Monthly Stumblings # 2: Frans Masereel

Posted on June 27, 2010 by Domingos Isabelinho

Frans Masereel’s Route des hommes (men’s path)

In my humble opinion the best Belgian comics artist is not Hergé… The best Belgian comics artist is Frans Masereel…

I vaguely remember mentioning this to a couple of Masereel’s fellow countrymen and I’ve got two different answers (I must add that, in my view, of course, I chose my collocutors well): (1) a nod of approval; (2) something like: In Belgium we don’t view Frans Masereel as a comics artist.

(Needless to say that, besides some puzzled expressions asking “who are those?,” most of my possible Belgian interlocutors would react in a third way calling me a lunatic, or worse, depending on the person’s degree of Tintinophily.)

The first reaction was understandable because said person is an artist himself and what he does is akin to Masereeel’s work. The latter one is more interesting to me at this particular moment because it permits me to enter one of the muddiest territories in comics scholarship once again (when will I learn, right?…), the old conundrum: what is a comic?…

I’m not going to answer that question because it can’t be done. All the answers that one can come up with are rigged because they depend on a previous particular view of what’s essential in a comic (and that’s not only prescriptive, that’s also arbitrary). To Bill Blackbeard, for instance, speech balloons and image sequences are essential so (even if there are older examples, namely, here or even, here) comics started with Richard Felton Outcault’s Yellow Kid in 1896.

Saying this though, doesn’t get us very far (my thoughts on the subject, are here, by the way). What interests me right now are two related points: (1) the sociological side of the problem; (2) anachronism. (1) Words have a (social) commonly agreed meaning. The dictionary tries to stabilize it, but significations aren’t fixed. There’s a reason why we call Maus a “comic.” The sense evolved to include serious work while the signifier stood still. Even so I accept that “comics,” to most people, don’t include Frans Masereel’s oeuvre. Perhaps it will, someday… (2) Frans Masereel didn’t view himself as a comics artist. As far as he was concerned he did wood engravings, that’s all… To call his cycles “comics” is an anachronism. Maybe so, but it seems to me that we are guilty of anachronism all the time and nobody cares. To go back to Tintin, the expression “bande dessinée” didn’t exist when Hergé started doing comics. Why do we continue to say that he did comics, then?… Did the Lascaux painters call what they did “painting?” Is that important? How logocentric can we get?…

As you can see in this 1915 illustration above Frans Masereel was a naturalist. But working for the pacifist newspaper La feuille in Geneva as a political cartoonist during WWI Masereel needed a less detailed, more urgent, style. As Josef Herman put it:

Working for La Feuille posed two main problems for [Masereel], both of a technical nature. One was that the drawing had to be done quickly, leaving no time for the careful, detailed draughtsmanship he had practised until then. The other was how to achieve maximum effect using poor quality paper, on which thin lines were simply lost. He solved these two problems with the true instinct of a man of genius. He avoided drawing with a fine pen and took a thick brush, in the process giving up the search for tonal texture. He now used large planes of intense black, drawing lines wherever needed with a brush. The emotional effect he achieved was staggering.

Maybe the times weren’t right for nuanced views of the world (?). I love Frans Masereel’s verve and variety (he did manga in the original sense of roaming drawings), but his ideological views and Expressionist style push him into a less than complex view of the world sometimes (the fat, jeweled, cigar-chomping capitalist, for instance, is a regrettable stereotype). You can see one of Frans Masereel’s political cartoons as published in La feuille below:

Frans Masereel was 75 years old when he published Route des hommes (1964). He did “novels without words” all his life (more than 50, according to David Beronä). Route des hommes is far from being one of his best (that would be Passionate Journey – 1918 – and, my personal favorite, The City – 1925).

Route des hommes is about the horrible and great things that happen to humankind. We find in the book Masereel’s usual topics: war, famine, exploitation, but also progress, team work, joy, etc…

The greatest thing about this edition of the Musée des Arts Contemporains au Grand-Hornu and La Lettre volée (2006) is that it shows both Masereel’s prep drawings and his wood engravings. In this way we have access to the artist’s creative process as never before.

We can see above how Frans Masereel cites another Belgian painter, James Ensor (ditto Jacques Callot at some point). It’s interesting how what seems to be a tree in the foreground of the drawing becomes a sinister figure in the wood engraving (death waits us all at the end). His composition changes (increasing the two background figures’ size) greatly improve his work.

Masereel used allegory a lot. In this drawing the cars represent careless rich people. The city lights aren’t just that, they connote poor people’s acceptance of the status quo: they’re hypnotized, alienated (as Marxists liked to say)…

…But, to tell you the truth, I prefer allegoryless Masereel. He could be very poetic, as we can see above…

Utilitarian Review 6/26/10

Posted on June 26, 2010 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

This week at HU was devoted to Komikusu, a roundtable on selling awesome manga. Contributors included Erica Friedman, Kate Dacey, Brigid Alverson, Ryan Sands, Ed Chavez, Shaenon Garrity, Deb Aoki, and Peggy Burns. Also lots of insightful comments from folks like Xavier Guilbert, Melinda Beasi, Sean Michael Robinson, and more. Thanks so much to all those who posted, commented and read. I learned a bunch.

Utilitarians Everywhere

Over at Madeloud I provide an introduction to doom metal.

Dooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom. It sounds threatening and, well, doom-like, but in fact doom metal is a giant furry mammoth that just wants to cuddle and roll all over you…inadvertently crushing you into a gelatinous blot of assorted fluids.

Maybe we should start over.

Other Links

When people think NSFW, they think of things like this.

Thinking Outside the Comic-Shop: Exposing Great Manga to Grown-Ups

Posted on June 26, 2010 by deb aoki

(or “Can Manga Muster Up Its Maus / Watchmen Mega-Crossover Hit?”)

As a reader of Hooded Utilitarian, you’re probably a little like me: you spend so much time in the world of comics and manga, you’re a little weirded out when you remember that the vast majority of readers in America still think that “comics are for kids.” Why do you think there are still magazine / newspaper / TV news reporters who trot out that tired headline “Pow! Zap! Comics Aren’t For Kids Anymore?” It’s because it’s news to them that there are lots of comics (ahem, “graphic novels”) that are written by grown-ups, for grown-up sensibilities.

