The Last of the Great Manga?

Before we go any further let me just make it clear that there are certain aspects of manga that do make me feel uneasy. Firstly, the excessive gore and violence in MPD Psycho, both in the manga and the TV series (I have some details in this older blog post) is certainly not going to be to everyone's liking and I'd have to admit, might be fodder for a certain type of individual to put forward as an influence for their own dark deeds. Having said that, I like the mood of the thing and whilst I'm not advocating censorship, I do find it difficult to envisage the sort of youngster the work would appeal to. However, as the work comes clearly labelled "adult content", I feel that should be enough of a heads-up for the average supervising adult. I'm telling you this so that you are aware that I didn't just read the series and watch the TV show without registering some disquiet - I'm not ever what you would call a passive viewer.

Even more disquieting for me though, on a personal level, is not the violence in some manga, or even the porn manga, which I personally don't bother with, much, but a technique used in a lot of manga to signify embarrassment or belittling, literally, by drawing the adult characters, or one of the adult characters, as children or a child. I find this very unsettling when it happens in a story where I've accepted the characters as adults. Oh, I know it's a technique some Japanese illustrators use, but I personally dislike it very much, especially if it happens in a manga that includes, er, bodily interaction or those frequent up-skirt angles. Heck, I don't even like it in the more mild knicker-showing stories like Change123 - which is otherwise fun.





Hopefully it's clear then that I do find fault with some manga, and I'm not blind to the fact that there is as much pap-manga as there is superpower-pap indie-pap and pap-graphic novels.

Anyway, that said, I got to thinking about the amount of posts out there hypothesizing about the death of manga, or at any rate those suggesting that there is no new great manga being created. The posts reminded me of a phenomena that the poet and critic Tom Paulin pointed out at the turn of the Millennium, when quite a lot of writers began to produce a lot of work that focused on sleeping. It is sort of zeitgeist moment, coupled now, as it was then, with a sort of quasi-New Testament panic about a possible end-of-days. It struck me that such thinking is understandable, because we do seem to have come to the end of a particular cycle, with the likes of Death Note, and Monster, and MPD Psycho, completely finishing. After all, in one form or another, whether available only from Japan or as scanlations following their publication in the weekly or fortnightly or monthly Japanese comics, these titles were around, literally, for decades. And now, having finished their run in Japan, and having been removed from scanlation sites as they appeared in full volumes here in the West, there is something final about their disappearance.

Not that the genius behind Monster, Naoki Urasawa, has stopped producing work, he has followed 20th Century Boys and Monster and Pluto, with Billy Bat, which I wrote about at some length on a post below. I've been keeping up with the story and there is little doubt in my mind that "the god of manga" has created another classic, although it was a safe bet that he would. In a sense, although it is, strictly speaking, less so than than the current manga that explore the job of working as a mangaka, it is also very self-referential in that it is a story based around a fictional comic book character, and a manga creator.








Just as Urasawa has a new title that is developing nicely, so to does the team behind Death Note, Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata. Unlike Billy Bat, Bakuman deals directly with the business of aspiring to become a mangaka, bringing us the story of Moritaka Mashiro, a high school student and the nephew of a man who was himself a mangaka.

So, exactly why, with new titles by some of the leading figures in manga really getting into their stride, and with some great new titles out there, is there so much gloom about the art form? Well, I suppose, at least partly, it has something to do with the self-referential nature of some of the stories. Manga is often very, very, imaginative, very out-there, and seeing so many titles looking inward may have caused a sense of panic in some circles - maybe. And of course there is the steady decline in manga sales in Japan, that might have added to the sense of foreboding; but then surely that downward trend is counterbalanced by the increase of sales of manga on phones and handheld readers. Then there is the increasing cherry-picking by some publishers who seem to conduct their research and development by hanging around the scanlation sites and the comics scene, to find out what is hot. As soon as they step in and option a title, the thing gets pulled from the scanlation sites (a gentleman's agreement that most scanlation groups adhere rigidly to) and so the reader who has already gone to some lengths to find the thing ends up with a hiatus between the most recent scan, and the first western publication which covers the story the reader has already consumed, and invariably the interest in the title drops. I mean to say, how long have we had to sit and wait for the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service volumes to trickle out?

