Manga Invasion!

Celebrating an art form where girls can be super, the hero doesn't always win, and mah-jongg is blood-sport

Only when you have sat in an automobile overflowing with college students (and their various odors and idiosyncrasies) for five hours can you truly understand obsession. In the age of the Internet, satellite dishes, and free shipping, what could possibly consume anyone enough to submit to the travails of such bone-jarring interstate journeys?

Until recently, you could say the word "manga" (Japanese for comics) and count on blank stares. These days, manga paperbacks fill rows at bookstores. Book sale reports showInu-yasha and Naruto making runs at the crown long held by Calvin and Hobbes and Get Fuzzy. Manga popularity has even encouraged one pair of local entrepreneurs to open a dedicated store --- after making the aforementioned trek one too many times.

"[I]n Hiroshi Hirata's samurai comics, with their direct, serious art style, I find a nostalgia for the kami-shibai of old, and a sensibility in the manner of the violent warrior prints of the late Edo period." --- Yukio Mishima (Japanese traditionalist and writer, better known nowadays in the West for his ritual suicide in 1970)

Hiroshi Hirata, Osamu Tezuka, and their fellow mangaka are the inheritors of a long artistic history in Japan. A thousand years ago, Buddhist monks were producing cartoon-like drawings satirizing other clergy and the nobility. In the 17th and 18th century, woodblock printing techniques led to mass production of story-telling pictures on scrolls, arguably the original comic books. The most popular prints were ukiyo-e, the "Floating World" pictures recently on display at the MemorialArtGallery.

The arrival of American comic strips in bound collections a little less than a century ago led to the production of thick monthly Japanese magazines collecting whatever comics were available. Even so, pre-1945 most of the artwork bears little resemblance to the stylistic conventions now associated with manga.

That would all change with the artistic emergence of a medical student who preferred Walt Disney and Max Fleischer.

Paging through Buddha by Osamu Tezuka is revelatory, like hearing the Beatles for the first time or eating seafood fresh off the boat in a place where that means something. The art varies from exquisite landscapes to elongated caricatures. Like Citizen Kane, the artist took the opportunity to explore the possibilities of black and white. The 3000-page tale offers the same labyrinthine experience as the lengthiest Russian novel. Buddha is a manga masterpiece created by the originator of the medium. This could never be a comic book produced by the American entertainment machine.

"People talk about [Tezuka] as the 'father,' [and] he was in a lot of ways," says Joanne Bernardi, director of the Film and Media Studies Program and associate professor of Japanese at the University of Rochester. "He was the one who introduced this new style. It caught on. It fed into a whole lot of social and cultural ethos at the time. It completely meshed with the whole idea of technology outracing and outpacing and undermining humanity. The fact that there had been this atomic bomb and this traumatic experience in Japan that was due to technology. The bomb really seems to infect popular culture, at least. It definitely overshadows other aspects about the war."

Sitting on her parents' sofa in the early '60s, Prof. Bernardi was on the frontlines as the first Japanese animations entered American family rooms on Saturday mornings. "[Tezuka] really did make a big change with Astro Boy," she says. "Astro Boy was his flagship character. To our American consciousness, he was the only one exported."

"There was a young girl sitting beside me.... [F]or nearly the whole time since we had left Ueno Station she had been reading a thick comic book. The girl rose, put her comic down, and walked the length of the car to the toilet. A green TOILET OCCUPIED light went on, and while that light burned I read the comic. I was instructed and cautioned. The comic strips showed decapitations, cannibalism, people bristling with arrows like Saint Sebastian, people in flames, shrieking armies of marauders dismembering villagers, limbless people with dripping stumps, and, in general, mayhem. The drawings were not good, but they were clear. Between the bloody stories there were short comic ones and three of these depended for their effects on farting: a trapped man or woman bending over, exposing a great moon of buttock and emitting a jet of stink (gusts of soot drawn in wiggly lines and clouds) in the captors' faces. The green light went off and I dropped the comic. The girl returned to her seat and, so help me God, serenely returned to this distressing comic." --- Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar

Ignoring the fact that he seems to feel all right touching his fellow passenger's stuff, Theroux does accurately describe the contents of the common manga weekly, in many ways not too far removed from Mad Magazine or a Hollywood Western. On the other hand, "There's also this idea that the violence and sex in anime --- this is today --- that seems to be blown out of proportion," Bernardi reminds us. "That's been a much bigger impediment to [adults] appreciating anime. The kids don't bother with [worrying about] it."

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