designed Vertical’s editions of To Terra and Andromeda Stories, the only works by major shojo pioneer Keiko Takemiya available in English. Have you bought To Terra and Andromeda Stories? Didn’t think so.

4. The Internet. Putting awesome manga online for free browsing seems like a great strategy. After all, scanlators are always going on about how their piracy does the industry a favor by introducing readers to new titles, so why not use that power for good by introducing people to Moto Hagio and Yoshihiro Tatsumi rather than the latest borderline-pedo-porn strip out of Dengenki Daioh? Home-grown American webcomics survive, and even thrive, by building an audience online for material that might have trouble finding fans in print. Can you imagine a print publisher even touching the stick-figure math-nerd strip xkcd, much less figuring out a way to market it? So here’s the plan, presented Internet-meme style:

1.Put awesome manga online.

2. Build a fanbase and get the attention of critics.

3. Publish the manga in print.

4. ???

5. Profit!

That’s the logic behind sites like SigIkki.com, Viz’s online alt-comics initiative. The site does just about everything right. Rather than offering stingy samples, Viz posts entire volumes online. The lineup (all manga originally serialized in Ikki magazine) is solid but eclectic, including the haunting aquatic fantasy Children of the Sea, the quirky-cute sci-fi drama Saturn Apartments, brilliant up-and-comer Natsume Ono’s not simple and House of Five Leaves, edgy but accessible genre series like Afterschool Charisma and Bokurano: Ours, and out-of-left-field weirdness like Tokyo Flowchart and Bob and His Funky Crew. The site’s e-reader is excellent, a cut above the clumsy, slow-loading readers most publishers offer.

Are there things publishers like Viz could do better as they move online? Probably. My own feeling is that the Viz sites need more non-manga content: blogs, forums, exclusive material, anything that contributes a sense of community. That’s how all successful webcomics work. Hell, go to the frontpage for Penny Arcade, the biggest webcomic in the world, and you don’t even see the comic, just the creators’ blog posts about the gaming industry. (And a ton of ads, of course.) Scanlation sites have already achieved this; a big part of the appeal of the scanlation community is the sense of being part of an exclusive inner circle of alpha fans. For a lot of oft-downloaded titles (I’m looking at you, Weiss Kreuz), the manga itself is much less of a draw than the vibrant fan community that’s formed around it like an oyster pearl.

A wise cartoonist once gave me some advice for making a living from webcomics. He told me that online fandom revolves around stealing stuff, so the only way to survive is to build a cult of personality around yourself to the point that your fans feel bad about stealing from you. With manga, that’s hard to accomplish, because communication between creators and fans is severely limited–by language, by distance, and by the fact that these people are insanely busy drawing manga all day. Maybe the solution is to develop the publisher itself as a personality, Mighty Marvel style. The company that became Tokyopop started out this way; anyone else remember the funky editorials of DJ Milky in MixxZine? Not exactly the way we want the industry to go, but maybe the basic concept could be done more honestly and effectively online.

I guess I’m supposed to devote a paragraph here to talking about iPads, e-readers, smart phones, etc., but they’re going to be completely interchangeable with computers within a few years. Assume that everything I’ve said about websites applies to apps.

5. Things that don’t make a difference in sales. Flipping or unflipping. I honestly don’t think enough people care one way or another to make a noticeable dent in sales. Someone who says, “I can’t read right-to-left because it’s all foreign and hard,” or, “I can’t read left-to-right because it destroys the glorious purity of the manga-ka’s authentic Japanese vision OH GOD THEY PROBABLY DROPPED THE HONORIFICS TOO” wasn’t going to buy the damn book anyway. In the balance, it’s better to publish manga unflipped because it’s cheaper.

Getting celebrity blurbs. It’s really cool when famous people, or semi-famous people I admire a lot, share a fondness for my favorite manga. If such a person is willing to provide a blurb, the publisher should by all means go for it. But I’m not convinced that Junot Diaz’s recommendation of Monster did anything to spike sales. And he made that recommendation in Time magazine, the biggest mass-media platform you could hope to reach. Again, it’s cool when it happens, but I don’t know if celebrity endorsements do anything for sales–unless it’s someone who’s Internet famous, with the aforementioned cult of personality, and orders their minions to buy the book. Junot Diaz? He’s just another bestselling novelist with a Pulitzer. When Joss Whedon or the guy who played Wesley Crusher plugs Monster, maybe Viz will start raking in the benjamins.

Oprah would be good too. Somebody publish a manga version of The Secret. Only awesome.
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Update by Noah: The whole Komikusu roundtable is here.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: June 2010