Posts Tagged “manga”
John Seven • 31st Dec 2009 • Art Articles, Book Articles, Comics • Astro Boy, Japan, Japanese comics, Japanese paper theater, manga, Osamu Tezuka
Two recent art book releases from Abrams wrap beautiful fantasy images within the history of post-war Japan and the popular culture that mended the wounds of World War II.
Eric P. Nash’s “Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater” is a fascinating archeology of a lost form of entertainment that dominated Japan from the 1930s to the early 1960s — well-remembered in its country of origin but entirely unknown anywhere else.
Kamishibai was a form of public storytelling that utilized printed artwork in the action. Imagine someone pulling out the illustrations of a children’s book and acting out the narrative before a live audience, and that’s essentially what kamishibai was. The form was so influential that at times of war — and occupation — it was steered by official bodies for propaganda purposes, since it was a reliable way of reaching a massive audience of citizens as well as children.
The storytelling is gone with the decades, but what we have left is the astonishing artwork that embellished the words, and Nash’s book does an absolutely beautiful job at presenting this material.
Complete stories are contained in the book, ranging from the over-the-top adventures of the Golden Bat to the jarring Hiroshima examination “Pledge of Peace from Children of the Bomb,” and just about any genre or tone between the two. Much of the art is breathtaking and filled with the sort of pluck that such lively theater must have demanded in order to compete with the storytellers. (more…)
John Seven • 25th Jul 2009 • Book Articles, Comics • autobiography, Drawn and Quarterly, Japan, manga, memoir, Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Manga — that is, the Japanese style of comics — has taken America by storm in the last decade or so, moving beyond a niche audience and deep into mainstream youth culture. Yoshihiro Tatsumi is one of the most respected practitioners of that form, renowned for his serious work that investigates the dark side of the post World War 2 Japanese psyche in artful stories not meant for kids.
It’s a part of Manga that is hidden to many Americans, who only encounter the form on the packed shelves of places like Barnes and Noble, where most the titles involve teen-age girls in very short skirts. Tatsumi offers gray depths for interested adults to plummet into.
In his new work, the decade-in-the-making autobiographical novel “A Drifting Life,” Tatsumi lightens it up a bit to offer a fictionalized chronicle of his own early career. In episodic format, Tatsumi traces his early days as a fan artist entering post card contests in Mangas to his first large successes in the late 1950s, when he began mining new territory in the format working through different genres and challenging himself to do better with each subsequent work. Tatsumi’s biggest influence was the American art film and he set about revolutionizing Manga by applying film techniques to the storytelling, thus creating an entirely new language of visual storytelling for print.
“A Drifting Life” goes into the minute details of the way that industry worked in the 1950s, the types of artists who sought to create within it and the sorts of businesses that put out the books.
It’s a coming of age tale that involves fly-by-night businesses and farms of young artists churning out product day and night. It is also an amazing history of Japanese pop culture — Tatsumi scatters each section with Japanese pop history, giving the reader a crash course in the subject and also providing a context for the leaps and strides being made by the characters portrayed.
As an introduction to another form — as well as another culture — “A Drifting Life” is a charming and informative work. But more importantly, it serves as a gateway to the creative lives of those in other cultures as well. It’s a painstaking effort to document the studio habits of commercial artists in Japan half a century ago, with the hindsight of miracles they forged in their work.
John Seven • 26th Aug 2008 • Book Articles, Comics • Drawn and Quarterly, Japan, manga, Seiichi Hayashi
Seiichi Hayashi’s “Red Colored Elegy” evokes French New Wave film as it follows the relationship between Ichiro and Sachiko, investigating the personal tortures that have an effect on their status as a couple.
Structurally, Hayashi unfolds his tale through disjointed scenes that either hint at more than they reveal, or sometimes just make the reader feel left out from a secret. It’s that arm’s length mode of storytelling that grew out of films like “Breathless,” where it’s hard to engage with the characters since it’s impossible to get inside them beyond their whining to each other.
Hayashi matches the oblique attitude with simple artwork — sometimes so simple that characters can become interchangeable in appearance. That’s a shame because at points, Hayashi lets his skill slip through, mostly with some lovely renderings of landscapes, street scenes, and architecture. The complication of these renditions make it seem as if he is holding back too much with his characters — especially since there are points where the author is really on the verge of drawing a reader into his characters’ dramas.
At the same time, Hayashi does have the detached, disjointed storytelling technique down. It’s not hard to see that in 1970/71, when this first appeared, it certainly was groundbreaking — it’s just that decades later, it has little emotional resonance and stands best as a technical example of experimentation in the graphic arts.
It points to what could be and shows an astonishing level of creative maturity — it is, unfortunately, a promise of what could be rather than a realization of it.
John Seven • 4th Jul 2008 • Book Articles, Comics • Drawn and Quarterly, Japan, manga, Yoshihiro Tatsumi
If Ingmar Bergman were a Japanese Manga creator, he would no doubt have been Yoshihiro Tatsumi. In “Good-Bye,” a new collection of Tatsumi’s short works from 1971 and 1972, the underbelly of the Japanese psyche is examined in from an intimate and often grim vantage point with masterful results.
Japanese Manga has been the hottest comics trend in the United States, with shelves of the books finding their way into mainstream bookstores and the hands of American teenagers everywhere. Tatsumi, though, is a pioneer of the form and if the current onslaught is mystifying to adults on a number of levels — from the youthful subject matter to enormity of the titles available — Tatsumi provides a reference point for the lost, both in chronology and maturity.
In Tatsumi’s world, Japan is land of not merely of repression, but of the illusion of repression. Nastiness still abounds and people still act out their coarsest desires, but society turns a blind eye to it, creating the mass delusion that there is nothing wrong. The way Tatsumi tells it, this results in a world of colliding, mournful loners who want and take and hurt.
In “Hell,” Tatsumi uses the bombing of Hiroshima as the ultimate indicator of the fraud of Japanese society, with the desire for upright decency being revealed as a compulsion enabled by the country’s nostalgia for its own need for honor.
Japanese women are portrayed as being expected to submit to being objects of lust, while being shamed into doing what their society demands of them. In “Life Is So Sad” Akemi is forced to work as a hostess after her abusive boyfriend lands in jail — but his assumptions about her job push her into fulfilling his worst expectations. In “Good-Bye” Mariko — branded a slut by her neighbors — finds herself torn between her American lover and her sleazy father, a conflict that results in a horrible dehumanization of the woman.
Meanwhile, men are desperate and lonely, filled with self loathing due to the expectations of society. In “Just a Man” and “Rash,” older men grope for their fantasies and end up with further dark holes in their souls. In “Woman in the Mirror” and “Night Falls Again” the inability of Japanese men to express themselves in a sexual manner is turned inside out on them by the world at large.
Tatsumi’s bitter slices of life unwind with a silent grace — his artwork renders the tragedies with a compassion that never hides the starkness of the emotions portrayed. Tatsumi is spare with dialog, but it packs a punch when his characters speak, bring the reader to intimate corners as we intrude on the most private — and sometimes horrible — moments in their lives.
Two recent art book releases from Abrams wrap beautiful fantasy images within the history of post-war Japan and the popular culture that mended the wounds of World War II.