Even now, if I mention that I read graphic novels to my friends, co-workers, family members and acquaintances who are non-comics readers (there are a lot of them), only 1-in-5 (maybe 1-in-10) will mention that they’ve read and enjoyed a graphic novel. They’ll usually name-check Maus by Art Spiegelman, or maybe Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. But it’s extremely rare that I’ll hear a manga title mentioned in this short list of grown-up graphic novels that reach non-comics readers. That’s really a shame, because manga has a lot of variety, and a lot of original and fascinating stories to offer to readers who normally shy away from superhero fare.

MANGA ABOUT ALMOST ANYTHING FOR ALMOST EVERYONE

I love lots of things about manga, but there’s one thing I especially love: it’s so incredibly diverse. There’s manga about almost any subject you can imagine. There’s manga written by and for men AND women. There are stories for adults, teens, tweens, girls and boys — almost any reader of any age, and about almost any subject under the sun. This year alone, I’ve read manga about:

Cats, dogs, fish, rabbits, dinosaurs
Cooking, wine, bacteria and fermentation
Basketball, football, ice skating, mountain climbing
Rock music, classical music, kabuki, acting, ballet
Fine art and fashion
Space exploration, astral projection, oceanography, medicine, religion
Autism, alcoholism, drug abuse, homelessness, serial killers
English maids, Spanish bullfighters, Turkish nomads
Gay, straight, cross-dressing, transgendered and transsexual characters
Single parents, office workers, soldiers, librarians, pastry chefs
…Even comics about making comics!

And that’s mostly just the manga I’ve read in English. If we open it up to manga that’s available in Japan, the variety of stories and styles is even greater.

Really great manga creators draw about subjects that they’re passionate about – and their enthusiasm, diverse art styles and points of view make their comics a joy to read. “Manga” is not a style – it’s a genre, just like “rock music” is a genre that can be expressed in a variety of ways for a variety of audiences.

So why do people have such a narrow perception of what manga is? As Ed Chavez mentioned in his essay, in Japan, “manga” just means “comics.” I say we need to think beyond that. In North America, calling manga “comics” limits a book’s appeal to just comics readers. Calling it “comics” forces a book to try to overcome what mainstream book readers assume “comics” are – they think comics are kids stuff.

TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING: FIGHTING FOR COMICS FANS’ ATTENTION

If American comics have to deal with the “comics are for kids” stigma, imagine what manga has to endure. Not only does manga in America have to deal with the “kids stuff” label, it also has to fend off assumptions held by mainstream comic book readers.

“Manga? Isn’t that girly stuff?”
“Manga? What, like Pokemon?”
“Manga? I can’t read that backwards crap.”
“Manga? Nah, I’m not into tentacle porn.”

As things stand now, a lot of manga that’s published in the U.S. is geared to appeal to people who already “get”manga: the fans who watch anime, or have already been introduced to the joys of manga, via the classic”gateway drug” manga titles like Akira, Lone Wolf and Cub, Fruits Basket, Naruto, Death Note and Ranma ½. But by focusing on the already “converted,” are we missing out on an opportunity to reach out beyond the comics shop, the manga aisle or even the “graphic novels” section of the bookstore?

Where there was once only a handful of manga titles published in the U.S., there are now hundreds – and a lot of them are targeted at teen readers. As a result, a lot of teen manga fans are overloaded with choices. There’s so much great manga for them to choose from nowadays, they despair because they can’t afford to buy everything they want to read. So faced with so many desirable titles, what do budget-strapped manga readers do? Some (okay, lots of) fans download it for free by any means necessary (Erica Friedman dove into the scanlation issue in her essay for this roundtable).

Meanwhile, on the other side of the comics shop, a lot of diehard superhero comics fans have a hard enough time keeping up the various crises on Infinite Earths, Darkest Nights, Brightest Days and Marvel zombie invasions. Why would they invest their spare time sifting through the hundreds of similar-looking manga on the shelf to find one that they might enjoy reading, much less consider buying, with their already tapped-out comics-buying budget?

These clichés of comics fans have tons of manga / comics titles fighting for their attention and their dollars. So why bother trying so hard to sell “arty,” “indie” or “grown-up” manga to this crowd? I say think bigger – and think outside the comic shop.

LET GO OF LABELS THAT LIMIT MANGA’S APPEAL TO NEW READERS

To break out of the comic shop/manga aisle “walled garden”, we need to stop focusing on selling this kind of comics for grown-ups merely as “manga” (or “seinen manga,” “josei manga” or even “indie manga”). Clinging to Japanese classifications may give a diehard fan a degree of satisfaction that they know that a particular manga was published in XYZ magazine in Japan, but classifying a particular manga title as a “shojo,” “shonen,” or “seinen” title isn’t all that helpful to a reader who doesn’t understand Japanese; it just adds another potentially off-putting “code word” for new readers to decipher.

Using Japanese labels to describe a book tells new readers that they have to take Japanese lessons or earn their “otaku cred” before they’ll be allowed into the “manga clubhouse.” As Shaenon Garrity pointed out, and as Ryan Sands also mentioned in his essay, what we consider to be “indie” in the U.S. doesn’t always jibe with how Japanese readers perceive the same series anyway.

Trying to sell manga based on how they were sold in Japan can cut off worthwhile books from the readers who might potentially appreciate them most. For example: Emma by Kaoru Mori is an exquisitely-drawn, painstakingly-researched, beautifully-told historical romance. It was first published in Comics Beam, an eclectic “seinen” or “mens'” manga magazine. Based on its romantic storyline, Emma was marketed in the U.S. as a “shojo” or girl’s manga series. Naturally, its “girly” look and subject led a lot of “sophisticated” comics readers to turn up their nose at this series. Although it was submitted for consideration, it was snubbed for the 2010 Eisner Awards.

