Tag Archives: manga

Overthinking Things 8/29/2011

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All Roads Lead to Thermae Romae

When most people think of Japan, they have a relatively limited cultural palette from which to chose. Samurai, sumo, wacky mascots, big-eyed anime characters, shrines…and baths. Japanese baths are, to many Westerners, an exotic mix of hedonistic luxury, voyeuristic public nudity and, (because we all watched James Clavell’s Shogun mini-series when we were young,) an indication of how civilized the Japanese are.

But the Japanese are hardly the only culture to revel in the various joys of bath-taking. One of the most famous cultures to embrace and refine the architecture of bathing was the Romans. Roman bath structures have been found everywhere the Romans themselves held sway. At their peak of power, this meant that Roman bath-taking was a cultural relic being spread over huge swathes of Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa and AsiaMinor.

 

Roman baths are amazingly sophisticated things. In the north of Britain I visited a bath substructure that had survived many millennia, more invasions than you can imagine and was still in good enough shape that you could see how water was brought in, heated, circulated and drained. I find Roman baths amazing and fascinating. And, clearly, so does Yamazaki Mari, creator of one the strangest, yet most charming manga I have ever read, Thermae Romae.

Thermae Romae is set in 129 AD, during the reign of Emperor Hadrian, when the Roman empire was at relative peace, under an Emperor who saw building and economic expansion as a better use of Roman money than war. Lucius Modestus is an architect of baths. His friend Marcus is a sculptor and they are both moderately successful men. Lucius is young enough that his reputation has room to grow.

While Lucius and Marcus are relaxing in a public bath, Lucius finds himself drawn under the water, through a water tunnel deep underground, only to rise out of the water once again…in a public bathhouse in 21st century Japan. If this seems wackadoodle to you, that’s only because it is. And it makes a rollicking good yarn every time.

In every chapter, Lucius is confronted by a conceptual problem – how to make an outside bath, how to create a better atmosphere in a public bath, how to please a wealthy, but aesthetically challenged patron, how to create a bath for soldiers in camp with no running water? And in each chapter, Lucius dives under the water, finds inspiration in a Japanese bathing concept and returns to Rome where he blows the Romans out of the water, as it were, with his amazing ideas.

In between chapters, Yamazaki discusses and shows photos of actual ruins of Roman baths that contain these concepts – everything from posters of popular gladiators on the wall to makeshift bathing contraptions in military camps.

The art in Thermae Romae is part of its charm. Lucius is drawn to resemble a Roman statue of a mature man. Rome itself is rendered with accuracy and sophistication.

Japanese characters are drawn with slight caricature, but recognizably to Western eyes as “Asian,” which sets this manga apart from the big-eyes crowd.

The art is attractive, but what keeps me reading is the fact that Lucius is a fantastic character. As his experiences in Japan become more normal to him, he begins to seek out the stimulation and bring home more ideas. But he’s still human and his fame and fortune comes at a price – he loses his wife, who is tired of being left behind. (And those rumors that Emperor Hadrian favors him aren’t helping any either….)

Thermae Romae runs in Enterbrain’s Comic Beam, a magazine that has the tagline “…a MAGAZINE for the COMIC FREAKS” in English on every cover. This comic is for a sophisticated, adult manga-reading audience. Comic Beam is most notable here in the west for publishing Wandering Son by Takako Shimura, currently published by Fantagraphics. Appreciation for Yamazaki’s eclectic story is not limited to comic freaks, she has won the 3rd Manga Taisho Award and the 14th Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize for this work. A live-action movie has just been announced for this title, as well…although it looks like they are going with an all-Japanese cast, which will dilute the visual impact of the story. The visual contrast between Ancient Rome and the Romans and Modern Japan and  the Japanese is the one of the main strengths of the art.

Yamazaki’s story, characters and art combine to create a completely unique, complex and fascinating story. At three volumes so far , Thermae Romae is the kind of manga it’s worth learning Japanese to be able to read

 

Borders and Manga: Interviews with Shaenon Garrity, Lillian Diaz-Przybyl, and J.R. Brown

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A few weeks back I published a story over at the Washington Times about the effect of the closing of Borders on the manga market. Several of the people I interviewed had such great thoughts that it seemed a shame to just use a quote or two. So I decided I’d reprint them all here. Thanks to Shaenon, Lillian, and J.R. for agreeing to let me do this!

I’ve edited down my comments in several places, since they’re the least illuminating parts of the dialogue.
______________

Email interview with J.R. Brown, BL expert and occasional HU contributor.

Noah: Hey JR. I’m writing because I’m currently working on a piece for the Washington Times about the effect of borders closing on manga. I was interested in the post you made on twitter about how this would have a big impact on the availability of BL titles. I wondered if I could ask you a couple more questions about that.

JR Brown: Hi Noah;

More than happy to talk, although I’m not sure how much help I’ll be, since I’m merely a reader with no inside info. The people at Digital Manga Publishing (the biggest standing BL publisher) seem to be quite responsive to academic/journalistic inquires; you could try giving dropping them a line.

My comments were based on 1) statements made by Digital Manga staff on their forum saying that availability of their BL titles in bookstores (as opposed to online / comic book shops / elsewhere) is a significant driver of sales, 2) remarks by DMP and other BL publishers indicating that Borders was a major component of their bookstore sales, and 3) in the Boston area, Barnes and Noble (our only other major chain) does not carry BL titles in its physical stores (the downtown location stocked the Junjo Romantica series briefly after it made the NYT bestseller list last year, but dropped it even before Tokyopop disintegrated). B&N in my area also just carries much less manga generally, with a more specific focus on the best-selling series and new releases biased towards the larger publishers. I have heard that B&N stores elsewhere in the country do carry BL, but even so it appears that they do so less consistently and to a lower extent than Borders did.

We do have a couple of very good local comic shops that carry BL, and of course you can get everything online, but I think the loss of Borders is going to make it less likely that the casual and especially the new reader will come across the books. And of course the same goes for other manga, especially less-popular series and the output of the smaller publishers.

I’ll be happy to take a stab at any questions you have.

Hey JR. That’s super helpful already, thanks.

Here are a couple more questions if you don’t mind…

—Do you know if Borders moved early on into BL sales? And did they help popularize that genre in the US, or at least make it available?

—Have there been any public censorship efforts aimed specifically at BL? My sense is that it’s mostly been self-censorship when the books have become unavailable, but I don’t know for sure….

—Do you think Amazon is unlikely to attract new readers to manga or BL?

