Introduction
As a fan of manga outside of Japan, there comes a time when one is no longer able to stand waiting for translated editions. Perhaps you search online for scanlations, or head out to your local Japanese bookstore to buy them in the original. Needless to say, taking the latter choice draws its own new problems, primarily being how to read the text, whether by taking Japanese language classes or studying on one’s own. In both cases, it can be the beginning of a long, sometimes frustrating but always exciting journey in acquiring a new language. In full honesty, this is not a general story, but rather my story—and perhaps many readers’ too. While I did not start reading manga anticipating learning Japanese at the time, let alone having it as a specific goal, it would not be an underestimation to say that the linguistic elements of manga quickly became one of the most important aspects for me as a reader.
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Tags: akahon, Anime-manga.jp, anti-comics feeling, classroom, education, educational comics, image-text, intertextuality, Japan, Japan Foundation Japanese-Language Institute, Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs, Japanese manga, Japanese National Institute of Informatics, Kitazawa Rakuten, Kondō Hidezō, language acquisition, manga, manga studies, modern manga, onomatopoeia, post-war period, scanlations, Scott McCloud, Shimizu Kon, shōjo, shōnen, stereotypes, yakuwari-go, Yokoyama Ryōichi
In the folded concertina pages of their book Correspondences (2013), artist Bernice Eisenstein and writer Anne Michaels have collaborated to adapt and put to use a multifaceted temporal dimension inherent in the medium of comics. Michaels and Eisenstein explore the potential that comics have to interrupt processes of consumption through phenomenal engagements with image, text, narrative and temporality. (Smith 2013) Correspondences changes through reading, offering new connections and configurations, made possible by the choice of directions in which the book can be read, and the page arrangements chosen by the reader upon any particular visit. The book opens as an accordion, the edge of each page attached to another. Read it this way, it is a poem. Read it a different way to look at Eisenstein’s portraits. When arranged conventionally, they are accompanied by a text on the facing page. As voices in a gallery of conversations, situated in the shadow of the Holocaust, Eisenstein’s portraits show us the faces of connected figures, from Paul Celan to Nelly Sachs, while the fragmented text of the poem sets up associations and relationships across time. There are echoes of the image/text combinations of Eisenstein’s previous graphic novel I was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2006), which prodded the boundaries of the medium, resisting a more conventional approach to graphic memoir. Miriam Harris describes how Eisenstein illuminated “a vanished world of family members, shtetl culture, and Jewish intellectual inquiry and art, to identify what had been lost.” (2008: 132) Harris points out that “the union of words and images” (2008: 141) enables a reanimating of the dead through yoking together past and present in the corporeal form of the graphic novel. Correspondences performs similarly, but with an even greater sense of corporeal engagement, and moves even further away from standard image/text relations as found in comics.
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Tags: anti-Semitism, Auschwitz, Bernice Eisenstein, Canada, Correspondences, Griselda Pollock, Holocaust, I was a Child of Holocaust Survivors, image-text, kinship, linearity, mental health, Russian revolution, Shoah, Stalinism, trauma, Virtual Feminist Museum
Takeuchi Osamu, a professor of media studies at Doshisha University, is likely not the best manga studies critic to use as an introduction to problems surrounding the relatively recent turn in Japanese manga studies discourse to formalism or, more specifically, to the study of manga expression (manga hyōgen), since his work is something of a too easy target. It is parochial—his examples, despite pretensions toward general principles, are exclusively Japanese—and has changed surprisingly little since the late 1980s, despite the fact that his contemporaries, such as Natsume Fusanosuke and Yomota Inuhiko, and the manga expression discourse in toto have changed considerably in the intervening years. Yomota’s Manga genron (Principles of Manga) makes reference to at least some non-Japanese comics artists, notably Windsor McCay, and in the introduction to a recent translation of two chapters of his Tezuka Osamu wa doko ni iru (Where is Tezuka Osamu?), Natsume reflects on how limited this early formalist work was and, if reproduced today, would have to be understood within the context of a global comics studies discourse:
At the time I wrote this book, my interests generally centered on postwar Japanese manga, and the scope of my inquiry was almost entirely limited to Japan. If we were to consider European and American influences on manga from the Meiji period [1868-1912], the discussion in this book on transformations related to time and panel articulation would link to world-historical questions of modernity (changes in the expression of time and space in modern times)… Future research will surely depend on sharing knowledge and intellectual exchanges between scholars in different countries.[1]
While a turn away from more parochial concerns is admirable, a broadening of perspective on manga-as-comic expression is not guaranteed to overcome or even make apparent a number of assumptions underlying the study of manga expression as it emerged historically and in direct response to the currents of nearly two decades of manga criticism that preceded it. In order to make those assumptions more apparent, my use of Takeuchi’s critical oeuvre here is directed more toward discourse analytical ends than toward a detailed explication of what his theory of manga expression entails.
