Monthly Archives: January 2009

Manga: What IS the Point? Part 4

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I’m batting cleanup. & I think Tom, Miriam, & Noah are perfect just as they are. So no suggestions for what they just have to read (outside every manga column I’ve ever written for TCJ).

Just three bunts, written listening to Animetal Lady:

The Point of Manga Is…

…to cocoon. Not just in shelves & shelves of 40, 50, 100 volume series– in character goods, posters, costumes, movies, soundtracks. Pencil boards, cel phones, cow catchers. You can use the new Kramers Ergot as a pup tent, but all of Dragonball could build the Great Wall.

The rest of it could fill the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

On land, people cocooned in manga cafes, even living them. Hikikomori, humorously presaged in Otaku no Video, who fear the sun. It’s all rather urban, where life’s a series of little boxes. Like the model-builder in Otomo’s Domu, the best comic on Brutalist architecture.

Also like the great wall of Mao’s Little Red Books in La Chinoise. But for fantasists, not ideologues. Otaku don’t conceal & carry.

…to Globalize the Youngsters (aka “The Daihatsu and the Olive Tree”).

If the 21st Century City is Asian, at least 20th Century Pop was American.

Every other country just imitates our pop culture, or at least they did. (I’m sure someone will comment me down. Knock yourself out, but give specific examples of a non-American pop scene that has spread worldwide like syphillis. What’ve you got, Godard? Scandinavian metal? Okay, Brits have a point if the Beatles leapt whole from Chuck Berry’s skull.)

The few robust pop pockets– Bollywood– usually traveled only with the diaspora. Anime & manga, though, had precious few immigrants to spread them. So foreigners stepped up.

They did well: you can find manga-style pop everywhere from Kuala Lumpur to Krakow.

I don’t know what the next non-American All-World pop culture phenom will be. My money’s not on Eurovision. I do know that there will be one. If it’s like manga, following it will take a big commitment– it’s two full-time jobs keeping up with translations and nobody’s hiring. It will have its own language and rules that make it seem exclusive. It will be modern but not Western, just like Japan.

And it will be some kind of sexy.

All of which explain part of Western manga/anime fandom. I always thought the point was to get all the non-prom kids to dress in notional wisps of spandex and pack them in steamy hotels at the height of summer. Good for them!

The only problem is, they’ll teach their kids to like Japan better than the US of A, so when Taro Aso shows up and peels off his skin to reveal the Reaper, we’re doomed. Unless we got a new president yesterday and our foreign policy’s changed.

Finally: the point of manga is best explained by Asian Steve.

He’s subtle Yin to blackasthenight‘s husky Yang. He has a radio show on a college station somewhere in the sticks. He plays K-Pop, though I doubt he’s from Incheon.

I caught it in the car, not long after a stint working on farm in Kurume with a trio of Korean college kids who belted songs at the pears all day. They spoke of Boa, so I called the station.

"This is Asian Steve."
"Hi, Asian Steve.  Do you take requests?"
"YES!  YES!  What do you want to hear?"
"Boa?"
"Which album?"
"I don't know!"

Then Asian Steve and I rocked to Boa as I drove into the sun. You weren’t invited, but we preferred it that way. Soon I arrived at the gent’s club, where I toasted in High Latin as we all tried to forget we’re surrounded by tobacco fields planted with crystal-meth users.

Conclusion: manga breeds Asian Steves. Great explainers, evangelists. But their chief should have the Christian name of Ron. “Manga Ron.” Get it?

???! I’m hilarious.

Anyway, that’s part of the point, right? Finding your own private ecosystem and then explaining the biodiversity within is a joy. Of course, that perspective dates me. Many readers younger than me don’t see the divisions, I think. And a handful of cartoonists, like Hilary Florido and Laura Park, effortlessly mix influences. They both lift from manga stuff that suits them, ditch the rest, and draw with a sense of Western cartoon history in their lines.

Sweet. Global culture, here we come.

Manga: What is the Point volume 3

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I saw the Akira anime first (in 2002, at a boyfriend’s house, so I wasn’t aware of its context in Japanese or American geek culture), and loved the art so much I started buying the big Dark Horse volumes.

They became, alongside Cerebus, the set of phonebooks that changed my life forever. I don’t know if I ever knew for sure what was going on, but I loved the character designs — I mean, is there anything so simply, beautifully creepy as aged decrepit children? Also, instead of the boys looking like girls, the female lead looks like a boy! I loved the panel layouts, which seem a lot closer to the western grid model than the shonen/shojo model, in my limited experience with the latter. I loved how iconic the big panels were (see below if you doubt the sincerity of my flattery). and I especially freaking love the way he drew architecture. I’m not a person who usually appreciates backgrounds or buildings, or straight lines, but his architecture made me feel things (I later read Domu, and saw how he learned to make anonymous modernist architecture so alive). Otomo is the artist who made me invest in a t-square, for good or ill.


Sometimes I Feel Like a Nuclear Bomb, 2005, oil on canvases

So, that’s manga. But all other manga I’ve tried has been exceedingly… you know, all right, I guess. I have tried: Astro Boy, Lone Wolf and Cub, Good-Bye, Steady Beat (an oel shojo manga), Beck, and just this month, Nana. None of them have really transported me, as in, made me identify with the characters and feel immersed in the settings. I’d probably pick up further installments in all of those series/oeuvres if they were lying around, but I’m certainly not running out to buy them.