JR: Oh wow. A full discussion of all this would be more than I can knock off tonight, but hitting the high points:

Borders was a major player in manga sales when the format was really taking off in the 2000s, thanks in large part to their graphic novel buyer at the time, Kurt Hassler, who was deeply gung-ho on manga and especially on the idea that girls would buy it. Borders went big and deep into manga in the mid-2000s, just around the time that publishers really started to tackle full-on BL. Several publishers had tested the water with hint-and-innuendo-only BL-esque series previously (and there had been two extremely obscure e-book releases of “real” BL by a tiny company), but around 2003 Tokyopop’s “Fake” and especially “Gravitation” series came out and did extremely well in stores (by manga standards). Borders was a major outlet for Tokyopop’s books (and continued to be so up until their joint demise), so they sold a lot of those series. I don’t know how much Borders supported the first sexually explicit books (from smaller BL publishers like CPM’s BeBeautiful, Media Blaster’s Kitty), but they did carry explicit material a few years later, including Tokyopop’s BLU line once they launched it around 2005. And as I mentioned Borders was apparently a large component of DMP’s BL sales. I don’t know of anything Borders did to popularize BL as such, beyond making the books available, but they definitely did that.

I’m not sure what you mean by “public censorship”. Many BL titles have been censored by the U.S. publisher, either because of legally/morally questionable content (particularly underage characters) or, frequently, to make the material tamer and more acceptable to bookstores. Usually it’s a question of a few panels being retouched, or dialog or character ages changed, but occasionally a page or two is left out entirely. DMP folks have talked on their forums about this, and apparently they regularly consult with bookstore buyers about permissible content for their less-explicit June imprint; it appears that said buyers prefer an absence of visible genitalia or body fluids, and the art is frequently retouched to obscure such content. Fans hate this, of course, especially in books that are 18+ anyway. Fortunately, it seems that this sort of adjustment is becoming less common, perhaps under the influence of certain very strong-selling explicit titles (Junjo Romantica, DMP’s Viewfinder re-release).

Also, this is only part of more general trends of censorship in manga; Japanese publishers have rather different ideas of how much nudity, sexual innuendo, etc is appropriate for different age levels, not to mention stuff like smoking and “hand gestures”, and quite a lot of manga gets “tweaked” for the American edition. An article that mentions some examples (mildly NSFW):

http://io9.com/5383540/dragon-ball-spice-and-wolf-and-low+class-filth-in-manga-nsfw

If you mean taking books off the shelves completely, I don’t know of any case where books were actually pulled by the publisher (more that they go out of print, or the entire publisher folds), but there have been several public flaps where specific books have been removed from certain sales channels. In 2007, Walmart.com pulled some BL after complaints about the series Yaoi Hentai (a made-in-America, explicitly pornographic OEL comic):

http://www.icv2.com/articles/home/9968.html

And just recently, Amazon.com pulled a large number of Kindle titles including BL from several publishers as part of an apparent purge of Kindle porn, but also removed a few print BL books (no specific reasons were ever given, and some of the removed stuff was quite tame):

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2011/05/too-hot-for-kindle-amazon-pulls-yaoi-from-kindle-store/

In regards to Amazon bringing in new readers: online bookstores work great for people who already know of the material and are looking for it. For someone who hasn’t ever heard of BL, or is vaguely aware of it but hasn’t actually seen any, I don’t think it’s effective. Anecdotally, for people not already familiar with slash fanfiction and so forth, entrée into BL tends to come from one of three places: indoctrination by friends; exposure to a popular “almost-BL” series like Loveless or The Betrayal Knows My Name, followed by looking for “more like that”; or just tripping across the stuff at random. Amazon.com doesn’t really facilitate the latter, except via the Kindle books, and I don’t think the Kindle Store has the degree of market penetration Borders had.

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Email interview with Lillian Diaz-Przybyl, a former senior editor at Tokyopop

Noah: I know Tokyopop had a close relationship with Borders initially when the manga boom started. Did that relationship continue over time? Did Tokyopop develop similarly close relationships with other stores, or did Borders always do better in carrying manga?

Did the problems at Borders (which I know has been struggling for years) contribute to Tokyopop’s struggles? Or were they mostly separate issues?

Have other companies taken up the slack left behind by Tokyopop’s disappearance? Or are there just less titles out there now and for the forseeable future?

Will places like B&N or Amazon or digital services fill the space left by Borders? Or will there just be less products available for manga fans?

With the end of Borders and Tokyopop, is this the end of the manga boom?

Lillian: 1. Credit where credit is due—a huge part of the influence that Borders had on the manga market was thanks to Kurt Hassler, who was the buyer for the section for quite some time. He was a great supporter of manga, and brought a lot of things into the section that might not have been there otherwise (boys love being the prime example, but there are others as well, including what we called original global manga, and a variety of merchandise). After he left to run Yen Press, there were still good connections with the buyers, but that was coincidentally the start of a long downward spiral in terms of how we worked with the chain. But we had great relationships with the other stores as well, even from the start. We did very solid business in the South, for instance, thanks to the Books a Million chain—and with a lot of the mature titles, too, which was the unexpected part. But B&N, for example, was generally a little more conservative in terms of what they would bring in. They were happy to take loads of Fruits Basket and the like, but took in fewer mature titles overall, and no mature-rated BL until last year when they tried Junjo Romantica as a test. That may be changing now, with the hole in the market (anecdotally, my local B&N has a nice, diverse line-up—but then, I live in Los Angeles), but I still see that initial risk-taking attitude on Borders’ part as a significant part of what helped grow the market back in the day, and that has never really been duplicated elsewhere.

2. Yup, Borders’ troubles most definitely affected us. Waldenbooks had always been a strong market of ours, so those stores closing down was a significant blow, and that was just the beginning. Over the last three years there were a variety of issues that we were dealing with, from how they were handling bill payment versus returns, to how aggressive they were with promoting new series, to how reliable their order numbers were. They still remained about 1/3 of our market up until the end, though, so the final impact of the bankruptcy troubles from the beginning of this year were significant (it directly led to me being laid off, for one). And every minute that your sales team is spending trying to work out problems with one distributor is a minute when they’re not thinking of new strategies to be competitive in an increasingly tight market. That’s certainly not to say that TP didn’t have its share of other problems (because it did), but that was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back.

3. Speaking from experience, “rescuing” dropped titles is a tricky business, especially since manga is a very trend-driven market, so I wouldn’t expect to see many of TP’s old series out in print release from our former rivals, if that’s what you mean. (What the J-Manga consortium has up their sleeves in that regard is anyone’s guess, though.) There are a few that are probably worth the effort to obtain, but for the most part I think the remaining companies are going to stay the course, rather than try to usurp the corner we’d been clinging to. Or rather, I think they’re better off exploring new avenues and new business models, instead of trying to regain TP’s past glory.

But to put this in perspective, the big manga market adjustment really happened in 2008 and 2009, when we went from publishing 40-odd titles a month to 20, and then to 10-15. Borders or no Borders (and Borders was definitely a factor in that decision for us), and whether we’re talking supply or demand, the US market just doesn’t support two companies printing 40-plus volumes a month, with several smaller publishers adding another 20 or 30 to the pile. TP learned that lesson the hard way three years ago, and everyone else followed shortly thereafter in one way or another, and that’s not going to get un-learned any time soon. If TP’d gone under in 2008 there may have been more of a rush to fill the vacuum, but at this point, except on an individual title level, I don’t think our catalogue is going to be that sorely missed by the market overall (Our charming personalities and flamboyant marketing campaigns, maybe, but that’s another story!). VIZ’s shojo titles may get a little bump from the people who aren’t buying Maid-Sama and Gakuen Alice anymore, and Yen may see a little uptick from people with no more Trinity Blood or Deadman Wonderland to buy, it’s not the gaping void it might have been if we’d gone under sooner.