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Tags: Biranji, Cinematism, CJ Suzuki, Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold!, Doshisha University, eiga-teki shuhō, Europe, film, formalism, Frederick Schodt, gekiga, Helen McCarthy, historiography, image-text, Ishiko Junzō, Itō Gō, Japan, Japanese manga, jaqueline berndt, Kitazawa Rakuten, Kure Tomofusa, manga criticism, Manga genron, manga hyōgen, Mangashugi, Media Studies, Meiji period, Mizuki Shigeru, Nakano Haruyuki, Natsume Fusanosuke, New Treasure Island, Osamu Tezuka, Ryan Holmberg, Sakai Shichima, Scott McCloud, Shin takarajima, Shintakarajima, Shirato Sanpei, Shishido Sakō, shōjo, Speed Boy, Supīdo tarō, Takeuchi Osamu, Tatsumi Yoshihiro, Tezuka, Tezuka Osamu, Tezuka Osamu wa doko ni iru, Thierry Groensteen, Thomas Lamarre, Tsuge Yoshiharu, Tsurumi Shunsuke, USA, Winsor McCay, WWII, Yomota Inuhiko
Kitazawa Rakuten’s (1876~1955) place in manga history is secure. Yet the two important manga historians of today, Shimizu Isao and Miyamoto Hirohito, diverge considerably in their understandings of what Kitazawa represents in this history. Shimizu sees him in terms of continuity, while Miyamoto sees him in terms of discontinuity. Both of these scholars are in agreement that Kitazawa was Japan’s first modern manga artist and that he was an important figure in early-twentieth century manga development. However, Shimizu considers Kitazawa as an important link in a manga history that connects manga’s present to ancient Japanese past, whereas Miyamoto views him as part of a radical separation from the past that established and popularized a new genre recognizable as manga today.
Here I want to explore these two scholars’ contrasting perspectives on manga history with a focus on Kitazawa whose own thoughts on manga I will take up at the end. As many readers are probably not familiar with this artist, I will firstly sketch out his life and career.
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Tags: art, Box of Curios, Chame, Chojūgiga, Dekobō, Frank A. Nankivell, History, Hokusai, Hosokibara Seiki, humour, image-text, Imaizumi Ippyō, Ishiko Jun, Japan, Japanese manga, Jiji Manga, Jiji Shinpō, Katei Puck, Kidorō, Kitazawa Rakuten, Kitazawa Yasuji, manga, manga criticism, manga studies, Milano Manga Festival, Miyamoto Hirohito, Miyao Shigeo, Mokubei, newspaper strips, Okamoto Ippei, ponchi, Punch, Rakuten Puck, ronald stewart, satirical cartooning, Shimizu Isao, Suyama Keiichi, Tagosaku, Tokyo Puck, USA, woodblock prints, Yurakusha
Comics and archaeology should be natural cousins. After all, most ancient languages – Egyptian hieroglyphics being an obvious example – exploit the same image/text synergies as comics. What is perhaps surprising is how limited a role comics have so far played in either formal or informal archaeological discourse – particularly given the fact that archaeology is a highly visual science, and the presentation of archaeology depends to a great extent on visualising specialist concepts and practices. Watch any episode of Time Team, and it becomes clear why it works as television: the presenters’ language is about showing, not telling. “Look over here,” Tony Robinson will call to the film crew, “Have a look at this,” Phil Harding will say, scraping away with his trowel, “This is the remains of a ditch,” Mick Aston will explain, “Running all the way along there, over the field to the edge of the hill.” As arms wave and fingers point, patches of dark and light soil become castles, forts and houses in the mind’s eye. This is the language of visual explanation, and it is used just as much in professional discourse as public presentation.
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Tags: archaeology, image-text
Comics Forum 