MANGA: JAPANESE FOR COMIC

WORDS BY ANDREW GROSSBERG 

I’ve been kicking around the comics industry for 15 years now and actually lettered manga adaptations for the last three. I was there to see the so-called “speculator boom” and the bust that followed first hand in the 90’s. Now the industry is in the midst of a “manga boom” and plenty of pundits predict another crash. But how can the manga market crash when people can’t even agree on what manga actually are?

Recently, I took the opportunity to speak with an expert on the topic and try to pin down the allure of Japanese manga in the West. I met with Carl Horn an editor from Dark Horse Comics, publishers of manga including Oh, My Goddess!, the longest continuing American adaptation in the business. We sat down at Fanime Con in San Jose to discuss this, starting with a particular pet peeve of mine…

TRIPWIRE: There is a large public perception that manga is a genre, or worse, a style of Japanese drawing with big eyes and big feet. How would you define manga?

CARL HORN: Manga are comics that come from Japan. In America they’re called comics and in Japan they’re called manga, even though the Japanese are perfectly fine with the word “comic”. They use “comics” as a loan word. The largest comic convention of any kind in the world is in Japan and it’s called “Comic Market” (Comiket) not “Manga Market”. Although the Japanese themselves have a very specific, very stereotyped idea of what an American comic is: A superhero comic.

TW: Guys in tights in fights.

CH: Yes. Yet some of their artists do pay attention to American artists and are influenced by them. Yasuhiro Nightow (Trigun) says that the four days he spends at the San Diego Comic Con are his four favorite days of the year.

TW: They’re influenced by American and European artists just as it is the other way.

CH: Ten years ago, people thought manga was something drawn in the style of Kenichi Sonoda (Gunsmith Cats) or Katsuhiro Otomo (Domu, Akira) or Masamune Shirow (Appleseed, Ghost in the Shell). These days manga is more likely thought of as something by CLAMP (Chobits, Angelic Layer, xxxHolic) or other popular shojo artists. The image of what is a typical manga has changed.

TW: What brought about this change?

CH: The revolution was in US bookstore sales of manga and the fact that the market had this enormous pent up desire to read shojo titles. But before the shonen and shojo explosion here almost all the manga released in the US were seinen. The thinking was that those were the types of comics that appeal to American comic readers. Now shonen and shojo are categories which have lots of American readers too.

TW: Do you think there is a Western market preference for one manga category or style over the other?

CH: A common mistake American publishers made early on is they looked at one comic from one genre and figured that was what all manga were. Most American comics would be considered seinen in Japan, Vertigo (the DC imprint that published Sandman) especially. Although there’s nothing wrong with superheroes either. The Japanese have a strong tradition with superheroes with Kamen Rider and Ultraman. If you take something like Spider-man, they understand Spider-man.

TW: I would think the Japanese market would understand something like Sandman whereas the American comic market had to sort of be reinvented internally to digest it.

CH: Sandman would probably have been created by a shojo artist. But this gets to one of the most basic differences between American comics and manga: There are no universes in manga; no Kodansha universe, no Shueisha universe. A universe can be a powerful tool but it makes it hard for the first time reader to get into it. Now you don’t have to buy just one comic, you have to buy into a whole religion. It’s fun but it seems that all the big events in comics are about continuity.

TW: Lots of characters running between books…

CH: That’s another difference between the Americans and Japanese. The artist is the most important thing rather than the character. Take Rumiko Takahashi’s hit Uresei Yatsura which ran from 1978-1987. If this was an American book, it’d still be going and have had 12 different artists on it by now.

TW: Most manga stories have endings in Japan. The books are complete.

CH: It’s a healthy thing. If you want to have a strong industry it’s good to have an artist work on more than one idea. Astro Boy is not still running in Japan. It’s not the dream of every aspiring manga artist to draw Astro Boy.

TW: Do you see any American comics company following these lessons?

CH: Vertigo has a more manga approach. Every character is not obliged to be in the same universe. They tell stories that appeal to readers outside comics. These are stories you can jump into. Of course in Japan, all the Vertigo titles would be in one magazine.