4. If you mean print sales through Amazon, that’s certainly not going to make up the difference (people are generally surprised to know what a small percentage of our revenue came from Amazon—but remember that the manga market is primarily teenagers, and even now most of them don’t have credit cards), and I think B&N is going to stay comfortably where they are for the time being. Digital opportunities are definitely there, though. And I think it’s a very legitimate question to ask whether people whose local store was a Borders will now go further afield to buy print manga (and in some cases, it may be significantly further afield), or if they’ll just turn to the internet to get their fix.

To combine this question with your final one, in my mind, the print manga boom hit a plateau with the rise of the aggregator scanlation sites, when a tremendous volume of content became easily available for free. Borders closing may have been the nail in the coffin for TP, but if a huge portion of your potential customer base is just as happy reading comics on their computer (which they are), that has to be addressed. I love print books, and I believe there will always be a market for them, but the serialized and addictive quality of manga means that this is a crowd with a thirst for getting new content as quickly and easily as possible, and for a variety of reasons the traditional publishing model makes it difficult to satisfy that demand. Providing a compelling alternative to the scan sites is a major challenge on every level from tech to marketing to licensing, but especially after San Diego Comicon, it’s obvious that publishers are painfully aware of this, and are actively trying to come up with that new model. If all goes well, there may be a new manga boom! I just don’t know if it’ll be in the chain bookstores anymore…
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Email interview with Shaenon Garrity, cartoonist, critic, and a freelance editor for Viz

Noah: How important was Borders to manga outside of Tokyopop? Was it a major venue for other companies as well, or were they already more focused in B&N or Amazon or other locations?

Will the closing of Borders damage the sales of manga generally, and of Viz especially? Or do you think other venues (like B&N or Amazon or ebooks) will pick up the slack?

Does the twin demise of Borders and Tokyopop mean the manga boom is dead?

And maybe last…I’m curious if the end of Borders will have a particular effect on some niche manga. I saw some talk that it might be especially hard on BL readers…while on the other hand I assume there won’t be a ton of effect on higher end art manga. Is that your sense as well?

Shaenon: I don’t know all that much about the business end of manga, but I can answer these questions:

> Will the closing of Borders damage the sales of manga generally, and of Viz especially? Or do you think other venues (like B&N or Amazon or ebooks) will pick up the slack?

Publishers have been preparing for the Borders collapse for a while, so they’re already expanding into other venues. In the brick-and-mortar world, that includes Barnes & Noble, independent bookstores and small chains, and the comic-book direct market. There’s also a lot of interest in ebooks, especially Kindle and iPad editions, and in online comics in general, as evidenced by Viz’s big rollout of vizmanga.com at Comic-Con last week.

> Does the twin demise of Borders and Tokyopop mean the manga boom is dead?

I’d say the bubble has burst, but the big manga titles are still popular and selling well; it’s just that publishers’ overall output is settling to a less artificially inflated level. Instead of scrambling to flood the market with every available license, publishers are cutting back and being cautious in picking up new titles. I hesitate to point to Tokyopop’s situation as proof of the boom times ending, since Tokyopop’s business problems had little to do with sales of its manga, and ultimately the company folded because the guy running it just had interests elsewhere. I’m more concerned about the precarious status of smaller publishers, but with Viz still huge, DMP on the rise, and Japanese publishers getting directly involved in the American market, the industry keeps marching on. I get the impression that last year was the toughest year.

> And maybe last…I’m curious if the end of Borders will have a particular effect on some niche manga. I saw some talk that it might be especially hard on BL readers…while on the other hand I assume there won’t be a ton of effect on higher end art manga. Is that your sense as well?

For me, personally, the biggest problem with Borders closing is that Borders was very open to stocking yaoi/BL, and Barnes & Noble is not. I hope this situation changes, and that more bookstores get interested in BL. I’m saying this as a BL fan, of course, but also as someone who’s in the industry and believes that BL is going to be increasingly important as a steady seller to keep manga publishers profitable, just as romance novels keep print publishers profitable. Also, there are a bunch of awesome BL I want to see translated.

Overthinking Things 8/22/2011

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Anime and Manga, A Cultural “Acting Out”

This is an adaptation of an article I wrote on July 31, 2000 for a website that no longer exists. I was a site administrator at the time, and one of the conditions of my position was to write…publish or perish, in fact. I was cranking out quite a few anime and manga reviews…and no one had a clue what I was writing about at the time. Anime was for creepy guys who wore t-shirts with Lum on them (it’s always Lum….) two sizes too small. Manga was unheard of.  As a result, I received many questions about this “anime” stuff.  Mostly “what the hell are you talking about?” In the past 11 years, quite a bit has changed; manga and anime blew up in global popularity, then the market blew up because it couldn’t sustain itself and now the industry is reconfiguring for a new century.

This essay was my answer to the most common question I received in 2000 and I think it’s worth revisiting once more. It’s applicable to most comics, in fact. Enjoy.

***

Of course, as I rant and rave about all the anime and manga I consume, I’m eventually asked, “what *is* it about this stuff that you like so much?”

I love that question.  ^_^

For one thing, if there is a single quality that exists in anime/manga that nearly completely lacks in Western animation and comics, it has to be consistent character development. How many times can we see the gang in Scooby-Doo find that the bad guy wears a mask and was really the old caretaker, or have a new team, new costume, new continuity for our fave superhero, before we start to crave something more?

Over the course of a 26-episode anime series, or a 20-volume manga, the one thing I can practically count on is the emotional growth and complexity of all the characters – not just the hero/ine, but also the bad guy/girl, all the secondary characters and frequently tertiary characters as well.

But that’s not what this article is about. ^_^ This article is about all the *other* things I love so much in anime and manga – the qualities that make it so popular, and why it was inevitable that anime and manga be created specifically in a culture where there is a tremendous social pressure to conform.

1) Anime/manga heroes are usually “different.”

It is an axiom here in the west that we are all unique. Not so in Japan, where those who stand out are frequently pressured to conform by schoolmates, coworkers and family. “Pounding in the nail” is the OMG-overused-to-death phrase that is meant to express the collective desire to keep everyone at the same level. Very often the hero/ine of an anime or manga series is different – too tall, too short, bad at schoolwork, a complete brain. It doesn’t matter much – as long as the character stands out. Conversely, (and somewhat perversely) the character is occasionally average, but the circumstances of the series make them unusual – these series usually are filled with gags as the unwitting hero/ine attempts to seem “normal” as things around them fall apart. And, of course, many series portray a perfectly average hero/ine surrounded by many people of extraordinary looks and/or powers…frequently of the opposite sex.

 

 2) Taboos are not.