That’s a shame, because I’d argue that Kaoru Mori is probably right up there as one of the world’s true masters of graphic storytelling. Her ability to capture nuances of character, emotion and relationships with just a few strokes of her pen is astonishing. Mori’s current series Otoyomegatari (The Bride’s Stories), which is as yet unlicensed in the U.S., has one of the most stunning, heart-pounding hunting scenes I’ve ever seen in print.

Why should anyone who loves comics deny themselves the pleasure of reading such a wonderfully-drawn, masterfully-told story just because it looks “girly” or (gasp) just because they have a thing against what they think “manga” is?

EXPOSING MANGA TO NON-MANGA READERS

Breaking out of the mainstream mindset that “all manga is Naruto” requires savvy and imaginative marketing on the part of U.S. manga publishers.

Manga is incredibly diverse. Selling every manga title with a “one size fits all” approach to readers is a grave disservice to these comics, and it limits their potential readership. I know it’s time-consuming to do so, but it’s probably more effective to sell graphic novels to various types of readers based on the various titles’ individual art styles and subject matter.

If we can’t get new readers into the manga section, then it’s up to us, publishers and people who want to see more “grown-up” manga get the attention it deserves, to put manga in front of new readers by bringing manga to where these prospective readers are getting information now: non-comics magazines, newspapers, blogs, TV shows, radio shows – anywhere they turned on to new ideas. One way to do this is to focus on the subject and style of the manga, and as Brigid Alverson suggests in her essay, pitch these unconventional graphic novels to non-comics media outlets.

While rare, several manga titles have gotten some attention from non-comics media:

Basketball manga by Takehiko Inoue (Real and Slam Dunk) was reviewed and Inoue was profiled in the L.A. Times during the Lakers – Celtics NBA Finals.
Kami no Shizuku (Drops of God) by Tadashi Agai (a.k.a. brother/sister team Yuko and Shin Kibayashi) has been written up in the New York Times, CNN and Decanter Magazine, and wine blogs. Alas, while it has been published in French, it’s not yet licensed in English.
Oishinbo has been featured in the pages of Bon Appetit, the food section in several newspapers and numerous food blogs. As a result, I’ve seen Oishinbo sold at cooking specialty shops like Omnivore Books in San Francisco and Good Egg in Toronto. Seven volumes of Oishinbo, each focused on a different food, are available from VIZ Media.
LA Weekly columnist Liz Ohanesian regularly writes about anime and manga culture with a hip, street-smart voice and perspective that’s not just “otakus writing for otakus” – check out her fab article about former Bratmobile singer Alison Wolfe’s role in localizing Ai Yazawa’s rock ‘n’ roll drama, Nana.
Whitney Matheson, from USA Today’s Pop Candy blog gave a shoutout to Detroit Metal City, Kiminori Wakasugi’s crass, brash and outrageous heavy metal comedy – and even named it as one of the top 10 best graphic novels of 2009, along with A Drifting Life and Oishinbo

Summit of the Gods by Jiro Taniguchi, a manga about climbing Mount Everest got a nice write-up in Outside Magazine. (Available from Fanfare-Ponent Mon)
Section Chief Kosaku Shima, one of the most popular “business manga” titles in Japan was written up in The Economist. Unfortunately, only a few volumes of the Kodansha bilingual edition of this series is available in English.
With the Light by Keiko Tobe, a series from Yen Press about a young mother’s struggles to understand and raise her autistic son has been featured on a few autism-focused parenting blogs.
GoGo Monster by Taiyo Matsumoto (VIZ Media) was nominated for the L.A. Times Book Prize alongside Asterios Polyp, Scott Pilgrim, and Footnotes in Gaza.
Ooku by Fumi Yoshinaga (VIZ Media), won the 2009 James Tiptree Jr. Literary Award – an “annual literary prize for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender.” Ooku certainly fit the bill, as it examines an alternate reality where most of Japan’s male population has succumbed to a mysterious plague, and the shogun is a woman.

Meanwhile in Japan, manga is featured in fashion magazines, alongside fashion photo spreads and celebrity interviews:

Manga creator Erica Sakurazawa (The Aromatic Bitters from TokyoPop) recently did a 6-page short story adapting the characters of Sex in the City as manga characters. This full-color comic was featured in the Japanese edition of Harper’s Bazaar as a showcase for both the Sex and the City 2 movie and the latest styles by Louis Vuitton, Prada and Versace.
Ai Yazawa’s Paradise Kiss (TokyoPop), a story about an aspiring model and fashion design students, was serialized in the pages of Zipper, a fashion magazine.

As Kate Dacey asked in her essay, why aren’t we doing more to reach the one audience that the U.S. comics industry has been ignoring or failing to reach for years: young women? If we can have manga versions of Twilight and Gossip Girl, why not Sex and the City comics? Why isn’t a series like Suppli, a series about the professional and romantic tribulations of a young woman working at an advertising agency reviewed or serialized in Glamour or Marie Claire? Why not have Bunny Drop, a completely relatable series about a single father and his young adopted daughter discussed in parenting blogs or magazines? And what if (as Shaenon Garrity suggested in her essay) Oprah actually plugged a manga series on her show or magazine? The mind boggles.

WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO TAKE IT TO THE NEXT LEVEL?

There are so many possibilities out there to explore. I’d love to see a regular columns about indie manga – or even have have manga featured more prominently in hip, artsy and pop-culture savvy magazines like Giant Robot, Hi-Fructose, Spin, Juxtapoz and VICE. Artistically edgy, smart and witty titles like Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu (Last Gasp), AX: Alternative Manga (Top Shelf) and I’ll Give It My All… Tomorrow (VIZ Media) are all appealing choices for these magazines’ readers.

Websites like SigIkki.com make it easy for new readers to sample manga online before they buy them; it’s a painless way to turn new readers onto manga they might not ordinarily be exposed to. It can only get better as more manga is available for sampling and reading online or for download via eBook readers like the Kindle or iPad.

