Category Archives: Roundtables

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.

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.

Manga:What is the Point volume 2

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Tom posted yesterday to say that he really doesn’t like manga at all.

All that solid-black hair, those pie-shaped googly eyes and triangle mouths (with rounded corners!), the stunted pseudo-children, the skimpy few words stranded in fat balloons. And never anything in view but more black hair, googly eyes, and a lonely sprinkling of words against white space. Page after page, book after book, truckload after truckload. Manga makes me feel claustrophobic.

He adds:

manga, all manga, carries to an extreme the formal trend followed by US mainstream comics over the past few decades, which is to streamline word-and-picture arrangements so that the eye is always pinging forward with as little drag as possible, even if a concomitant of drag might be better dialogue or more detailed drawing.

That second quote is interesting, because it’s got the formal influence exactly reversed. That is, manga isn’t carrying a U.S. trend anywhere; the influence goes the other way. To the extent that there has been cross-fertilization between manga and American comics over the last decade, most of it’s gone Japan to America, rather than the other way around, I think.

That aside…Tom’s not really making, or attempting to make, an objective argument here, so refuting it is in some sense kind of pointless. If you hate manga art, you hate manga art; I can’t make you like something you don’t.

Still, there are a couple of ways to go with this argument I guess. In the first place, the formal elements you object to seem to be derived mostly form looking at shojo — comics for girls. As Tom somewhat reluctantly noted towards the end of his post, there’s actually a lot of manga out there that looks rather different.

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Gon, by Masashi Tanaka

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Lady Snowblood, Kazuo Koike and Kazuo Kamimura

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Lone Wolf and Cub, Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

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Parasyte, Hitoshi Iwaaki

I’m sure Bill could come up with more and better examples, but I think you get the general point; dismissing all manga is like dismissing all American comics…or, more, like dismissing all American movies. It’s a huge medium; if you felt like looking, you could probably find something that you liked.

As for shojo — that’s actually a genre I like a lot. To answer your objections in turn:

1. Stylization — If you don’t like stylization, you don’t like stylization, I guess. If most of the enjoyment you get from art is based on realism and anatomical fidelity, then, yeah, shojo isn’t necessarily the place to be looking. If, on the other hand, you really appreciate patterning, layout, and surface detail, shojo can be amazing.

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Amaterasu, by Suzue Miuchi

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Forest of Gray City, by Jung-Hyun Uhm

I just hardly see anything, ever, in mainstream comics, and precious little in alternative comics, that gets me the way drawings like the above do.

2. Too few words — American comics are extremely wordy. Manga in general (and shojo in particular) are much less so. You seem to see this as a failure on the part of manga. For me it’s the reverse. Manga is extremely good at visual storytelling; in comparison, American comics writing seems extremely tedious, tending to state the obvious over and over and over again. This afflicts superhero comics..but it’s also the case for things like Maus, which goes on and on and on and on and on, almost fetishizing the fact that the pictures are so unnecessary to the story.

When manga (or shojo specifically) doesn’t work, it can be well nigh incomprehensible; I wouldn’t deny that. On the other hand, when it does work, it fuses word and images in a way that’s really sublime. Nana and Let Dai, two of my favorite shojo series, have incredibly nuanced and thoughtful characterization and relationships, much of it conveyed through visual expressions and body posture, just as you would see in, say, a movie or on stage. In comparison, something like Fun Home seems to me incredibly thumb fingered, in every sense — constantly harping on the obvious, much less fluid storytelling, art with a lot less emotional heft, etc.

I’m kind of not the best person to be defending manga, maybe…I haven’t read a ton, and I’m certainly nowhere near being an expert. But in my limited explorations in the genre, I’ve found a number of series that are funny, touching, thoughtful, cool as shit, beautiful — all the things I look for in art, basically. So that’s the point of manga to me.

Or you can read Tucker’s take; first review at the top.

Update: Tom does over his post. His rejiggering of his discussion of manga pacing made me thing more about his point, which in turn made me not quite get what he’s talking about. Tom says manga is all very fast forward movement. I don’t get that at all. On the contrary, people like Ai Yazawa or Sooyeon Won or even Clamp seem much, much more in control of pacing than their Western peers. In Nana especially, the story can bounce along quickly…or it can be slower and more contemplative…or it can freeze in a moment of emotional intensity. It’s true the text is less heavy than in American comics, but there are other ways to slow down the story — close-ups, expression, levels of detail, and so forth.

I guess it’s possible that what’s happening for Tom is that he’s so alienated by the art that he’s not able to pick up on the pacing cues? Anyway, for me, super-hero comics seem to be much more frantically paced…Grant Morrison’s cyberpunky stuff especially often seems just jam-packed with stuff without almost any effort to do visual pacing. Most of the manga stuff I see is very aware and capable of using space for pacing….

Manga: What Is the Point?

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UPDATE:  Fuck it, I screwed up. I’m redoing the post here. Meanwhile, Noah’s response to the original version is here. 
Now the old version:

We at HU are having our second round of “theme” posts. First time we talked about our comics discoveries of 2008. This time we’re talking about manga: what is it, why is it, why do I hate it so badly I can’t look at more than a page? “Hate” is a strong term, but it’s true that my brain and eye shut down as soon as I encounter a manga specimen. All that solid-black hair, those pie-shaped googly eyes and triangle mouths (with rounded corners!), the stunted pseudo-children, the skimpy few words stranded in fat balloons. And never anything in view but more black hair, googly eyes, and a lonely sprinkling of words against white space. Page after page, book after book, truckload after truckload. Manga makes me feel claustrophobic.