Many people assume that anime/manga series are all pornographic. That is not at all the case.  While Americans are obsessed with violence, but complete hypocrites when it comes to sex, the  opposite is the rule in Japan – they tend to be more sqeuamish about violence than sex. Many of  those things that we consider taboo are dealt with in a less Victorian manner in anime/manga.

Up until recent social pressures began to affect the laws of Japan, teenagers in Japan were  assumed to be (or about to be) sexually active, and thus series’ directed at them often deal with sex and love in a reasonably direct way. Mind you – this doesn’t mean it’s realistic! From what  I’ve seen,  it pretty much ends up doing what western series do, portraying it as all violins, flowers floating by and hazy lighting, OR nasty, dirty, demonic sex. There rarely seems to be a happy medium.

Anime and manga often have gender-bending characters. Cross-dressers, gays or lesbians – some of the coolest characters in anime and manga are the bent ones. This does not mean that Japan is more accepting of these qualities in real life – just that it’s less threatening in *theory.* Plus, let’s face it – women look good in ties.  ^_^ Also, strong emotional, even sexual relationships are considered relatively normal for Japanese kids – relationships that are left behind as part of their childhood when they get older and get married. It goes back to the sex thing – it just isn’t a scary concept.

3) Magic and the occult are everywhere.

Another sticking point for many Westerners – Japan is not a Christian country. Their religion is primarily a shamanic one, centered around fertility and harvest festivals. Does this mean that the average Japanese salaryman believes in magic? No. No more than the average American office worker. But they like to see it in their entertainment! And so do I.

***

To sum up, from my years watching anime and reading manga, I’ve noticed that many of the themes dealt with in these media are *not* what the average Japanese person wants to cope with. The pressures of remaining in conformity with societal norms are rather enormous. I believe that many of the things that make anime and manga so popular are those very things that make life difficult. In effect, anime and manga are a giant cultural “acting out” of things that can’t be dealt with easily in real life.

For me, these qualities are some of the most attractive things about this particular form of entertainment.

***

Note: All pictures used in this article are from Tenjo Tenge, by Oh! Great, Shueisha and Viz Media. I picked them because I thought it would be amusing to do so as it embodies all of the qualities discussed and great heaps of violence.

Manga and the Best Comics Poll

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Though manga has been a fixture of the American comics scene since the mid-1980s, it wasn’t until the anime boom of the following decade that publishers began to get savvier about what they were licensing and how they were packaging it. The shift away from manly-man titles towards teen-friendly material, and from floppy to trade paperback, had a big impact on who bought manga; once found only in comic book stores, manga now appeared in big chains like Borders and Walmart where young fans of the Dragonball and Sailor Moon TV shows could find it. By the mid-2000s, manga sales were robust enough to crack the USA Today bestseller list, inspiring more companies to jump into the licensing game.

The manga gold rush came to a crashing halt in 2008. A confluence of forces — economic recession, abundant scanlations, rising paper costs, teen fickleness — forced all but the biggest and best-financed publishers to cease operations.

It comes as little surprise, then, that many of the manga on the Best Comics list are ones that outlived the market’s dramatic boom-and-bust cycle. Lone Wolf and Cub, which ranked 48th in the Best Comics Poll, made its Stateside debut in 1987, just one year before Marvel Comics began releasing AKIRA (#40) and VIZ began publishing Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (#73). Rumiko Takahashi’s beloved romantic comedy Maison Ikkoku (#73) is another long-lived series, going through three editions since 1993, when VIZ first acquired the North American rights.

Equally important is the role of the American comics establishment in anointing certain manga as masterpieces. AKIRA, Buddha (#71), Lone Wolf and Cub, and 20th Century Boys (#96) are all Eisner winners, while Pluto (#48), A Drunken Dream & Other Stories (#96), The Walking Man (#73), and Yotsuba&! (#73) were past nominees. The American industry hasn’t neglected creators, either; Comic-Con International has bestowed its Inkpot Award on some of the list’s best-known contributors, including Osamu Tezuka, Rumiko Takahashi, and Hayao Miyazaki.

But perhaps the most striking thing about the top vote-getters is how many of their creators embody the Great Man stereotype. Consider Osamu Tezuka, whose Buddha and Phoenix both made the cut. His role in the history of manga is analogous to Beethoven’s in orchestral music. No musicologist would reasonably claim Beethoven to be the first person to write symphonies, or even the first great innovator within the genre, but Beethoven’s distinctive compositional approach — particularly towards motivic development — had a profound impact on the musicians who came after him. Likewise, Tezuka didn’t invent shojo manga — as some critics have claimed — nor was the he the first person to pioneer the use of “cinematic” layouts. But the popularity and artistry of Tezuka’s work, and the uniqueness of his vision, cemented his reputation as one of the medium’s most important creators, someone who cast the same, anxiety-producing shadow over his successors that Beethoven did over his. (Small wonder that Tezuka’s last project was the bio-comic Ludwig B.)

Moto Hagio, author of A Drunken Dream and Other Stories, occupies a similar place in shojo manga history. Along with writers such as Riyoko Ikeda and Keiko Takemiya, Hagio played a pivotal role in transforming comics for girls, drawing on myriad sources — Frances Hodgson Burnett, Shotaro Ishimonori, Ray Bradbury — to create bold, taboo-busting stories that spoke to the concerns of teenage girls. Perhaps her greatest innovation was to apply Tezuka’s “cinematic” techniques to her characters’ interior lives, immersing us in their emotions and memories in the same way that Tezuka thrust readers into the action. Throughout her work, Hagio placed a premium on subjectivity, using fluid layouts, unbound by grids, and employing an elaborate code of visual signifiers to represent the full gamut of emotions — symbols found in contemporary shojo titles such as Fruits Basket (#73).

[An aside: As Shaenon Garrity observed in her essay about “lady comics,” Hagio’s most representative work has yet to be translated into English; A Drunken Dream is an anthology of short stories spanning Hagio’s career, and not fully indicative of her narrative skill. Tezuka, on the other hand, is fortune enough to have had many of his best-regarded works –- Astro Boy, Buddha, Ode to Kirihito, Phoenix –- translated into English, making easier for readers to appreciate the depth of his artistry.]

And no responsible manga critic could overlook the significance of Katsuhiro Otomo, whose AKIRA was one of the most widely admired — and imitated — comics of the 1980s. If Tezuka was the artist who translated Walt Disney from screen to page, Otomo was the one who brought the grittier world of 1970s cinema to Japanese comics. AKIRA owed a visual debt to Star Wars, but Otomo’s storytelling was, at heart, more attuned to the mood of the early 1970s. His story was complex and political, a grand, paranoid fantasy that questioned Japanese enthusiasm for technology and cast a doubtful eye on the government. Otomo’s artwork, too, was peerless; countless manga-ka – Naoki Urasawa included – imitated Otomo’s blocky character designs, sleek vehicles, and meticulously detailed cityscapes. And Otomo wasn’t afraid to cross the line into outright horror, as Kaneda’s grotesque bodily mutations attest.