I suppose, to be honest, that there must also be a certain amount of disenchantment involved in these posts. After all, many of these writers discovered manga like Death Note years before it appeared in the West, and then became ubiquitous as merchandise and anime and as live action movies, and they wrote a great many posts extolling its virtues and the virtues of manga in general. And perhaps there is no need to do so now, or at least they may feel there is no longer any need to do so, now that the mainstream press is sniffing around. It is, perhaps, not so much that there is no new great manga being produced, but that there is no longer any great need to try to impress upon the reading public that manga is great. They are preaching to the converted, not only that but they are preaching to those whom they themselves converted, and the converted have all gone their separate ways.

Whether you or I think it is a great manga or not, a title like Antique Bakery deserves its place in the manga firmament. It is a popular manga, and it is well drawn and to be honest, it is just another one of those ideas that at first glance seems unlikely to appeal to us in the west, and actually turns out to be a complete joy. To dismiss work like this out-of-hand because we don't like the way the eyes are drawn or for some equally idiosyncratic reason, is just plain silly, it is clearly work executed by an expert hand.

What I'm trying to say, in a round-about way, is that it is no coincidence that the much-missed titles are all Seinen manga, and what the writers who miss some of this Seinen manga seem to forget is that a diet of nothing but Seinen manga may not be everybody's cup of tea. The reader may well have have been turned on to manga by one gateway Seinen title, like Death Note or Monster, but they may well, by now, have moved on and decided that they prefer Shonen titles. In fact I'm sure we all hope they have moved on and discovered what a broad church manga is.

The fact that the much-missed titles all seem to be Seinen manga, actually got me thinking that this worry, that the really great manga has come to an end, might actually just be a perceived problem for male readers of a certain age - of which I am one (both a fan of Seinen manga and a male reader of a certain age). After all, one look at my previous manga-related posts over the years, is a clear illustration that I veer toward Seinen titles:

http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2008/03/monster-will-astonish-you.html
http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2008/03/work-of-jiro-taniguchi.html
http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2008/03/ykk-alpha-at-end-of-world.html
http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2008/03/kurosagi-corpse-delivery-service.html
http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2008/06/takeo-saitos-golgo13-kimonos-and-bad.html
http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2008/07/death-note-re-post.html
http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2008/09/astro-boy-mighty-atom.html
http://rodmckie.blogspot.com/2007/07/where-to-begin.html

However, if you are familiar with those old posts, or if you clicked them, you'll know that I don't just read Seinen and horror manga, and that is what has given me, I think, a particular perspective on these events. For this perspective, I give the credit, or blame, to Dirk Deppey's deep knowledge of manga, and his championing, in particular, of Ashinano Hitoshi's dream-like, post-apocalyptic, sci-fi, romance, manga, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (YKK). My exposure to this story, created over a period of 12 years and still not optioned in the west so the scans are still available (here), helped position me, I think, to appreciate a wider range of work like Nana, Honey and Clover, and Walking Man, and brought me to a slow appreciation of manga's huge sweep and broad canvas. It also helped me to realise that the titles some of the critics' miss so much, are not necessarily the titles that the majority of manga readers actually read. In fact the current "crisis" has probably not even registered with the readers of manga that coexists in both the East and the West, such as Nana. And those who have just started reading manga titles like Soul Eater, or Spray King, or Moyashimon, or Oshinbo, or Astral Project, have probably never seen or read anything so exciting.

No, the great manga has not stopped, it continues in an unbroken chain that eventually winds its way to our shores, and it takes different forms and slips between genres of manga. YKK is a great manga, a great voluminous sprawling epic that meanders peacefully towards its final chapter. It is nothing like Monster, which is nothing like Death Note, which is nothing like Nana which is nothing like Billy Bat which is nothing like Homunculous which is nothing like Mushishi which is nothing like Until Death Do Us Part (UDDUP) which is nothing like Moyashimon: Tales of Agriculture. In other words the great manga is still out there, if we don't recognise it that says more about us, than it does about the state of manga. I mean, be honest, if someone suggested that you might like a manga called Tales of Agriculture, you would be a little skeptical, until you actually caught a glimpse of the fantastic artwork and then started to read the thing that is.