It’ll take a lot of effort and outreach to get to the point where we have a manga title that’s as widely read as Maus or Watchmen. It won’t be easy. Books like that achieve a high level of attention and acclaim because they have a rare combination of factors going for them:

a great story that’s well-written, enjoyable to read and accessible enough to captivate even non-manga/non-comics readers
strong and consistent marketing support from publishers and creators
lots of great word of mouth from readers.

One only needs to look at the attention and care that Drawn and Quarterly put into promoting the work of Yoshihiro Tatsumi to see how it could be done. There are lots of good reasons why A Drifting Life made it onto more “Best of 2009” lists than any other manga title put out last year (It’s just an amazing book, period) – but I’d have to say that D&Q’s thoughtful and consistent marketing efforts made a huge difference too.

I think that manga’s version of the Maus/Watchmen “cross-over hit” will happen eventually – but it won’t if we content ourselves with just promoting manga to the already converted.

I believe in putting my money where my mouth is, so on a 1:1 basis, I recommend manga to friends based on their interests.

I gave a copy of Kami no Shizuku to a sommelier pal (he actually heard about it from the Decanter article, and he found it to be completely fascinating).
I’ve given copies of Solanin, GoGo Monster and Children of the Sea to friends who normally just read “indie” comics (they’ve come back to me asking for more recommendations).
I’ve turned on girlfriends to Emma just by describing it as being like a Merchant-Ivory film, or similar to Jane Austen books.
I gave Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture (Del Rey Manga) to a friend who is a technical editor who writes about waste-water management (she’s always asking me when the next volume will be coming out).
My cat-loving sister who hasn’t read a comic book since she stopped reading Archie comics 30 years ago is loving Chi’s Sweet Home by Konami Konata (Vertical).
And I’m pretty stoked at the reaction I’ve gotten when I’ve recommended Biomega to this particular friend.

So I’m doing my part – what are you doing to turn on new readers to manga that they might enjoy? Try it – you might be pleasantly surprised by the results.

______________
Update by Noah: The entire Komikusu roundtable is here.

Selling Awesome Manga

Posted on June 25, 2010 by Shaenon Garrity

As other people on this roundtable have pointed out, we’ve been using “arty manga” as a catchall term for a variety of niche manga with potential appeal to older readers: genuine alternative and underground manga (gekiga, the work of Junko Mizuno), offbeat manga similar in content to American indie comics (Viz’s SigIkki line, pretty much everything Fanfare/Ponent Mon puts out), mainstream manga aimed at adults (Ooku, A Drifting Life, Oishinbo), and basically any manga published before 1980. In Japan, a manga’s publishing category is usually determined by the venue where it first appeared, whether a mainstream magazine like Shonen Sunday, an edgier but still basically mainstream magazine like Ikki, an indie publication like Comic Beam, AX or the defunct Garo, or a totally alternative venue like self-published doujinshi or CD liner notes. This system is problematic in its own way (Comic Beam‘s “alternative” lineup runs the gamut from underground trip-outs like Junko Mizuno’s Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu to the mainstream-friendly Victorian maid romance Emma), but it does keep things simple.

In the U.S., the established categories are less clear. Jason Thompson has pointed out that, in terms of popularity and sales, manga in America can be divided into Naruto and everything else. Aren’t most comics “alternative” to most of America? So what the hell. For the purposes of this post, the manga under discussion are Awesome Manga, all the titles that are too smart, too weird and/or too old for the established comics audience.

They’re hard to sell. For years, it’s been a truism in manga publishing that alternative, adult and classic manga have to clear nigh-insurmountable odds to find an audience. Personally, I knew it was going to be an uphill climb when, in 2004, I heard the shojo manga Boys over Flowers, originally published from 1992-2003, dismissed by manga fans as “too old.” Most manga fans are lukewarm toward alternative or classic comics, and most fans of alternative and classic comics actively hate manga. This is slowly changing as manga permeates the larger comics culture and the manga audience ages, but we have yet to reach a tipping point where autobio manga or Black Jack reprints can reach American shores with expectations of a built-in audience. It still takes a ton of effort to get people to read awesome manga, and often you have to go outside the usual manga/comics venues to do it.

Many of the previous posters have suggested ways to market these titles. Based on my ten years of experience working for manga publishers, talking to people at manga publishers, and generally obsessing over manga publishing, here’s my take:

1. Selling outside the established comics readership. A great strategy if you’ve got a title that can sell that way. If you have the only comic in a non-comics section of the bookstore, you’re golden. Viz has been successful in getting Oishinbo stocked in cooking and food sections of bookstores, and even in cooking specialty stores, where it stands out. It helps that, for bookstores, Oishinbo has an easily grasped high-concept pitch: it’s the manga about food. Obviously it belongs in the food aisle! It may be harder to get, say, Ooku shelved in historical fiction, sci-fi or romance, even though it fits all these categories. But nonfiction manga–history, autobiography, instruction–can often escape the comics ghetto.

This is, of course, the same strategy followed by American alternative and small-press comics. Titles like American Born Chinese and Fun Home attracted only lukewarm interest in “mainstream” comics fandom at the same time they were making bestseller lists in the book market. Every alt-publisher dreams of making this strategy work.

2. Selling to libraries. At this point in the manga game, this is a no-brainer. Manga loves libraries and libraries love manga. Librarians tend to do a fair amount of research before purchasing new manga, so you can sell them with a more detailed pitch that explains the work’s artistic/literary/historical value. As far as I can tell, Tezuka’s Buddha has been the champ in this category. It’s got a double-barrelled claim to legitimacy: a work by the undisputed master of manga covering a Serious Historical Subject. (If you actually read Buddha, you’ll find that it’s more of an action-and-comedy-packed Classics for Children take than a reverent history, but whatevs.) In the dawn times of the manga business, Tezuka’s Adolf sold well to libraries for the same reason. Hitler equals Serious Literature.

