Manga by Paul Gavett is a large format illustrated introduction to manga – Japanese comics. The two characters in Man-ga can be translated “irresponsible pictures”, but has come to mean a particular Japanese form of comics often consumed in thick books full of serialized stories. Gavett does a good job of surveying the history of manga from Osamu Tezuka to the nouvelle manga “movement” of Boilet. (See the previous blog entry on Nouvelle Manga Digitale.)
Gravett occaisionally tries too hard to present a view that manga is not just “tits’n tentacles” or sexist eye-candy for boys. He is best when documenting manga for girls (think Sailor Moon) and the cultural context of manga in Japan. (Think about how hard it is to translate comics into English when the order of the panels is right-to-left.) The real value of the book are the illustrations that give you a feel for the variety and graphic inventiveness of Japanese manga. I can see how manga, an enourmous almost entirely domestic business, is a vast reservoir of plots, visual ideas, and characters for animation (which does translate easier), games, toys and cards. One could argue that the Japanese incredible everyday consumption of manga buttresses other industries so that they can compete internationally. We don’t see the manga, but we see the animations, the kids toys, and the computer games.
An interesting question is what makes manga different from Franco-Belgian BD and American comics. One answer is the cinematic pacing. Gavett shows how early manga by Tezuka imitated American movies in their subjective point of view and pacing. There is a speed to the panels that makes them something you fly through rather than the carefully and intricate panels of BD. Boilet argues that they also deal with the mundane and are therefore accessible to a much wider audience while American and French comics are often dark and complicated science fiction that is aimed at a restricted audience. It is probably more true that there is a much greater variety to manga from sports stories for boys to erotic stuff for older women while American comics tended to focus just on the young male audience. Finally there is a graphic inventiveness. While American and French comics were coloured and and relatively short in length, manga are mostly black and white (with some colour inserts) and they go on for hundreds of pages. The sheer quantity has probably pushed mangaka (as the drawers are called) to innovate.
Paul Gravett Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics New York: Harper Design International, 2004.