To be honest, I also think there is something else going on, an undercurrent if you will; a subtext, perhaps one that the authors of the pieces are themselves unaware of. It just might be that Tom Paulin's observation can be applied here, and the blog writers are all displaying a end-of-days style panic, based not just on fact that a few great stories have come to an end, but also on the fact that printed comic books are being replaced by digital comics. To people of a certain generation, and again I am also one of those, that really does represent the end of an era. There was always something elemental about making marks on pulped wood with a liquid that itself came from deep beneath the earth. Perhaps, and I'm only surmissing here, the bloggers concerned cannot with any certainty look 10 years down the line and see any future at all for comic books, let alone "great" status for a title like Detroit Metal Blues.

Then again, perhaps I am just reading too much into it. After all, I noticed a reply to a post on the TCJ forum that more or less suggested that the "big-eyed manga", as the poster called it, is the wrong kind of manga. Which informs us that the poster is either completly unfamiliar with manga classics like Black Jack and Astro Boy, or has probably only ever read a limited amount of Seinen manga, and decided that is the only style of manga that counts. It is, I think, to be sure, befuddled way thinking, but it may be no more than a failure on the part of some people to embrace titles that look a little different from the ones they usually pick up. Perhaps, it really is no more than that.

Cat-Eyed Boy

I'm putting together a manga piece for Forbidden Planet's Blog, that I hope they'll use. It's not just about manga it's also about the people behind some of the titles. In particular, I'll be looking inside the studios of some Mangaka (I'm just sorting out the screenshots). But I can't resist putting this up here. Unless I'm mistaken the young women here was in Sexy Voice and Robo, or Akihabara (at) Deep, certainly something I've seen quite recently.

This movie version of Umezu's classic, Cat Eyed Boy, which Viz has recently released in two thick volumes (great idea) is as cheesey looking as Lion Maru, but it is great fun. Released in Japan in 2006, it was directed by Noboru Iguchi, and of course written by Kazuo Umezu (see Same Hat! Same Hat! link), with Mana Yasuda responsible for the screenplay.

The mange, available from Forbidden Planet, of course, is awesome. Volume 1 is over 500 pages thick.

I've put up some screen shots in case the trailer, which I had a job squeezing to this size, gets moved. I would like to have compared it with the anime that Same Hat! Same Hat!, which has long been a champion of Kazuo Umezu’s work (they introduced the likes of me to Umezo's Drifting Classroom), and the man himself, has a broken link where the link once was. I'm thinking this is better though; but I love this sort of thing. Look out for that maurading turd.

I'm going to shoot for copyright of the original characters belonging to Kazuo Umezu, and the movie copyright having something to do with Nekome Kozo. Certainly Euro Space, Euro Space, one of the pioneers of art-house cinema in Tokyo in the early 80's was in some way involved with the movie.

Takeo Saito's Golgo13, Kimonos and Bad Sons

I have a great memory for many things. I can remember dialogue from TV shows I saw 20 years ago, I can remember all the lines of Annie Hall, every song from the Rocky Horror Picture Show (even though I now wish I couldn't), lots of poems, lots of Wodehouse, some of Shakespeare, some of Burns, and if I had a conversation with you in 1982, I may well bring it up next time we meet - particularly if you said something that has been getting on my wick for 26 years. But I still forgot to send my old man a Father's Day card, so I've sent him a belated one. Sorry it's late, Happy Father's Day, Bill - from your ungrateful and stupid son.

It also doesn't work well in this respect:

(the following two items are related but they are separated by 3 years so you have to make the leap with me)

in the Art and Architecture edition of The New Yorker, Oct. 17, 2005 I read an article about a Kimono painter and it made an impression on me. It was called Letter from Japan, The Kimono Painter.

(now you should be able to tell by that very accurate date that I have gone and hunted down that edition of The New Yorker from my little library so that I can be completely accurate)

So now I can be very precise, it's called Letter From Japan, The Kimono Painter, A modern master of venerable art, and it's by Judith Thurman. The article is about the master yuzen Kimono maker Kunihiko Moriguchi, and it is accompanied by a gorgeous illustration by Ruben Toledo. If it's online at the New Yorker archive, I recommend you read it, it's marvelous.

Ah, ha, I found an extract in the New Yorker archives; click here.

