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The Occidental Tourist: Manga By Name
In the first instalment of The Occidental Tourist, I offered the supposition that manga were something more complex than just Japanese comics. Like any potentially controversial critical position, this idea that manga somehow transcend the category of mere comics, a phenomena of Western culture by my reckoning, is one that merits a deeper exploration before pronouncing the matter settled. One of the most illuminating ways to do this is to find sequential narratives that aspire to be (or are billed as) manga but are identifiably not, thus charting the distinction between manga and not-manga. Rather than viewing this description as somehow punitive or indicative of poor quality, we can instead use these titular manga as crucial tools towards understanding how manga differ from other types of sequential narrative; representative points on a continuum of measurable activity. One such example is 'Henry' Yoshitaka Kiyama's, FOUR IMMIGRANTS MANGA, distributed to the Direct Market by Viz. Begun just after the onset of the Roaring Twenties by a Japanese artist living in San Francisco, the FIM is a fascinating look at that American society from the position of a disenfranchised immigrant worker. Despite the title's promise, however, it lacks a number of critical elements to really be considered manga. In his book, MANGA! MANGA!, Frederick Schodt notes that most Japanese comics before the time of Osamu Tezuka had much more in common with American comic strips like BRINGING UP FATHER or THE KATZENJAMMER KIDS than either comic books like ACTION COMICS or anything that we would recognise as being manga today. For this reason, anyone who merely thumbs through the book will find very little, aside from Asiatic players, that reads or looks like modern manga. To Kiyama's credit, there are actually some damn innovative elements to this strip, not the least of which being its starkly autobiographical tone and the real-time progression of the story, not unlike the more celebrated GASOLINE ALLEY. So if it's not a comic strip (which is actually still debatable in my mind), and it's drawn by a Japanese person, why wouldn't it be considered a work of manga? For all of its ethnic veracity, what the FIM lacks are the tropes, both visual and narrative, that are inherent to manga in the same way that the 12 bar song form and the use of parallel dominant chords are intrinsic to the act of blues. These manga metaphors, ranging from the physical comedy of a bloody nose to indicate inappropriate sexual arousal to the more subtle variances like sudden changes in hair colour, are the hidden subtext in every successful piece of manga - a silent soundtrack that signifies meaning to those who understand the code. What makes these tropes so central to the collective identity of manga has everything to do with why manga don't still ape those American comic strips outmoded by Tezuka so long ago. The wholesale embrace of Western ideas by the Japanese culture that pervaded from Admiral Byrd's forcible "opening" of their ports in the late 1800s until the end of WWII was a complete reversal of the largely xenophobic, insular position that Japan that had espoused for centuries previous. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed by Japan's subsequent surrender to the Allied forces, began a period of questioning the wisdom of Japan's having turned its back on its traditional values and relying on the inventions and innovations of such distant lands to guide internal affairs. So, the reason FIM can not be considered true manga is that it was created before the tropes of manga were even a glimmer in Tezuka's parents' eyes. If anything, it represents most perfectly what manga is not because it is embodies an aesthetic value that manga were originally created in reaction to, namely the Japanese culture in deference to Western values, whether they be economic, spiritual, or, in this case, artistic. Another manga-maybe for us to consider is MANGA HORROR from ACG Comics, a recent re-packaging of late 1960s horror comics drawn by South Korean artist, Sanho Kim. As a post-Comics Code addition to the body of American horror, the stories in MANGA HORROR have remarkable little to offer past their novelty value as they are haphazardly written, poorly drawn, and, frankly, not very scary. But, taking the title at face value for the briefest of moments, are these stories really manga? They are drawn by an Asiatic person (OK, Koreans actually create manwha, not manga, but let's not start splitting those hairs), born after the appropriate Tezukan innovations, so, by our working criteria, it seems like they might be. Yet, one glance at the pages within dispels any hope that our hypothesis may have wrought, as the clunky third-person narration defiles the manga edict, "Show, don't tell" like holy sacrament at a Black Mass, gleefully double stating each discreet action in both the text and art in nearly every panel. The characters' facial features are the only consistent sign that someone at least influenced by manga is working on the art, save for brief, uncharacteristic forays into humour within the action, over which we can assume that the overpaid-at-any-price script writer had little control or probably even interest in regards to the finished product. So, while hints of manga may be lightly sprinkled in Kim's artwork, MANGA HORROR is an example of titular manga, at best, that lacks the crucial element of intent to create manga. While Kim appears to be capable of manga-esque artwork, the uncooperative story and, most importantly, editorial/audience expectation disallow it, and it wouldn't be too grand a fiction to posit that Kim was probably going out of his way to hide his cultural roots, for fear that his artwork would be dismissed as 'weird' or 'too cartoony' for such weighty themes as these. The last batch of titular manga considers more directly the question, "Do you actually have to be Japanese to create manga?" Since the 1980s, Anglo comics creators have been utilising manga tropes with the intent to create manga, initially through publishers like Antarctic Press and others dedicated solely to this experiment but, more recently, spilling over into a wide array of publishing houses with strong works like Lea Hernandez' TEXAS STEAMPUNK TRILOGY (Cyberosia Press) and the deliriously imaginative, RUMBLE GIRLS (Image Comics), Chynna Clugston-Major's BLUE MONDAY (Oni Press), and Stan Sakai's long-running USAGI YOJIMBO (Dark Horse). Without taking every example apart to consider it "manga-ness", it is simpler perhaps to look past the issue of race and more towards one of culture. Manga are necessarily created through and imbued with a deep understanding of Japanese culture that cannot be easily mimicked by reading other manga. Most artists attempting to do just this will inevitably create only a pale imitation that will be readily obvious as such, and the resulting distortion generally destroys whatever internal coherency or imagination the story idea might have originally possessed. However, manga works from creators like Hernandez, Sakai, and even Paul Pope, have convinced me that with enough study, imagination, and real craft, it is possible for non-Japanese natives to approximate the rhythms and purposes of manga closely enough that the result is indistinguishable, at least to this Occidental Tourist, from the real things. Whether it would fly with the Japanese people, from which this wellspring has, well, sprung, is another matter entirely, but one, gratefully, for another day. 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. 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