As with any list, there are some outliers: Yotsuba&!, a slice-of-life comedy about a bachelor who adopts a tot with green pigtails, seems more a sentimental favorite than a classic title. The same could be said for Fruits Basket, which sold like hotcakes in the mid-2000s, but is already beginning to look a little dated. I say this not to diminish either series, but to observe that canon-building is a difficult and fascinating process; works that might seem essential to us now may recede in importance (and vice versa).

So what do these nominations tell us about the current state of manga in the US? First, that visibility and longevity were key factors in determining which titles made this list, and which ones didn’t. Second, that critics gravitated towards artists whose work could be labeled as “great,” “important,” or “pioneering” –- in short, artists whose work neatly conforms to Western notions of genius, a peculiar standard for a medium that is unabashedly conceived as mainstream entertainment. Third, that readers tended to nominate titles that fell within respectable genres; some of manga’s most distinctive voices –- Kazuo Umezu, Yoshiharu Tsuege, Suehiro Maruo –- are absent from the list. And fourth, that only a tiny amount of manga has been translated for English-speaking audiences; seminal works such as The Rose of Versailles, GeGeGe no Kitaro, The Song of the Wind in the Trees, and Left Hand of God, Right Hand of the Devil have yet to be licensed here, begging the question of what results the next Best Comics Poll might yield.

Best Comics Poll Index

Tom Gill on Tsuge and Tatsume

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Tom Gill has posted a lengthy comment on his essay about Tsuge and Tatsume and fetuses in the sewer from a bit back. I thought I’d reprint it here just to make sure it doesn’t get lost in the internets.

To all the readers who commented on my paper “Fetuses in the Sewer: A comparative study of classic 1960s manga by Tatsumi Yoshihiro and Tsuge Yoshiharu.”

First, many thanks for taking the trouble to read my paper and comment on it; and apologies for taking a very long time to get round to responding. I moved back to Japan from England in April and all my manga and stuff were on a ship for two months, and then there was the Great Tohoku Disaster as an added distraction. Anyway, let me respond now as best I can.

Several people asked how come Tsuge does not get translated into English more. I have heard the following theories, some here at HU, others from friends:

1. Some say the work is too challenging to interest mainstream publishers. Indeed, it is does make more demands on the reader that Tatsumi’s punch-in-the-face approach. Who’s to say whether it would sell?
2. Some say Tsuge has usually refused to allow his work to be translated because of bad experiences in the past. It probably did not help that The Comics Journal got his name wrong on the front cover of their 2005 special issue on Manga Masters. Calling him “Yoshihiro” (that being Tatsumi’s name) may have made it a teeny bit worse.
3. Someone here on HU said that Tsuge does not like the damage done to the flow of the visual narrative when manga get “flipped” when translated into English, though as Ian S pointed out, he has had a substantial chunk of work translated into French.
4. Yet another rumour has it that Tsuge promised the translation rights to some long lost friend in America who has never made use of them.

If anyone knows the truth of the matter, please do share.

Noah Berlatsky says: Here the representation and the reality are both in flux and swimming around each other.
— A very astute comment, and one that speaks to other Tsuge comics too. One reason why people have such a hard time responding to his famous work Neiji-shiki (Screw Style) is because they want to decode it, to refer symbols to reality when in fact neither is solid enough to allow such a reading. My main objection to Masashi Shimizu’s Freudian commentaries on Tsuge is that he thinks such a systematic decoding is possible, which sometimes leads him into far-fetched assertions.

Noah Berlatsky says: I was thinking about Anne Allison’s book Permitted and Prohibited Desires…
– Yes, it is interesting to speculate that the “absent father” may be hovering off-stage in these productions. Theories emphasizing Japan’s uniqueness are deeply unfashionable these days, which may explain why Shimizu never references Kosawa Heisaku (Anne Allison’s principle reference for alternative non-Oedipal development in Japan), or Doi Takeo, another absent father theorist well-known outside Japan, preferring to follow a relentlessly orthodox Freudian line in his analyses. In my paper on Tsuge’s ‘The Incident at Nishibeta Village’, recently published in IJOCA (spring 2011) I describe how Shimizu makes a large boulder stand in for a father figure in one of these forced interpretations.

Anyway…it seems like that might link up somehow with the fascination with fetuses you’re talking about here. It’s more direct with Tatsumi; the flip side of his misogyny is disempowerment fantasies; identifying with the fetus as revenge against the all-powerful feminine and as a capitulation to it. The bleak vision seems less like a look at the dark realities of life than an excuse to crawl back into the womb.

– Identifying with the fetus? A lot of horrible things are done to fetuses in Tatsumi’s comics. And also there are moments of tenderness – the window-cleaner carrying his daughter’s baby on his back in The Washer, for instance. I think a careful look at the role of fetuses/babies in these Tatsumi works shows that he is not quite as blunt and predictable as some readers seem to think.

>> Tsuge it’s harder to pin down…he’s more playing with the notion of returning to the womb than he is in thrall to it, perhaps?

– I think you are probably on target there.

>> As you say, the salamander seems like both sperm and fetus. If it’s pushing the fetus out to be born, it could also be in some sense the mother, or associated with the mother. A sperm dreaming it’s a mother, maybe? Or at least dreaming it’s gone back to the womb…though a womb reimagined as post-apocalyptic eden, too.

— With Tsuge, all is possible.

Maybe that makes sense of the womb/freedom symbolism you’re seeing in the water? That is, if the Oedipal relationship is reimagined so that mothers are actually the lawgivers, then it makes sense to think of the womb as not just safety but freedom.

— I don’t really get this.

ryanholmberg says:
Tom, I enjoyed your piece. Nice to read a baseline analysis of Tsuge and Tatsumi’s heavy-handed symbolism.

— I think you are rather unfair to both authors to call their symbolism heavy-handed.

>> There’s an interview between Tsuge and Tatsumi in Garo in 1971 that you should read. There Tatsumi more or less admits that Tsuge’s Garo work is what inspired Tatsumi’s circa 1970 stuff.

— Any chance of a photocopy?

>> The knocking-off is painfully obvious in some cases, and the work you have analyzed is not even the most extreme. Tatsumi produced some interesting things in the 50s, but most of his 60s material is just plain junk. Were it not for Tsuge, Tatsumi would probably have disappeared.

— I would not call Tatsumi’s 60s work plain junk. I much enjoyed reading these works. They are page turners. Then again, I also enjoy listening to loud, repetitive punk rock music. For me, Tatsumi is Johnny Rotten to Tsuge’s Roger Waters. That said, there does some to be fairly obvious ripping-off going on here. I am beginning to wonder if Adrian Tomine ever reads the postings here, and if so, whether he is going to jump in and launch a spirited defence of Tatsumi.

>> A couple corrections: Tsuge was not plucked out of oblivion by Nagai in 1965. He had already been making comics for close to a decade and was well-known in the kashihon circuit and even published work in mass-print magazines.

— I do of course know that Tsuge had already published a lot of stuff, Ryan, but is it not also true that Tsuge’s career was fairly moribund by 1965, and that Nagai heard he was struggling, wanted to help, couldn’t find anyone who knew of his whereabouts, and finally had to find him by putting a notice in Garo asking him to come forward and make himself known? Such at least is the legend… I’ve read it several times.