(so now we launch forward to Father's Day 2008 to discover why this particular article came to mind)

Well, I been watching some Japanese TV shows featuring Mangaka of all ages, and it struck me that the description of the Kimono painter's apprenticeship, as described in Judith Thurman's story about Kunihiko Moriguchi, the Kimono painter, is much like the apprenticeship of a cartoonist studying under a Mangaka. Even the description of the artist's studio, with its library of books, tools and its computer station, sounds similar to the studio of the Mangaka. And what Moriguchi says about the job itself, that "...no one becomes a yuzen painter just, or primarily, for the livelihood. It is a way of life.", struck a chord as it would with any illustrator; in fact with anyone involved in any way with a comic strip, comic book, graphic novels, or daily cartooning. The more I watched the Mangaka in their studios, the more I was convinced of this, and the more I came to understand why the job of a cartoonist, especially a manga cartoonist or Mangaka in particular, is so revered in Japan.

Clearly, the fact that the creations of the Mangaka are creator-controlled in a way they often are not in the West, is at least partly responsible for the way the studio set-up of the Mangaka has evolved. The entire project is imagined and put together by the team in the studio, headed by the Mangaka, who sits in a position at the head of affairs, his desk approachable from all sides so that the work can easily be handed to him to check quality control. The work rate of some of these masters is truly awe-inspiring and as you will see from the movie clips (for as long as they are allowed to stay here) the projects they work on benefit from this team approach - which helps us greatly in understanding how one man or woman can create several series with 100 or more volumes. It should also go some way to dispelling the myth that the 'creator' credit suggests little or no involvement by the great man (you know who you are - you might want to go back to your review and change that suggestion).

Whilst we do have creative teams working on projects in the West, even on creator-controlled projects they tend to be geographically spread around, rather than all working together in the one studio. And although the advent of faxes and computer networking and Skype and the like has sped up the process beyond the old snail-mail methods, this Western system is still markedly slower than the Japanese equivalent.

In some studios the Mangaka will only pencil the work, with others in the studio handling the inking. In others studios the Mangaka will ink only the main characters and the apprentices will rule lines, ink backgrounds, handle toning and burnishing, scanning and all the other parts of the process.

The show, in particular, that I was watching as I thought about this is a sort of 'This is your life' or at least a 'This is your Character's Life' of Golgo13 creator Takao Saito. Born in 1936, Takao Saito, is older than the two other Mangaka I've been watching recently, which is nice because I was beginning to fear that everyone creating the manga I enjoy was younger than me - which would just fill me with despair about my pathetically low artistic output. Having said that, I don't think even another 100 years would allow me enough time to produce a body of work as consistently stunning as Takao Saitou has produced.

From his debut in 1955, with Kuuki Danshaku (Air Baron) the man has barely paused to take a breath. In 1959, he helped to establish the comic studio "Gekiga Koubou" which in 1960 became Saito-Productions. In 1964, Saito began the 007 Series, based, of course, on Ian Fleming's famous character. In 1967, Muyonosuke started serialization, and 1968 this series was followed by his magnum-opus, Golgo 13 which is still running today. Never one to rest on his laurels, the Seventies marked the debuts of the serials Barom One, Kagegari , and Survival and since then Kumotori Jinpei, Onihei Hanka-Chou and Shikakenin Fujieda Baian have all been given birth by Saito-Productions. One of the most respected cartoonists in Japan, Takeo Saito won the 21st Shogakukan Manga Award, the Grand Prize of the 31st Japan Cartoonist Awards, the Jury’s Special Award at the 50th Shogakukan Manga Awards and in 2003 he received a Purple Ribbon Medal. He is a director of the Japan Cartoonists Association .

It's also nice because it makes this first film of a Mangaka's studio, providing it is the first time you have seen inside such a studio, seems more in touch with the rituals and traditions of the venerable occupation, whereas the studio of one of the younger creators could look, out of context, like a much more modern set-up; rather than what it is - a modern variation of a traditional Mangaka workplace.

So, hopefully TokyoTV will allow us to keep these parts of the show as essential research and for the purposes of studying and reviewing a rich part of Japanese cultural heritage. I hope they won't mind me doing so, but I've chopped the show into smallish sections, and left out the interview and audience parts so that we, over here, can concentrate on the action in the studio. I've also left in the section about Japanese manga readers increasingly reading their manga on their (much cooler than our) phones.