The challenge, for titles that aren’t Buddha or Adolf, is convincing libraries that a manga they probably haven’t heard of, by a creator they probably haven’t heard of, covering an esoteric subject that may or may not be of interest to their patrons, is a must-buy because it’s awesome. At this point, most librarians have heard of Tezuka, but they may not be familiar with the Year 24 Group or care about its role in shaping shojo manga. They may not have heard the term gekiga. They may not see the literary value in a pulpy horror manga like The Drifting Classroom or Cat-Eyed Boy. And manga with graphic adult material is going to get them into trouble with parents no matter how carefully they shelve and label it, so they need to be convinced that it’s pretty damn great. That said, libraries are a manga publisher’s best friends, especially for titles with value beyond their immediate mainstream appeal.

3. Sweet book design. Again, a no-brainer at this point. Give manga publishers credit for picking up on Vertical’s initiative and putting a lot more effort into the design and presentation of awesome manga. Even Viz, which for years was reluctant to deviate from the 5 x 7.5″ glossy standard, has been publishing its Signature and SigIkki books in eye-catching outsize editions with matte covers, gatefold flaps and interior color pages. Fantagraphics’ cover for A Drunken Dream suggests that their new manga line will be a good-looking one, although the logo for the imprint is kind of spidery and weird.

Does good book design sell more copies? In some cases, yes. Chip Kidd’s line-up-the-spines design for Buddha makes the series look like a must-have, as does Drawn & Quarterly’s intimidating doorstop presentation of A Drifting Life. In other cases, not necessarily. In addition to Buddha, Chip Kidd designed Vertical’s editions of To Terra and Andromeda Stories, the only works by major shojo pioneer Keiko Takemiya available in English. Have you bought To Terra and Andromeda Stories? Didn’t think so.

4. The Internet. Putting awesome manga online for free browsing seems like a great strategy. After all, scanlators are always going on about how their piracy does the industry a favor by introducing readers to new titles, so why not use that power for good by introducing people to Moto Hagio and Yoshihiro Tatsumi rather than the latest borderline-pedo-porn strip out of Dengenki Daioh? Home-grown American webcomics survive, and even thrive, by building an audience online for material that might have trouble finding fans in print. Can you imagine a print publisher even touching the stick-figure math-nerd strip xkcd, much less figuring out a way to market it? So here’s the plan, presented Internet-meme style:

1.Put awesome manga online.

2. Build a fanbase and get the attention of critics.

3. Publish the manga in print.

4. ???

5. Profit!

That’s the logic behind sites like SigIkki.com, Viz’s online alt-comics initiative. The site does just about everything right. Rather than offering stingy samples, Viz posts entire volumes online. The lineup (all manga originally serialized in Ikki magazine) is solid but eclectic, including the haunting aquatic fantasy Children of the Sea, the quirky-cute sci-fi drama Saturn Apartments, brilliant up-and-comer Natsume Ono’s not simple and House of Five Leaves, edgy but accessible genre series like Afterschool Charisma and Bokurano: Ours, and out-of-left-field weirdness like Tokyo Flowchart and Bob and His Funky Crew. The site’s e-reader is excellent, a cut above the clumsy, slow-loading readers most publishers offer.

Are there things publishers like Viz could do better as they move online? Probably. My own feeling is that the Viz sites need more non-manga content: blogs, forums, exclusive material, anything that contributes a sense of community. That’s how all successful webcomics work. Hell, go to the frontpage for Penny Arcade, the biggest webcomic in the world, and you don’t even see the comic, just the creators’ blog posts about the gaming industry. (And a ton of ads, of course.) Scanlation sites have already achieved this; a big part of the appeal of the scanlation community is the sense of being part of an exclusive inner circle of alpha fans. For a lot of oft-downloaded titles (I’m looking at you, Weiss Kreuz), the manga itself is much less of a draw than the vibrant fan community that’s formed around it like an oyster pearl.

A wise cartoonist once gave me some advice for making a living from webcomics. He told me that online fandom revolves around stealing stuff, so the only way to survive is to build a cult of personality around yourself to the point that your fans feel bad about stealing from you. With manga, that’s hard to accomplish, because communication between creators and fans is severely limited–by language, by distance, and by the fact that these people are insanely busy drawing manga all day. Maybe the solution is to develop the publisher itself as a personality, Mighty Marvel style. The company that became Tokyopop started out this way; anyone else remember the funky editorials of DJ Milky in MixxZine? Not exactly the way we want the industry to go, but maybe the basic concept could be done more honestly and effectively online.

I guess I’m supposed to devote a paragraph here to talking about iPads, e-readers, smart phones, etc., but they’re going to be completely interchangeable with computers within a few years. Assume that everything I’ve said about websites applies to apps.

5. Things that don’t make a difference in sales. Flipping or unflipping. I honestly don’t think enough people care one way or another to make a noticeable dent in sales. Someone who says, “I can’t read right-to-left because it’s all foreign and hard,” or, “I can’t read left-to-right because it destroys the glorious purity of the manga-ka’s authentic Japanese vision OH GOD THEY PROBABLY DROPPED THE HONORIFICS TOO” wasn’t going to buy the damn book anyway. In the balance, it’s better to publish manga unflipped because it’s cheaper.

Getting celebrity blurbs. It’s really cool when famous people, or semi-famous people I admire a lot, share a fondness for my favorite manga. If such a person is willing to provide a blurb, the publisher should by all means go for it. But I’m not convinced that Junot Diaz’s recommendation of Monster did anything to spike sales. And he made that recommendation in Time magazine, the biggest mass-media platform you could hope to reach. Again, it’s cool when it happens, but I don’t know if celebrity endorsements do anything for sales–unless it’s someone who’s Internet famous, with the aforementioned cult of personality, and orders their minions to buy the book. Junot Diaz? He’s just another bestselling novelist with a Pulitzer. When Joss Whedon or the guy who played Wesley Crusher plugs Monster, maybe Viz will start raking in the benjamins.

Oprah would be good too. Somebody publish a manga version of The Secret. Only awesome.
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Update by Noah: The whole Komikusu roundtable is here.

