Ninth Art - For the Discerning Reader - http://www.ninthart.org
|
The Occidental Tourist: Rhymes With Conga
There was a time when comic fandom was a much simpler place, ideologically speaking. The time line that delineated our slow progression from comic strip to comic book to graphic novel had been repeated enough times in enough public places that nearly anyone could regurgitate the lineage from memory. Platinum Age, Golden Age, Silver Age, Modern Age. The birth of Superman, the death of Bucky, Barry Allen's usurpation of Jay Garrick's moniker, his untimely death at the hands of the Anti-monitor. Add in footnotes about EC comics, Robert Crumb, Los Bros Hernandez and a section on the rise and fall and rise again of the Graphic Novel and, it is assumed, the landmarks have all been mapped out and the rough edges polished. The word, in English, that sums up all that, and inarguably much more, is comics. Or it was until the onset of the Internet Age, when the world became a much smaller place. Many comics fans had known about the existence of manga long before the word "Modem" had become part of our collective unconscious. Military personnel and their children, stationed in Japan and other Far East nations, often returned to the States with a healthy respect for the medium that facilitated their being able to read even simple documents in the challenging Japanese script, not to mention entertaining them in times of extreme culture shock. Names offered to curious friends lacked the cultural reinforcement that gave them significance save for scattered episodes of SPEED RACER and a justified morbid fascination with Japan's number one cultural export, GODZILLA (or GOJIRA, if you like). It is very easy for the United Statesian comic book reader, even a well-read one with a diverse reading schedule, to equivocate the idea of manga with the phrase 'Japanese comics'. In Scott McCloud's UNDERSTANDING COMICS, he spends a good deal of time talking about the many differences between Western comics and Eastern manga, but refers to them continually as Japanese comics. Subconsciously, perhaps he understood that there is a semantic battle of epic proportions taking place around us, more now than when the book was first published in 1993. Manga are not a subset of comics. The two are equals in principal and, seen one way, are the participants in a battle for the world, or, seen another, are two concepts of Art that, by both longevity and fortune, stand a good chance of uniting with one another. What the result will be named is yet to be determined, but it is by no means a foregone conclusion that the name will be an English one, because the criterion for this challenge is profit and, as usual, the winner will undoubtedly take all. Perhaps it is superficial to squabble over such a simple distinction. Both media employ sequential art, often in combination with words, to tell a story or convey a meaning or emotion. Manga do this and so does comics (though, as the astute reader may have noticed, manga do it in the plural and comics, as a single noun). But, as any opinionated reader of one and not the other will surely tell you (over and over), the experiences had while reading comics and manga are distinctly and identifiably different, and that difference, it turns out, may be more difficult to quantify than talking about big eyes and big robots. Every critic has his or her own terminology for the rate at which the reader is drawn across a given set of pages. This expression of the experience one receives when reading comics or manga is often referred to as compression, though I favour viscosity myself as it references not only the substance being passed through but the object passing through it itself - in this case, the reader. This viscosity in many ways dictates the nature and sometimes the quality of the reading experience itself. Comic books, in whatever form you want to consider them, are a largely American phenomenon that grew out of a specific model of publishing. Golden Age comics have a particular flavour to them that reflects not only the emerging visual language of American comics in specific, but also the anthology format to which most of the books adhered. The stories are self-contained but often claustrophobic in their attempt to pack maximum story in minimum space. Each subsequent development in comics generally has more to do with changes in publishing format than true, evolutionary leaps in visual design, though that does play a factor later on. In this same way, manga have a specific viscosity that reflects the unique factors which go and have gone into their production and distribution over the years. Most manga are delivered on a weekly basis in the much-celebrated phonebook anthologies, featuring material that is grouped, if not thematically, then at least in line with the preferences of a particular and well-researched demographic. Because the initial buying/reading act is focused more on a particular anthology rather than on a given story within it, no one instalment needs to tell a complete story. There is no onus to sell the entire premise of a concept within one smaller portion of the larger story. This is directly in opposition to the concept of done-in-one that is the foundation of Western comics. Even the preferred modern comics form, the graphic novel/multi-issue story arc/mini-series (i.e.; "We need to have a damn book with a spine to sell when we are done with this story to make up for the awful pamphlet sales") is, in comparison to the way most manga are produced and conceived, a hesitant first step beyond the 24-page comics story. Not all comics are produced this way, nor all manga, but the generalisations, I believe, stand fit. Manga are, by their very nature, expansive. They are not driven moment-to-moment, scene-to-scene from introduction through the exposition to a climax, and perhaps through the denouement. They linger. They dwell and even loop. Every scene is given a chance to develop into something unexpectedly meaningful... provided the characters endear themselves somehow to their intended audience (and others, if lucky) and there is enough tension/action to keep folks turning the pages. Therein lies every manga creator's dilemma. It is feasible, while trying to create a comprehensive picture of how comics, fumetti, bande-dessinee, manga, and other localised forms of telling stories with pictures and words, that all can be seen as facets of the same essential function. Perhaps that 'ninth art' can be described in one word, but it is gross ignorance and predictably ethnocentric of the West, in particular, to first level the differences between those forms and then lump the others into a sub-species of one's own cultural experience. As it stands, there is currently a symbolic void in the world of Plato's idealised forms where this concept that embraces all the forms considered while diminishing none will someday abide. But, for the nonce, all we can know for certain is that Nature abhors a vacuum and the forces that will decide on what terms we should embrace these forms are probably already in motion.
The Occidental Tourist is a column about how the West perceives and misperceives manga as a cultural force and how that affects the way that we make comics as well. For the record, I can't read or speak Japanese, nor have I ever been to Japan, which makes this whole effort a bit like trying to tell you my thoughts about menstruation. But, that distance from my topic at hand is what makes the study of manga so fascinating for me. In addition to being a writer of and about comics, I also work seven days a week behind the counter at Atomik Pop, a pop culture destination that specialises in comics, manga, and anime, in Norman, Oklahoma. It is my intention to use this column to not only compare and contrast the two forms of sequential art I am most familiar with (comics, manga) but also to draw attention to some great and largely unappreciated manga already available in English. I wouldn't be surprised to also see reviews of very popular manga that may or may not actually suck. It seems worthwhile to state openly that I do not favour manga to comics, or vice versa. The unexpected benefit of treating manga as its own herd of beasts, rather than as a ghetto of the already disenfranchised comics, is that it allows the reader/critic to appreciate both for their respective merits and shortcomings. Any other approach, it seems, eventually dissolves into some nebulous argument about intrinsic cultural superiority that doesn't merit being perpetuated in this forum. I look forward to the territory we'll explore together in the coming months and appreciate everyone who took the time to read the first of what I hope to be a fruitful and informative column experience. In order that we all receive the full benefit of the technology that beams this manga missive into your home or workplace, please feel free to offer feedback in the form of comments, questions, concerns, or just cursing at my fancy new Ninth Art e-mail addy, rob@ninthart.org. Until next time, check out: Monthly pamphlet: CANNON GOD EXAXXION by Keiichi Sonoda, pub. Dark Horse, $3.50. Trade paperback: FLESH COLORED HORROR by Junji Ito, pub. ComicsOne, $9.95 Anime on DVD: LAIN Vol 1-4 Rob Vollmar is the Eisner-nominated writer of THE CASTAWAYS and the recently released BLUESMAN: BOOK ONE. Ninth Art endorses the principle of Ideological Freeware. The author permits distribution of this article by private individuals, on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice. Back. |