TW: Maybe they should be here too, but anthologies don’t sell in America.

CH: The reason anthologies don’t sell is they’re not priced to sell. You can’t rebuild a mass medium with collector prices.

TW: What would it take to get the American market to embrace black and white newsprint for an anthology?

CH: Value. One of the reasons anthologies have trouble is that American anthologies have never adopted a Japanese pricing scheme. I was the manga editor of Pulp which lasted for five years. I also did some work for Super Manga Blast. But a Shonen Jump or a Shojo Beat in many cases gives you twice as many pages for the same price as their counterparts. It’s a tremendous value for the cost.

TW: And it works in Japan.

CH: VIZ is trying to reproduce the Japanese model in all its particulars here in the US. We’ve had the tankobon (graphic novels) for the last five years but the other part of the puzzle is the magazines. VIZ has been trying to sustain that part of the model too for which I give them a lot of credit because they’re expensive magazines to produce.

TW: Aren’t their anthologies underwritten as loss leaders though?

CH: In Japan, to a certain extent, the magazines are loss leaders too. The idea is to get the comic into the mind of the reader so that every week they want to return to it. It’s much better to be in someone’s mind than in a mylar bag.

TW: So it’s better in Japan?

CH: Looking at comics in general, if you see comics and manga as the same thing, what is the real achievement of manga in Japan? Above artistic achievement or the work of individual artists I rank the business achievement. Japan put comics before the face of the common person. They made comics into their mass medium.

TW: They didn’t go after comics readers they went after readers in general.

CH: Right. And in America unfortunately comics over the long term have come to appeal to a specific audience like collectors. Comics are an expensive form of entertainment. But your average manga magazine in Japan costs less than two standard American comic books and you’re likely to get 500 or 600 pages. It’s a model more like broadcast television. Imagine if TV shows were only five minutes long and shown just once a month instead of a half an hour or hour once a week. You wouldn’t be surprised to see that TV only retained a cult following.

TW: That’s the specialty market. It’s the business people running the publishing houses that think comics have to be a certain way.

CH: I would hope the success of manga has shown that you don’t. Another way of looking at it is this: I consider the high point of American comics to be towards and during the Second World War back when there was an extremely robust newspaper comics section. There were great continuing strips and a high level of art and millions of people read it every day. It was so important that when the newspapers went on strike, Mayor LaGuardia of New York went on the radio and read the strips aloud as a public service. There were radio shows and movies, theme parks and cereals but the newspapers were thrown away. Thrown away but they stayed in the minds of the public.

TW: The comic as we know it was a compilation of newspaper strips into a standalone magazine format.

CH: Mike Richardson, the President of Dark Horse is known to remark that we have become slaves to a 1930’s format. Me, I like to say that comics have confused the format with the medium. “Comic” does not have to mean a 32-page pamphlet it could be any type of format. Our sales growth in comics has been in the form of graphic novels sold at bookstores. And that’s the other thing. There are good comic stores in America, but a publisher has to go where the average person goes, and they go to the mall and the mall bookstore.

TW: Which is where more manga is racking than the specialty stores.

CH: To use a religious metaphor, in America we give comics a Christian burial; they’re entombed in plastic, they’re carefully preserved, sealed up in a mylar bag and all of that. In Japan it’s a Buddhist cremation. You burn it, you pulp it, you recycle it, and it begins its new life next week. That’s a lot healthier. It’s far better to be in the minds of people than to be preserved and dead. That’s perhaps the most important lesson I’d like Western comics to take from manga.

TW: It’s a spiritual lesson as a business lesson.

CH: You don’t have to draw like they do. There’s nothing wrong with American comics creatively although it is true that American comics aren’t doing a whole lot for girls.  A very small minority of American comics creators are women. That’s not saying you have to be a woman to draw comics for girls but content-wise Japanese comics might teach Americans not to forget the other half of the human race.

Read the rest of the Carl Horn interview in the Tripwire Annual...

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