Review by C.J. Bunce
You can embrace a medium or art form without fully understanding it–where it came from, why it looks the way it does, and how it got to be where it is today. My springboard to manga appreciation was tied to my nostalgia for pre-1980s comics, specifically the first enticement that manga are typically printed on newsprint like the first century of American comic books. That’s right, they smell like comic books once did (okay, those pocket Archie Comics digests still do). Add to it the cultural twist of reading right to left and suddenly your brain somehow sees and interprets more–you are more of an active reader and can’t just gloss over a page. Then look at the different tropes and character archetypes–read only a dozen manga titles and you’ll find common flavors unique to the medium. But reading them and understanding them are different things.
Japanese culture and American culture have more in common than not, and you can see this as historian and media scholar Andrea Horbinski chronicles the manga and its place in pop culture in her new work Manga’s First Century–How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905-1989, available now here at Amazon from University of California Press. Dr. Horbinski argues a late 19th century start date for the manga as art and medium from its political comic inception to the end of one of its masters in 1989. This small print 418-page treatise will amp up the knowledge of any diehard manga fan, and will fuel many a collegiate course on the history of Japan, popular art, or comparative cultures–the author includes comparisons with American and Franco-Belgian comic forms. The result is the biggest reference yet available to Western audiences in English on the subject.
The author connects the dots of manga’s history chronologically while also taking a lateral look across the impact and interweave manga shares with political climates in influential Japanese communities. Manga is pervasive today with its components often overlapping with video game storytelling and the big and small screen anime productions. Dr. Horbinski looks to how this happened, and how these media feed off the other.
She also challenges current scholarship on the true beginning of manga in its current internationally recognized form. American comics historians look back as far as possible and frequently go to the American Revolution itself for its own origins, those drawings by Ben Franklin and his contemporaries criticizing government and political movements. Manga could have a similar story, tracked back thousands instead of hundreds of years, but the author is more pragmatic in direct vs indirect influences that resulted in the manga of today.
From cartoonist Kitazawa Rakuten in 1899 Yokohama who adopted the term manga for his political cartoons and the first magazine of manga called Tokyo Punch, to the death in 1989 of manga “grandfather” Tezuka Osamu, creator of Norakuro, readers will learn the interplay of history and manga across political shifts, two world wars, and their aftermath. She looks at the artists–mainstream and amateur–who made it possible, while also researching the fans and fandom that made it stick.
The book includes sporadic black and white and color images of key publications in the history of manga. It also has a helpful glossary of terms, detailed footnotes of sources, an immense bibliography, and exhaustive index.
A good principal text for a course on manga and its history and influence, or a resource for anyone wanting to know more than what they read in their favorite manga titles, Manga’s First Century–How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics will be a reliable resource and enlightening look at the interplay of history and pop culture. The book is available now in hardcover and paperback here at Amazon and via brick and mortar bookstores.