>> You also write that both artists wrote plenty of gangster yarns, ghost stories, and samurai bloodbaths in the 50s. I have not read everything by either of these artists, but from what I have I would to say that this incorrect. Tatsumi wrote very very few pieces set in the premodern period, and the one that I have seen was most certainly not a samurai bloodbath, but rather a ghost story set in the Edo era.

– You are probably right about Tatsumi. I wrote rather casually there, I must confess.

>> Tsuge also to my knowledge did not write that many gangster pieces (that was more a Gekiga Studio thing). He did write a number of samurai swashbucklers in the 50s, but the bloody samurai pieces didn’t come until around 1960, after Shirato Sanpei’s Ninja bugeicho made dismembered and splattered blood a prerequisite for the genre. Now that most of Tsuge’s pre-Garo work is in bunko (paperback), it should be easy to check this.

— Tsuge’s 1950s samurai bloodbaths include ‘Namida no Adauchi’ (The Tears of Revenge, 1955, 128pp.), ‘Sen’un no Kanata’ (Beyond the Clouds of War, 1955, 144 pp.), ‘Norawareta Katana’ (The Cursed Sword, 1958, 12pp.), leading into a series of four stories derived from the life and legend of swordsman Miyamoto Musashi in 1960. OK, that’s not strictly the 50s. His gangster yarns include ‘Hannin wa Dare da?’ (Who is the Criminal?, 1957, 40pp.), ‘Akatsuki no Hijousen’ (The Dawn Emergency Line, 1957, 66pp.), ‘San’nin no Toubousha’(Three Escapees, 1958,48pp), ‘Oyabun’ (The Boss), 1958, 20pp..
On the matter of bloodiness, I think you perhaps exaggerate Shirato Sanpei’s originality here. Tagawa Suiho has plenty of heads and limbs flying around the place in his 1930s Norakuro comics, for instance; Shirato’s contribution is more in the brilliant penmanship than the old ultraviolence itself, no?

ryanholmberg says:
I agree with Noah that if one is going to pursue some sort of psychoanalytical frame for Tsuge, you have to deal with the general absence of fathers. The wrench-carrying suit in Nejishiki could be read as a father figure, but otherwise they are pretty absent from Tsuge`s work, no? And when they do appear, they seem to be background color and not allegorical symbols.

— I think that in this Garo period, Tsuge typically has a male protagonist trying to come to terms with women, represented by actual women/girls he encounters on his travels, or by a feminized landscape, such as that of the Marsh (Numa). It is an obsession, and doesn’t seem to leave much room for fathers – or indeed for mothers, save as attenuated symbolic wombs like the one the salamander has found himself in.

>> Second, I think the Ibuse Masuji short story (which non-Japanese readers can read in Ibuse`s Salamander anthology) deserves more than a footnote, regardless of what Tsuge says about it himself. There is obviously more than a passing resemblance, and it is certainly more important than Western existentialist writing.

— You are right about this, though I wondered whether Hooded Utilitarian readers had enough interest in Japanese literature to warrant a full discussion. Tsuge freely admits borrowing from Ibuse – it is a famous story, a cameo literary classic, and by using the same title for his own work, Tsuge invites comparison. The offhand comment I mentioned him making about the Ibuse story in conversation with Gondo is typical of his sometimes infuriating reluctance to seriously grapple with his influences. I would make the following observations:

1. Tsuge has certainly borrowed the basic idea of the salamander as an existential figure from Ibuse’s story (first written around 1919; published in 1929). Both salamanders are literally in a hole, and forced by their predicament to reflect on the meaning of life. Even the way Tsuge’s salamander talks – or thinks out loud – sometimes recalls Ibuse’s salamander. Both are reflective, lugubrious voices, moody and sometimes capable of humour.
2. But this is creative adaptation, not plagiarism. Ibuse’s salamander is trapped in a very small cave, where Tsuge’s is relatively free, to wonder through the high-ceilinged labyrinth of a massive system of sewers. And where Ibuse’s salamander goes through a series of moods over a period of two years, we see Tsuge’s in a fleeting moment of his existence. His reflections make it clear that he has made a distinct progress, from disgust at his fetid environment to acceptance and even pleasure at the chance encounters that come his way. The final frame, in which he swims off into an ethereal light, is far from the image of permanent entrapment in Ibuse’s yarn. Whether that light signifies death/rebirth/enlightenment or what, it is probably better than just being stuck in a cave. So Tsuge’s salamander enjoys a lot more freedom of movement than Ibuse’s.
3. On the other hand, Ibuse’s salamander is considerably less isolated than Tsuge’s. He has a series of encounters with other animals – some killifish, a shrimp, then a frog. Tsuge’s salamander is completely alone – all the other animals we see are dead, except possibly for one water-rat glimpsed in a single frame. Hence the nightmarish, post-apocalyptic atmosphere of Tsuge’s piece. Ibuse’s salamander, though trapped, is at least in a familiar natural world. Outside his cave is a bright pool teeming with life. Who knows what lies outside the sewer inhabited by Tsuge’s salamander?
4. Both salamanders show a malicious streak, Ibuse’s trapping a frog to share his confinement, Tsuge’s head-butting the fetus he encounters. Despite his brutal behavior towards the frog, who is dying of starvation by the end of the story, Ibuse’s salamander is finally forgiven by the frog, and the story fades out ends on a note of quiet resignation. At least they have each other. In Tsuge, the fetus is not so much bullied as discarded, being too alien to the salamander’s experience to be understood. Again, there’s a deep isolation here that we do not find in the Ibuse story. Going back to Noah’s comment about use of metaphor, if Tsuge’s story is a metaphor for the human condition, then the arrival of a real human, albeit an unborn/still-born fetus, is a gross intrusion by the signified upon the world of the signifier. This may help to explain the deeply unsettling atmosphere of the Tsuge story.
5. Ibuse’s story is told through several voices: that of the salamander, those of the shrimp and the frog, and an authorial voice which invites the reader to laugh at or sympathise with the salamander. Tsuge has boiled the narrative down to a single interior monologue as the solitary salamander ruminates in solitude. The absence of authorial voice or other characters leaves the story more intense and focused than Ibuse’s.

In short, I think the interplay between these two salamanders adds a fascinating further layer of complexity and density to this little 7-page vignette for those who are familiar with the Ibuse story.

>> This isn`t the only story Tsuge borrowed liberally from.

— Tell me more!

>> Also, I feel like an artist can get that “existential” feel from anywhere, from life as much as from books. Probably a better track of interpretation would be to go back to the beginning of your essay and try to explain this through demographic or historical context.

— I don’t quite follow. Please tell me more.

>> I will probably post a related piece about Numa on TCJ sometime in the summer, so I will leave my thoughts for now at that.

— I look forward to seeing that piece.