Ed Chavez on Arty Manga, Past and Future

Posted on June 24, 2010 by Noah Berlatsky

The essay below is by Ed Chavez of Vertical Press.
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30 years ago all translated manga were practically arty comics. The designs were nothing like what was available in the West. The stories were told with a focus on characters, instead of narrative. And while the very first manga in English, Barefoot Gen, came from mainstream anthology Shounen Jump, many of the other titles that followed it in the 80’s were from seinen or alternative manga publications that at the time were just starting to make an impact on the Japanese manga scene.

The industry has changed in almost every way imaginable on both sides of the Pacific over these now four decades. In fact so much has changed that both regions can now say with confidence that they both have legitimate art manga scenes. Whether either market is actually viable is still questionable, but at least for the time being, artsy manga is here and I can say with confidence that more is on its way. And for the sake of this discussion, I would like to go into a little detail as to why that is and what publishers in the industry are doing to maintain that small subset within manga alive and well.

But before I dive into that, I feel I must provide my definition of “arty manga”, as this piece will focus solely on that subset and not just your average seinen or josei title like Oishinbo, InuBaka or even Twin Spica. Japanese comics for older readers have been around since the bronze age of English manga. Akira, Lone Wolf & Cub and Crying Freeman are examples of that. With publishers like Dark Horse and Del Rey Manga these titles should flourish as they have for hits like Genshiken, Hellsing and Chobits. I do not want to disparage the artistic value of any of those titles. However, all of these properties were at one point marketed towards the mainstream overseas by some of the biggest publishers in that market. And in many cases, these titles had media tie-ins that helped their brands receive more recognition from the sub-culture in the West.

An “arty manga” is generally not blessed with either. It is “successful” in spite of being under-supported or is published by the manga equivalent of a Top Shelf or First Second. It has been recognized by editors across the globe even when it doesn’t have a specific genre to be pigeonholed into by critics. An arty manga might not have dialogue. There are times when its designs are so bad they feel so right. These comics have so little going in their favor that even in Japan they are often just called comics (using the English term). And in some cases the artists even create new terms to more closely describe their brand of sequential art.

I suppose classical works are now being called arty, as some can reveal a chronological history of manga story-telling methods and artistic designs analogous that can then be used for study similar to an art appreciation course. But titles like Dororo or even some Tatsumi works transcend time and continue to have themes that can be appreciated from a mainstream seinen or shounen perspective generations later (though many manga readers will likely get hung up on character design).

With so many hurdles to overcome why even approach arty manga? The answer is simple… Unlike more mainstream manga, which is a bit of a contradiction in the US, arty or even literary manga tend to have a feel and tone that is closer to western graphic novels than to the best-selling shoujo or shounen properties on either continent. When approached with enough restraint and common sense, an arty manga has the potential to be a hit with readers, critics and sales directors alike for the following reasons…

1) Comics like Tokyo Zombie and to an extent many of Junko Mizuno’s works fill a niche for fans. These fans may not be manga fans, either. These readers may have an interest the world of Japanese film or Japanese design. Japanese sub-culture is much broader than just anime and manga, and by exploiting specific designs and genres smart publishers with a keen understanding for the pulse of sub-culture trends in North America can make properties or artists that are experimental even in Japan accessible to a steady readership without having to appeal to a manga-cow audience at Borders or B&N.

The development of “gekiga”, a term that is loosely thrown around by some pundits and marketers in the west, has created a reasonable base for titles that are labeled as such (even if they were originally seinen properties in Japan).

2) When critics outside of the “mangasphere” get a hold of a manga there is often some trepidation. Most appear to be too foreign and while even the best seinen and josei titles can stimulate readers, length is often an issue. So unless the property is extremely compelling or intriguing from a journalistic perspective, like Tezuka’s Buddha, it may be challenging to give an appropriate review.

Because of the challenges to produce these works in Japan, most arty manga tend to be shorter and many are plot driven (instead of character driven which is the industry standard). This allows critics, academics and journalists to really dig deep into these titles without having to devote time and resources to acquire translated versions of every volume of an 11 volume on-going series.
The informed publisher will have staff on hand to select and dissect properties that are challenging but relevant to their market. Through marketing they will find ways to exploit current events, trends or existing authors/books to help promote their titles. The smart publisher makes an effort to present their content as Japanese, but they must be always aware that their readership is not and may not have an interest in the nuances of manga culture, let alone Japanese culture. And when a critic can find a comic that transcends languages, cultures and time they will respect that and champion it as seen with arty mega-hits like A Drifting Life and Buddha.

3) Producing arty manga is a challenge within the manga industry. In Japan artists working within the experimental field have historically not received page rates. Instead they toil away submitting work, hoping that one day their stories or series will be collected into graphic novels from which they receive royalties. Print runs for these GNs are not significant relative to traditional manga releases (in my experience working for Kodansha print runs average around 30,000 for seinen magazines, but can go much lower for their more experimental spin-off lines).

Arty manga is rarely localized by the US manga powers—Viz Media, Yen Press and TokyoPop. Publishers like Drawn & Quarterly, PictureBox and Last Gasp (often with the help of JaPress) tend to provide most of this content with my company Vertical dabbing into the field now and then. Speaking from personal experience, releasing an arty title means a lot of overhead but can often mean significant returns in the long-term. Designing a book that will appeal to a mainstream readership is critical. So everything from the jacket and orientation needs to be scrutinized just as much as the top-class translations these publishers often commission. All of that costs money and demands time. However that is because these books are not mass-market. They are works of love and they deserve more.

Price points are often higher reflecting the production costs. Marketing budgets are also higher and used more effectively. And while I am reading that some believe this is because many of these publishers are comics specialists, I will say Dark Horse is a comics specialist and well they haven’t taken the scene by storm with their actual gekiga releases such as Satsuma Gishiden or the Color of Rage. At the same time, Dark Horse readers, whether they read manga or AmeComi or both, might not be art comics readers. D&Q readers are. Picturebox readers are. Last Gasp readers know what to expect from their comics. And in the case of Vertical, our readers tend to be fans of Japanese genre fiction and Japanese film, so they get many of the same themes and genres in comic form. I want to believe these publishers also exploit their books knowing that.
These business factors can turn a micro-niche release into a financial success. However, the same formulas also should prevent a publisher from over-reaching by releasing too much into a market that is growing steadily, but appears to be waiting for that next title to break free from the “manga/comics ghetto.”

