Manga's First Century
How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905–1989
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
A comprehensive English-language history of a beloved medium, Manga’s First Century tells the story of the artists and fans who built a cultural juggernaut.
Manga is the world’s most popular style of comics. How did manga and anime—“moving manga”—become ubiquitous? Manga’s First Century delves into the history and finds surprising answers.
In fact, manga has always been a global phenomenon. Countering essentialist myths of manga’s emergence from the deepest wells of Japanese art, author Andrea Horbinski shows it was born in the early 1900s, a hybrid form that crossed single-panel satirical cartoons popular in Europe and America with the Edo period’s artistic legacy. As a medium, manga initially focused on political commentary, expanding to include social satire, children’s comics, and proletarian art in the 1920s and 1930s. Manga’s evolution into a medium embracing complex, long-form storytelling was likewise driven by creators and fans pushing publishers to accept new, radical expansions in manga’s artistic and narrative practices. In the 1970s, innovative creators and fans empowered a new breed of fan-generated comics (dōjinshi) and established robust audiences of adult, female, and queer manga readers, while nurturing generations of amateur and professional creators who continue to enrich and renew manga today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this expansive debut history, Horbinski, a submissions editor for Mechademia, upends conventional Western narratives about manga, arguing that Japan's foremost popular art form is an expression of modernization and social change. She rejects the two most common historical framings—that manga is rooted in ancient Japanese art or emerged fully formed with Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy—and instead begins the account with ponchi-e, turn-of-the-20th-century satirical cartoons inspired by British humor magazines. From there, she depicts the art form as both a transnational and uniquely Japanese attempt to "get to the heart of contemporary customs and behavior," as manga artist Okamoto Ippei wrote in 1928. (For example, 1930s "proletarian manga" offended fascist government censors and alternative manga of the 1960s was embraced by the antiwar youth movement.) Manga became part of global culture, sometimes in bittersweet ways; in one of the book's regrettably rare photos, a harmonica band comprised of prisoners in a WWII Japanese American incarceration camp play a tribute to Norakuro, the canine star of a popular early manga. It's a shame the book has so few illustrations, as Horbinski's descriptions of older manga, many still unavailable in English translation, will leave readers eager to take a peek. Still, it's a vivid ode to the variety and depth of an enduringly popular art form.