Mind you, I haven’t read any. I’m starting off the round robin because perfect ignorance and unreasoning dislike provide a striking backdrop for the informed and authoritative. My colleagues will soon be along to provide some intelligent content. In the meantime, I’ll suggest the following: manga, all manga, carries to an extreme the formal trend followed by US mainstream comics over the past few decades, which is to streamline word-and-picture arrangements so that the eye is always pinging forward with as little drag as possible, even if a concomitant of drag might be better dialogue or more detailed drawing. [ Preceding sentence is not clear. To Noah it sounded like I was saying manga was imitating new-style US superhero comics. I just meant the two show the same tendency and manga takes it further. ]

Another observation: All the above, right down to my closing suggestion, places me in the same class as some fellow turning on the radio in 1968 and deciding that Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, the Beatles, the Young Rascals, the Four Tops, and the Velvet Underground are all pretty much the same because they have that damn beat and the electrified instruments. So, having set myself up, I now await my education at the hands of those who know better.

UPDATE:  Wait a second, is this manga? Maybe I should rewrite. Nah … double down. Time for the big guns.

For example, over on some message board a guy called  blackasthenight breaks off from frotting his pimples and declares:

ok now honestly, who has ever seen anyone whoes head, eyes, mouth, ect. is shaped like that? to me this just appears as a lack of willingness to studdy anatomy.

and whats with this gay stuff. half the time i see this crap its two dudes about to get it on. i mean wtf japan? also why do 80% of the dudes look like girls? and all the people with tails and stuff? and extra ears???

Yeah, Japan — wtf? 

Virtues of Ignorance 2008 — part 4

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In 2008, I was in one place for a long time for the first time in a long time. And I had a library. So I caught up: Mahler, Hope Larson, The Golem’s Mighty Swing, Dash Shaw, Bardin. I could make a list from Jeffrey Brown to that excruciatingly unreadable autism manga. Or I could list online reads, from “Pictopia” (finally) to Kate Beaton and critical writing, most of which melts together.

Instead, I’ll just note the new comics of Finland. “Com of Finland,” why not? I discovered the anthology Glomp this past year, and have since written about works by Amanda Vähämäki and Katja Tukiainen for TCJ‘s special section of Finnish comics coming soon. And I actually found a copy of the Finnish anthology KutiKuti‘s first issue, colors pulsing on newsprint, in a stack of my old papers. Don’t know where I got it. Can’t read it. But it’s fun to look at (pictured above).

So: Finnish comics, far more vibrant and essential than I could have imagined. But it could have been another pocket of comics, as the landscape looks much more vast than it did just a few years ago. There are dozens of new artists I don’t know, and even more I never will. Good. Before I started writing on comics in 2000, I had spent three or four years reading all the touchstones I could. Then it seemed doable. Now, keeping up with everything seems quite impossible, and ignorance a sure thing going forward. Good.

Virtue of Ignorance 2008 — part 2, addendum a

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Ok, all I had was Bechdel. Miriam had Carla Speed McNeil and Kate Beaton. Here’s one I just remembered: Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane. I read issues 1-16, or like that, on download for a TCJ column about Spider-Man (“Face It, Tiger,” issue 291). They were a case of a commercial comic book working exactly the way it should, no contortions or gimmes, no jumble. It’s like intelligent people knew what they were doing and did it. The target here is modest, but I’ll settle and hitting those can be hard enough.


It helps if you don’t mind sitcom and girl stuff. As I recall it’s very quiet-times storytelling, with superheroes kept off on the skyline, more or less. I like that mix: for some reason I like superhero comics and action movies more for their incidental elements than their main elements, and a title like Mary Jane puts the incidentals center stage. The so-called civilian school of superhero comics, I suppose. I loved Bendis’s Alias, though that was meant as psychological noir and Mary Jane is teen comedy. Kind of strange, two such different outcomes from the same genre development. 

The art/writing seems designed for maximum ease of eye movement, which I take to be a manga kind of thing. The images, as I recall, are simple and figures are positioned for maximum scannability. Dialogue skims along but without the pop-pop banter effect found with most superhero dialogue nowadays.

Which brings me to a key point: a big part of the comic’s appeal is relief. I would have liked it anyway, but set against most superhero product, it was a relief. Quiet skill is something we don’t get a lot of.

As to the Manga point above, the original artist was  Takeshi Miyazawa, a Canadian but Wiki says he has a Manga sensibility. Then came David Hahn. As I recall, I liked Miyazawa better. Writer: Sean McKeever. Sample plot: girl gets jealous because Mary Jane wins lead in school play. Title: “The Jealousy Thing,” because every issue is “The [whatever] Thing.” You get the idea. It’s simple stuff, but it works.

Further, we get one more example of Mary Jane being rewritten into a character entirely unlike the Mary Jane in the main Spider-Man series. Offhand I can’t think of any time her personality has made it intact into an alternative Spider-Man version. Noah has more here for those who have ever tried to figure her out.