That said, even with all those variables working in a publisher’s favor not every title will work, nor will every artist. For every A Drifting Life there will be a The Box Man and for every Apollo’s Song there is an Andromeda’s Story, just like Naruto has its Cat Eyed Boy and Fruits Basket has its Tantric Fighter… The successes earned their praise because of the quality of work. Sadly there are many more titles that do not receive their due everywhere for reasons too many to list.
So while others focus on demographics, libraries or designers, I say publishers need to make sure the arty, literary, indie, experimental, alternative…manga they select are always simply great comics. Whether spelled with a “k” or with a “c”, good comics will never be denied their place in homes and stores.
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The entire Komikusu roundtable is here.

Indie is as indie does

Posted on June 24, 2010 by Ryan_Sands

I’ve enjoyed watching this roundtable unfold — comics that we’d call “Indie Manga” are the ones I seem to spend the majority of my reading time digesting — some of which has been licensed and adapted for English readers, and others in their original form, still under the radar or not yet thought to have a potential readership.

Traumerei by Shimada Toranosuke(top) and Ashura by George Akiyama (bottom), indie manga in both content and pedigree

In thinking about this post and what I could add to this discussion, I had a private goal of sneaking in and name-checking as many cool titles as possible, to proselytize those weirdo books that we love over at Same Hat (the blog I run for indie/horror/weirdo comics fans get together and talk shop). I was struck yesterday by something Kate wrote in laying out her smart and right-on points about marketing indie manga to readers. She said,

Buddha, Ode to Kirihito, and A Drifting Life are three examples of manga that appealed to a wide range of readers, from folks interested in good stories to folks interested in reading works by seminal Japanese artists. It’s this piece of the Venn Diagram that I’d like to address, in the form of three simple suggestions for marketing books to both audiences.

These are all interesting manga titles that have crossover appeal to non-manga fans, and were published by publishers other than the mainstream big companies. But are they “indie manga”? Is it the case that a work by Osamu Tezuka can even be categorized as such? This may seem like an obvious place to start, but if we’re going to discuss how to market these books, it’s important to figure out what the hell these terms mean. It seems to me that the two defining characteristics of indie manga are:

Who licensed and published it in English
The content of the manga itself

I wanna try to unpack these two defining characteristics in this column. A few months back, About.com’s Deb Aoki hosted a special “Indie Manga” edition of the fantastic comics podcast, Inkstuds. That discussion was a blast, featuring commentary from David P. Welsh of The Manga Curmudgeon and Chris Butcher of Comics212/The Beguiling. (I recommend that post if only for the fantastic list of titles that get mentioned as starting points for indie comics fan looking to dabble in manga). I talked there about how what we think of as indie manga is very much defined by which publisher licensed it in the States, rather than where it appeared in Japan originally.

When manga fans I know on Same Hat talk about our favorite indie manga — they’ll throw together the formalism-meets-pornography experimental works of Shintaro Kago with a horror serial like The Drifting Classroom by Kazuo Umezu and alongside Red Snow by Susumu Katsumata. For American readers it’s easy to draw a line through these titles as similar in their “indie-ness”, but looking at their demographic/publisher/bookshop placement in Japan this makes no sense at all; If Shintaro Kago is “underground” in America, he’s mega-underground in Japan– no manga shop in Tokyo save for Taco Che and other speciality weirdo shops would stock his books. Meanwhile, Kazuo Umezu is a super-mainstream godfather of gag and horror comics, and his Drifting Classroom was published as a popular kid’s comic in Japan (and is now sold shrink-wrapped for Mature Audiences in America). Lastly, Red Snow is a gekiga collection full up on realism and rural life.

In America, perceived similarities (indie-ness?) between these creators in American comic fans head space are felt because of the publisher or imprint they are published in America… but in Japan folks would majorly scratch their heads at these being discussed together.

In the introduction to Secret Comics Japan, one of the three defining anthologies of indie manga to date, an interesting and similar point was made by the editor, Chikao Shiratori. Shiratori is a comics essayists and worked as Managing Editor of GARO in the ’90, and also helped put together its spiritual sister publication (and literally the BEST primer on indie manga out there), Comics Underground Japan. In that introduction, Shiratori said:

Today, categories like “major” and “underground,” have become ambiguous and are crumbling. It might just be that the medium has truly matured, and now no single manga or manga magazine can dominate over the others as they once did… This book is entitled Secret Comics Japan. What, then, is a “secret comic” in today’s Japan where underground exist in the majors and majors lurk in the underground? In Japan, reading manga is part of daily life in almost any age group; however, things have not reached the point where your average person will actively seek out good manga, manga that will stimulate them and make them think and feel deeply. Understand, in Japan today, manga and manga-type media have become so widespread that to read manga everyday doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a manga fan, any more than watching television regularly makes you a television fan.

Here, Shiratori hints at the other piece of my haphazard definition of indie manga — the content of the book itself! Seems to be the fundamental point of everything right? Indie to me used to mean topics and styles outside the mainstream. The weird, raw or uncommon forms of expression that you just don’t encounter without working and digging for it. This has been consistently where my comics sensibilities draw me when it comes to manga, and why anthologies such as the two mentioned above, along with Pulp Magazine and the book Sake Jock meant so much to me when I was younger — they were the Rosetta Stones of weirdo manga.

My current relationship to manga and comics in general feels different today. While my shelves are stocked with books that most likely will never be licensed into English — like the strange finds and old genre classics from my most recent trip to Japan — the world of indie manga seems vast but no longer untamed. For the initiated and devout manga fan, it’s not that hard to find out what the RAWs and MOMEs and POPGUNs of Japan are, or where the weirdest work is happening right now. (If this is you and you want to learn more and blow your own mind, I implore you to read the online English translation of the book on indie manga in Japan: Manga Zombie). Manga is awesome, sure, but the stuff I’m most excited about are self-published comics by friends and contemporaries, and Chinese and European indie comics– specifically cuz i dont know much about them! Isn’t that what “underground” is all about?