In shojo and shonen (Beck is shonen, right?) manga, I have never been able to get past the character design conventions. It’s not really the big eyes that bother me, as much as the barely-there noses, the acute-angle chins, and the fact that characters’ (this is especially jarring on adolescent characters) heads are reeeeally small in proportion to their bodies. I know it’s just a cultural thing, and I’m fine with western-comics-style stylization which is no less stylized, and the failing is in me, etc. but I can’t get over it. Nana additionally, has the fashion-illustration-inspired style of everybody at least ten heads tall, and less than a head wide (well, it would be so if their heads weren’t inhumanly small and narrow) and I haven’t been able to suspend my disbelief (or, perhaps, suspend my body-image issues) past that over the course of two volumes.

I also think I have issues around the idea that Zoey brought up in comments to this post, about manga being meant to breeze through on the train. That ethos seems to be connected to the visual shorthand that puts me off, where people are always exploding with sadness or happiness or anger or lust, to where every explosion looks the same (and I haven’t learned to tell whether a certain violent outburst actually happened or not… this was worst in the oel series, perhaps oddly).

I start to feel cheated out of subtext, or subtlety, or characterization, even, sometimes (everyone gets embarrassed the same way, etc.). If everyone is blowing up all the time, what does blowing up even mean? Can you take a really good shojo or shonen manga, and read it several times, and see different shadings or interpretations each time? If not, then I guess I’m not the target audience for shojo manga, much as I love romance and heartbreak and interpersonal intrigue and all that stuff.

So if manga is boundless and limitless, readers, and you’re finding stuff for Tom already, this is what I’d like: a non-bleak, interpersonal drama with strong, complex characters (especially female characters, bonus if the POV character is female) who don’t explode every other page… and drawing like Katsuhiro Otomo.

I was gonna say more, about the implicit rivalry between manga and everything the English speaking world could ever produce, and my relationship to that as an English-speaking creator, but… I’m on a deadline with my humble English-speaking creation, and I really can’t slack off more, tonight.

Question for Kurt Busiek or Mark Evanier

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If Batman is the best because he makes himself the best, and if the Green Lantern Corps’ special rings are fueled by will power, then how come everyone gets to be a Green Lantern except for Bruce Wayne? He ought to be the greatest Green Lantern of them all.

It bothers me that nobody else has thought of this.

So Long, Loser

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Yes, the headline of this post is directed at everyone’s favorite Republican. But before I am a citizen, I am a copy editor. As our own Kaiser Wilhelm shuffles off to let us deal with the fruits of his truculence, ignorance, laziness, ineptitude and rampant need for ego compensation, the world press has been echoing a phrase from the well-respected center-right news publication The Economist. The problem is that, as far as I can tell, the phrase makes no sense. Here the phrase is:


Bush has presided over the most catastrophic collapse in America’s reputation since World War II.


Ok, we know about the current, ongoing collapse in American reputation. But what collapse in American reputation is associated with World War II? Does The Economist mean the time that the country was caught in a men’s room outside Boulogne with that French kid and some chocolate bars? Or, to be more charitable, maybe The Economist has in mind some collapse in American repute that happened before WWII. But that makes no sense either. We had our problems — the Civil War, race — but nothing that made the rest of the world think so badly of us. We were the big young country that was up and coming and kept on being up and coming.

As far as I can tell, the only serious pre-Bush blow to America’s standing was the one-two punch of Vietnam and Watergate. The morbid can debate whether that mess was worse than our current mess. But we can all agree it came after World War II.

 So, Economist, what the fuck are you talking about?  

Manga: What Is the Point? — Do Over

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Same thoughts as here, but differently presented. First time around I tried being sprightly and provocative, like a British op-ed columnist fussing about how actually the French can’t cook or TV game shows teach you about life or some other bogus, dumbass lifestyle issue. This time I’ll be straightforward.

So here we go:
I don’t get manga. I look at a page and want to look away. Reason: the stylization of figures appears to me to be highly uniform, and it’s not a particular stylization I like. Solid black hair, googly eyes, the kids who look like adults, the adults who look like kids, etc. The look turns me off. Further, its kindergarten feel makes it hard for me to believe worthwhile stories could be told using this stylization, or at least told to their advantage.
Because my aversion to manga is so sharp and immediate, I have never given the comics a chance. If you ask me about pistachio ice cream, all I can say is I don’t like the taste. But manga ain’t just an ice cream flavor (title of my forthcoming Young Adult novel). Manga’s look is what I react to, but there’s more to manga than its look.
Which is the missing piece from this post’s old version. I should have asked straight out: What am I missing?
Noah has already started to answer the unasked question. Point one: the googly eyes, etc., belong to just one style of manga. The girls’ stuff, apparently. There are lots more out there. Other looks.
One observation I’ll stand by: manga emphasizes high-speed, all-out forward movement of the reader’s eye. US superhero comics have also started to do so, but manga does it more and seems to lack any other approach to word-picture combination. Pleasant as the effect can be, having just one item on the menu seems like a drag. Noah says US superhero stuff is wordy — well, sometimes, because every flaw on earth can be found there except overerudition. But at least a few different verbal-visual gears are available. In manga it seems like there’s just the one.
But hey, maybe not. The fellows will tell me.
All right, I guess that’s it. Xavier, thanks for the links and info. You too, Anonymous — you’re ok. Richard, thanks for the joke. Bill, thanks very much for laughing at my jokes, because somebody’s got to. Blackasthenight, thanks just for being you.