>>e reason I made the comment last week about what sorts of genres who was working in in the 50s was because I think it’s important to see how both Tatsumi and Tsuge started in a detective-thriller mode. However they diverged in the early and mid 60s, I think their re-convergence in the late 60s is in part a return to those 50s origins.

— Thanks for the clarification.

Ryan Holmberg has responded here.

I’ve closed comments on this post. If you have a response, please put it on the original post.

Reach for the Prehistoric Stars, American Comics!

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There should be more American comics like Yohei Sakai’s Dinosaur King volume 1.

Not that this is a great comic. Or a good comic. Or a comic that in any way makes you not want to seek out Yohei Sakai and force-feed him every Happy Meal in your local McDonald’s emporium, including the special toy Alvin and the Chipmunk figures, until his colon is completely encased in plastic, opening an anal fissure in space/time into which you can chuck him in the desperate hope that he, in turn, will be devoured by a fire-breathing Tyrannosaurus Rex, or, preferably, by a non-fire breathing Tyrannosaurus Rex so that he can confirm that no, really, Tyrannosaurus Rexes did not breathe fire, you shithead.

And then, as he’s torn into bloody, un-flaming gobbets, you can point out to him cheerfully that even if you grit your teeth and really, really try while simultaneously proclaiming your love of dinosaurs and whimpering softly about how you lost your mother at a tender age, encountering a T. Rex is still really fatal.

Where was I?

Oh right.

Yes, this book is bad enough that I wish hideous and improbable constipation and death on its creator and its distributor and its protagonist and, indeed, on dinosaurs, if, in their case, the death was not somewhat redundant and the constipation unlikely given the widespread absence of fossilized intestines.
But for all its manifest, egregious, bottomless badness, this book has something to teach American publishers. If you’re going to be bad, why not cater to the poor taste of the broadest possible herd? Fuck the decadent costumed multi-colored lantern corpses with the 30 years of repeatedly retconned backstory (no, not literally. What is wrong with you people?) Fuck the Forever Ultimate X-Claremont McKenna that 12 people want to read. Yes, Dinosaur King seems to say, those things suck like Youporn inhaling a vacuum cleaner. But I suck too, and I have cute baby dinosaurs and spunky young protagonists who have the amazing ability to talk to dinosaurs, and also I have full-sized dinosaurs with special ninja attacks. And, hey, I’ve got trading cards too. My artwork is even entirely decent in a stereotypical over-carbonated shonen kind of way. There are lots and lots of kids clamoring for just this kind of badness, and I aim to deliver it directly to their malleable, sugar-spasming adrenal glands and long-suffering parents.

Stop your elitist, clubby, insular dreck, American comics! You too can make dreck for the masses! I just know you can! There’s nothing you can’t do if you just try!
______________
This review first appeared on tcj.com.

Manga Legends: Just What Are They Selling?

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A Japanese company, Manga Legends, claims to sell original artwork by many of Japan’s greatest comic book artists. However, the executive in charge of publishing at Tezuka Productions, a company created by the legendary artist, Osamu Tezuka, has stated that there is a “high possibility” that at least some art sold by Manga Legends is a copy.

Further, Manga Legends claimed in an email that their company was affiliated with Animate, a nationwide anime/manga chain store in Japan. However, an employee at Animate’s customer service center had never heard of the company. Later, after looking at Manga Legends website, the employee notified us that Animate had taken legal action against them.

“It really is incredible to see all this stuff coming out of the woodwork.”

In recent months, on a community website that allows collectors to display pages of original comic book art – including the art used in the production of actual comic books, called Comic Art Fans, known to its members as CAF, various members had begun posting original panel pages from what appeared to be very significant Japanese artists and manga series.

Unlike their American counterparts who often sell their art to fans, manga artists are well known for keeping their art. With a few exceptions (and the occasional known gift), little of it ever makes it into the open market. The little that does tends to be sold at special auctions run by companies such as Mandarake, one of Tokyo’s largest vendors of used anime and manga-related products.

As an example, art from the artist, Rumiko Takahashi, the creator of such successful series as “Ranma ½ “and “Inu Yasha,” is considered to be so rare in Japan that an inked sketch of Lum, a character from her “Urusei Yatsura” series, drawn on letter paper, sold at auction on April 13, 2011 for JPY 3,267,500 (US $40,650 at the current exchange rate).

Sketch of Lum by Rumiko Takahashi.sold at auction in Japan

 

However, since November 2009, CAF members have posted two published interior pages from the “Urusei Yatsura” series on the Comic Art Fans site. Many Japanese would find this hard to believe.

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Two Urusei Yatsura pages posted on Comic Art Fans.

Since the initial pieces of manga art started showing up in late 2009, a steady number of key or prime pages have continued to be added to CAF by various, though mostly European, collectors. These have included pages from series such as “Blackjack,” “Tetsuwan Atom” (“Astro Boy”) and “Adolf” by the so-called “God of Manga,” Osamu Tezuka, “Nausicaa in the Valley of Wind” by famed animation director, Hayao Miyazaki, Dragonball by Akira  Toriyama, a “Lone Wolf & Cub” page by Goseki Kojima (a major influence on the American artist, Frank Miller) and many others.


After seeing the “Lone Wolf & Cub” panel page posted to CAF, fan and art collector, Felix Lu, said,  “It really is incredible to see all this stuff coming out of the woodwork. As someone who searched furiously over a six-to-seven-year period for published LWC pages, this latest update is a stunner. My understanding, through multiple sources, was that all the interior pages were held by (series writer, Kazuo) Koike. Given all that – and seeing zero evidence to disprove it, I just came to accept it as fact.”

 

Two of the most stunning examples posted on CAF come from the same series, Katsuhiro Otomo’s “Akira,” considered by many to be one of the most influential comics ever. These two pages show key scenes from the comic – one shows the story’s main character, Tetsuo, meeting the titular, Akira, while the other shows the shockingly memorable scene where Tetsuo loses his arm to a laser blast from a military satellite.


 Comic art collector and Akira fan, Satyajit Chetri, said, “I was really excited about the manga art and tried making inquiries. When I heard some of the numbers being thrown around, my first instinct was to go for them by any means possible – it was Akira, after all, something that I really loved and I thought there would be a limited supply of pages available only for a short period of time. But then more and more pages started popping up, good ones, and suddenly the exclusivity factor seemed to go down a little. (There are) 3000-plus pages of (the) Akira (comic book), and if there were some collectors getting PRIME pages, it was inevitable that more pages would turn up, as would a secondary market.”

At first, the source of this new vein of art seemed to be a secret. When asked by one of the authors by email, one collector stated that he had a relative living in Japan who acquired it for him. The authors also heard from various sources that the Akira pages had been auctioned by Mr. Otomo himself to raise money for Japan’s recovery after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami devastated much of northeastern Japan in early March.

“Strangely, Google searches for original Akira pages (from an auction or a store) do not turn up anything,” said Mr. Chetri.

Discovering Manga Legends

Recently, however, the authors received a link to a website called Manga Legends from an art collector living in North America who does not wish to be named. “Please keep it between us,” he wrote.