Getting back to this discussion’s thrust: it seems that indie has been used by fans and companies as shorthand for a few things:

+ Classics and Gekiga: Osamu Tezuka as Indie? How about Shojo masters like Keiko Takemiya and Moto Hagio?

+ Genre stuff that’s not SF, romance, or action: Horror serials and shorts, historical fiction, erotic comics. Interestingly enough, this is the approach that seems to often have been used on marketing European comics published here in N. America.

+ Stuff that is similar to American indies: Personal/introspective autobiography comics or stuff that follows the American “comix” scene. How often have we heard marketing refer to the “R. Crumb” of Japan, or use Tomine and Spiegelmen as their yardsticks in relating a manga?

+ Deeply weird stuff: the art and experimental comics (Yuichi Yokoyama), the genre-busting or straight-up explicit stuff (Toru Yamazaki’s Octopus Girl, Suehiro Maruo), genres we don’t have in America (gag comics by Tori Miki, Usamaru Furuya)

As the market and readership for manga in America has expanded, we’ve found ourselves walking through a range of the four manga above — some marketed as indie to English readers, others marketed as strictly “comics” without pinning them to their Japanese origin, and others marketed by their genre. A quick glance at the early history of manga in America underscores this point. (For folks more interested in this topic, Same Hat readers have assembled a work-in-progress chronology of early manga publications).

The Early Days! (late 1980s!) Genre comics were published piecemeal alongside other European and American genre comics. The few manga at the beginning was published in Epic Illustrated, Heavy Metal — bodacious SF and manly comics that weren’t demarcated by their country of origin, but by their adherence to genre tropes.

The Golden Years! (late 1990s!) Everyone starts taking weird changes, and Viz uses their Pokemon money to fund Pulp (spitting out art comics, genre comics, and deeply weird stuff!); To me, this was the golden age of indie manga, when it felt like the manga market pie was getting big enough that there was a piece for every reader, and every style.

Nowadays! (late 2000s!) Indie is everywhere? Or maybe we should just call them all graphic novels by now? Dynamic and interesting works are being put out by a number of publishers? In one sense, the defining characteristic seems to be a similarity to the house style/speciality of the American indie publisher that put it out…

Interestingly enough, this focus on genre stratification, and the curation role of the indie publisher (be it Fantagraphics, Last Gasp, or Viz) was raised at the very start of manga’s publishing in the late 1980s, by translator/author/manga master Frederik Schodt. Back then, he wrote an essay about manga’s potential success among English readers:

The first reason is the sheer size of the Japanese industry and the variety of material it churns out. Probably ninety-five percent of Japanese comics are not worth translating. A lot of them are soft-core porn for men or trashy romances for women, stuff we Americans could create on our own, thanks. And who wants to read volumes about the problems of hierarchical relationships in boring office jobs or the spiritual rewards of selling discount cameras in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district? But precisely because there is so much stuff produced, there is something for nearly everyone, if selected properly. You want a story on the Russian revolution, or an analysis of gourmet cooking? You wan wild, original art work? You want something that looks just like an American comic? If you can name it, Japanese comics probably have it.

And later on that same topic from an interview I conducted with Fred in late 2008:

I think most people who read manga in America are not aware of the fact that the filter is huge. The filter that an American publisher is using when they decide what to publish here is very big and tight and they ultimately have to import what they can sell here, which is not what someone in Japan would necessarily want. That’s why for years all the manga here were kind of SF, young male-oriented works. It’s only recently that shojo manga caught on, which was a big surprise to everybody in the industry. Even to this day, I’m not sure how much of the popularity of manga is here to stay, or how much of it is a bubble or fad. It’ll be interesting to see.

Okay, so I went long on history and terminology and short on solutions for marketing and selling indie manga to English readers. I think others have tackled this well, but here are my final thoughts on finding readerships. Considering the two definitions of indie manga from the start of this column (the content itself is truly “independent” in nature and/or the English publisher that licensed it specializes in indie books), here are thoughts:

1) Branding the Japanese source of the books and harnessing that curatorial indie brand:

Manga fans know that GARO was an important publication and an easy parallel to make. But what about AX and COMIC BEAM as the place in Japan for the coolest shit? Top Shelf seems to be doing this well in the way they’ve framed their upcoming AX Anthology, and similar things are happening with the term ‘gekiga’ due to Drawn & Quarterly’s promotion of the genre/movement. The ’90s anthologies I love and cherish understood this too, positioning their collections as THE gateway (drug?) to a certain scene and era.

2) Accepting small audiences when they are and should be small for truly independent work, and finding lovers of the type of story that book tells.

As Peggy said in her email, they have success with Tatsumi because “we promote him as one of our D+Q cartoonists, and because we publish books for adults.” Here’s another interesting marketing example: the works of genius creator Naoki Urasawa are very much NOT indie — not in Japan and not in America. Yet Viz’s Signature line editor noticed in an interview that Pulitzer-winning author Junot Diaz had name-checked Monster in an interview in the mainstream press, and got him to write a blurb for the flap of Monster / 20th Century Boys . This is a coup in one sense, but does it sell books? How do you telegraph the indie/genre cred of comics from Japan?

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The whole Komikusu roundtable is here.

Peggy Burns on D&Q’s Success With Gekiga

Posted on June 23, 2010 by Noah Berlatsky

Peggy Burns, Associate Publisher at Drawn & Quarterly, was not able to participate in this roundtable…but she did graciously agree to let me reproduce an edited version of the email she sent me when she declined. It’s below.

Hi Noah,

Thank you for the invitation but I do not think I would have much to contribute. We have had a lot of success with gekiga, but I sincerely think that the reason why someone like Tatsumi made the cover of the Paris Review, NY Times Arts section and on the NYT graphic novel bestseller list is because we promote him as one of our D+Q cartoonists, and because we publish books for adults, there is no added marketing necessary to get this point across to stores or readers.

While I wish mainstream manga sites the best, I feel no need to convince them to write about us, if they do not already.

Best,

Peggy