You can pick up a few volumes of Golgo13 from Viz Media.

Hokusai, Mangaka

1. Katsushika Hokusai's, Ejira in Suruga Province

From time to time we've looked at how difficult it can be to choose the precise moment to illustrate a situation. To be more precise we've seen many instances where illustrators sometimes seem to pick the exact moment before, or the exact moment after, but not the precise moment that sometimes looks like the artist has captured a moment in time.

Now I know what you're thinking: It's so ephemeral that capturing the perfect moment may be more down to chance than planning. Well no, I'd argue that can't be true, because some people manage to do it time after time, Turner for instance, and Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849).

We're not going to concentrate on Hokusai's ubiquitous Great Wave Off Kanagawa, we're going to look instead, at another work from Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji, Ejira in Suruga Province. And we're going to look at that woodblock print from 1831 because we can contrast it with a modern work by Canadian photographer, Jeff Wall, from 1993 called A Sudden Gust of Wind(after Hokusai).

You're likely to have noticed that 'A Sudden Gust of Wind' has 'foregrounded' the wind, and ignored the spiritual centre of Hokusai's work, Mount Fuji. Mount Fuji is the highest mountain in Japan and it is located in Honshu, Japan's largest island. Known locally as Fujisan (note:this shouldn't be confused with the male honorific 'San'), Mount Fuji is a sacred mountain, steeped in history and ringed by lakes and forests, and has, for centuries, been the traditional goal of pilgrimage. In his book, Hokusai said, "It struck me that it would be good to take one thing in life and regard it from many viewpoints, as a focus for my being, and perhaps as a penance for alternatives missed".

So let's look at Hokusai's work again in light of what we now know. Mount Fuji, the sacred object, is the focus of the work, and yet it is hardly catching our eye. It is barely a line, so slight it could be an afterthought. The foreground on the other hand, the blades of grass, the scribes clinging to their hats, and their modesty, are much more detailed. Fujisan, in the distance, seems like a benign influence on the composition, almost an afterthought.

It is a strange composition in many ways. It almost seems, at first glance, too subtle. Not for a moment, do we look at the paper that the wind has ripped from the hands of the people and scattered over the sky and think, 'ah ha, the artist is using the flying paper to balance the canvas'. Perhaps we feel that if Hokusai had wanted a more balanced drawing he would simply have shifted his perspective so that the twin-trees moved further to the right, balancing the drawing. That he has chosen not to manipulate the scene suggests even more that what we are seeing is a snapshot in time. A moment of real contemplation captured in a moment as time itself stood still.

Now take a look at this perfect photo of Fujisan itself, by Japan-based photographer, and perhaps one of the greatest living chroniclers of modern-day Japan, Everett Kennedy Brown:

Everett Kennedy Brown/EPA

It is striking is it not? And I think we can now see, with the benefit of Everett Kennedy Brown's photograph, that Hokusai's rendition of the mountain with that one iconic line is simply perfect. In Myths and Legends of Japan, F. Hadland Davis says:

"Fuji dominates life by it's silent beauty: sorrow is hushed, longing quieted, peace seems to flow down from that changeless home of peace, the peak of the white lotus."

All of which brings us back to Hokusai's most iconic work, Great Wave Off Kanagawa. Look at the print below (click the picture below for a very large copy - 2.5megs). Many people who own the print on calenders or mats or tea-towels are unaware that mighty Fujisan is even part of the picture. And yet, when you do know it is there, you become aware of its power. Fujisan stands there, behind the waves, anchored, impervious to the dangers all around. It is a solid immovable, dependable, sight. Whilst the humans in their little boats are small and frightened, and at the capricious whim of nature and the gods, the great Fujisan looks serenely on.

Not that Fujisan doesn't have a darker side. Its foothills provided a secluded location for the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, who carried out the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo underground in the 1990s, and at the base of Fujisan lies the ancient forest Aokigahara, Japan's most infamous suicide spot.

2. Jeff Wall's, A Sudden Gust of Wind(after Hokusai).

A closer look at A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) by Jeff Wall, informs us that this vacuous photo, lacking any depth or spiritual connotations, is a tribute to the Art World who have invested value in it. It can be found in London's Tate Gallery, if you have half a mind to look.