According to its URL information, the site was created in 2009. However, on its website, the company states:

“Manga Legends will celebrate its 25th anniversary on 2009. Our online shop and members service is celebrating now its 7th anniversary. From the manga store in Koenji-Tokyo to the homepage, a long way has been walked. Our goal is more than ever to be with you to live your passion at the best price end the best service.” (sic)

A URL search on June 5 listed the website as being owned by Alexandre Bodecot and it was located in Fukuoka. As of June 7, “Mita tomoki” (sic) was listed as the owner and the address had been moved to a Tokyo P.O. Box.

 

Manga Legends’ website advertises that it sells “Collectibles, old editions, signed mangas, original art…,” and listed available services in English, French, Spanish, Italian and German, but not Japanese. Since it is a Japanese company, this appeared odd.

 

[A screenshot of Manga Legends’ homepage. The colors are similar to that of a Japanese company, Animate, which Manga Legends claimed affiliation with.]

Mr. Chetri, who has participated in public comic art auctions in Japan, noted, “Japanese collectors are willing to pay a LOT for original art, as public auctions show. It seems disingenuous to target a European market when there is an eager fan-following right outside your door, unless you are a seller who is making claims that you do not want cross-verified.”

As part of Manga Legends’ service, the authors learned that the company issues certificates of authenticity with each page that they sell. The company claims that a “sworn expert” issues each COA.

The North American collector, who was in the midst of a deal for an art page drawn by Osamu Tezuka and his studio assistants, wrote an email on June 3, 2011 to Mami. Watanabe, an employee of Manga Legends expressing “concerns about manga-legends.” The collector also wrote in this email that he had already bought one page by Mr. Tezuka, a “Blackjack” panel page that he had bought from an unnamed “French collector,” and asked if the page had previously been sold by Manga Legends.

Ms. Watanabe answered the same day, writing that Manga Legends had indeed sold the page in question:

“Yes, after checking our datas, it happens that this page was sold to one of  our French members last year. To my surprise, it appears that this page was sold with a COA to this member. When you exchanged this page with this  person, he didn’t give it to you ? Please let me know and if necessary, we can  ask to our sworn in expert to reissue a COA for you. The point is, our COA  specifies that our original arts can’t be resell without the written agreement of  the author or it’s agent, through our company. Let me be sure that this person, in France, didn’t sell the page to you but exchanged. ” (sic)

Also, Ms. Watanabe stressed the genuine nature of the art. In an email from June 2, 2011,for instance, she noted that Manga Legends acquires all its original art from “collectors in Japan,” and “agencies such as Kashima Agency, Morita Ippei Inc. …etc.”

Just what is Manga Legends selling?

The authors contacted Ippei Morita through an address provided by Manga Legends and he wrote back in an awkwardly worded Japanese message (one of the authors is a native Japanese speaker), “Your friends from overseas can purchase from us without any suspicion.”

However, Akira Kashima, CEO of Kashima Agency, emphasized that his company is a translation copyright agency for multiple publishers and does not handle art.  On the phone, he was audibly upset to learn that Manga Legends was using his agency’s name as reference.

Mr. Kashima, whom the authors contacted on their own, told us that one of his clients is Tezuka Productions. Mr. Tezuka, who died in 1989, started the company after his animation company, Mushi Pro, went bankrupt. The company continues to publish his works posthumously, to license the many characters he created and to produce animation based on those characters.

The authors asked Mr. Kashima to send officials at Tezuka Productions links to artwork on CAF credited to Mr. Tezuka., including the “Blackjack” page bought by the North American collector that Manga Legends admitted to selling with a COA to another collector.

Tezuka Production’s Chief Publishing Officer (author’s translation) replied that while the company will not authenticate individual pages of art, he said there was a “high possibility” the “Blackjack” page is a forgery. He added that Tezuka Productions has virtually all the art to the “Blackjack” and “Adolf” series making it highly unlikely that any page from either of these series was genuine.

(Tezuka Productions did not release the name of the official who responded to the author’s questions. In Japanese corporate culture, releasing the full names of employees is not recommended unless both parties know each other. In this case, Mr. Kashima could not release the name of the Tezuka Production official because he had not dealt with the authors personally.)

An official from Tezuka Productions reported that there is a “high possibility” this “Blackjack” page, which Manga Legends admits selling, is a copy.

To find out more, one of the authors joined Manga Legends, filling out a membership application and providing a list of Japanese artists in whom he had an interest. Soon afterward, he received an email from Mami Watanabe containing scans of available panel pages from luminaries such as Osamu Tezuka, Katsuhiro Otomo and Go Nagai as well as a splash page by Goseki Kojima along with a set of prices for each page.

 

___

 

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[Scans provided to the authors by Manga Legends of art the company had available for sale. From top left (clockwise), the pages are purported to be from “Adolf” by Tezuka Osamu, “Akira” by Katsuhiro Otomo, an unknown samurai manga by Goseki Kojima and “Devilman” by Go Nagai.]

Getting Animated

Because the company would not provide better scans of the art, the authors asked if it would be possible to visit Manga Legends’ galleries in Tokyo. Ai Oonishi, using Ms. Watanabe’s company email address, replied:

“Of course, our head company’s called Animate, you can find our stores everywhere in Tokyo. I give you the link to our stores maps. Please visit us when you’ll come to Japan.”

The Animate company logo.

The email clearly indicated a relationship with Animate, the largest retailer of anime games and manga in Japan. Unaware that Animate had expanded into the original art market, the authors contacted the company’s customer support center and a telephone operator, who did not release her name, stated that the company only deals in “new, mass-market products,” not “specialized products.”  After requesting a link to Manga Legends’ website, the operator visited it and informed the authors that the site “looked highly suspicious.”

The operator then forwarded the information about Manga Legends to a company official who then sent a warning letter to Manga Legends regarding its use of Animate’s company logo. The logo disappeared from Manga Legends’ website on the following day.  (This information was provided to the authors by the telephone operator at a later date.)

Afterward, the authors gave this information to the North American collector who had provided the original link to the company. He wrote to Manga Legends and asked them to clarify their status with Animate.

He received a reply from Ms. Watanabe that read, “About the company’s affiliation, it’s a little bit complicated and I can’t really explain to you in details, our company is now independent after a long legal ‘fight’ with the original creator of our stores. That’s why we changed our logos and mark color.”  (sic)

This remark appears misleading. According to Animate employees, there was never any relationship to become independent from.

[Manga Legends current homepage after links to the Japanese company, Animate, were removed. Also, the color of the company’s logo, which was similar to Animate’s, has also been changed.]

 

As we are collectors of original art ourselves, both authors know that one of the reasons we acquire comic art is nostalgic delight, the ability to hold dreams made tangible in our hands. Manga Legends sells dreams and the lure of those dreams is strong.

When informed that Manga Legends had misled him about its affiliation with Animate, the North American collector wrote back that he admitted that he was probably naïve, but he still wanted to believe that the art Manga Legends was selling was genuine. “I still want to believe it is true.”

Update; This is a somewhat altered version of the original article.