Manga invasion

Only when you have sat in an
automobile overflowing with college students (and their various odors and
idiosyncrasies) for five hours can you truly understand obsession. In the age
of the Internet, satellite dishes, and free shipping, what could possibly
consume anyone enough to submit to the travails of such bone-jarring interstate
journeys?

Until recently, you could say the
word “manga” (Japanese for comics) and count on blank
stares. These days, manga paperbacks fill rows at
bookstores. Book sale reports showInu-yasha and Naruto making runs at the crown
long held by Calvin and Hobbes and Get Fuzzy. Manga
popularity has even encouraged one pair of local entrepreneurs to open a
dedicated store — after making the aforementioned trek one too many times.

“[I]n Hiroshi Hirata’s samurai comics, with their direct, serious
art style, I find a nostalgia for the kami-shibai of
old, and a sensibility in the manner of the violent warrior prints of the late
Edo period.” — Yukio Mishima (Japanese
traditionalist and writer, better known nowadays in the West for his ritual
suicide in 1970)

Hiroshi Hirata, Osamu Tezuka, and their fellow mangaka
are the inheritors of a long artistic history in Japan.
A thousand years ago, Buddhist monks were producing cartoon-like
drawings satirizing other clergy and the nobility. In the 17th and 18th
century, woodblock printing techniques led to mass production of story-telling
pictures on scrolls, arguably the original comic books. The most popular prints
were ukiyo-e, the “Floating World” pictures
recently on display at the MemorialArtGallery.

The arrival of American comic strips
in bound collections a little less than a century ago led to the production of
thick monthly Japanese magazines collecting whatever comics were available.
Even so, pre-1945 most of the artwork bears little resemblance to the stylistic
conventions now associated with manga.

That would all change with the
artistic emergence of a medical student who preferred Walt Disney and Max
Fleischer.

Paging through Buddha by Osamu Tezuka is revelatory,
like hearing the Beatles for the first time or eating seafood fresh off the
boat in a place where that means something. The art varies from exquisite
landscapes to elongated caricatures. Like Citizen
Kane, the artist took the opportunity to explore the possibilities of black
and white. The 3000-page tale offers the same labyrinthine experience as the
lengthiest Russian novel. Buddha is a
manga masterpiece created by the originator of the
medium. This could never be a comic book produced by the American entertainment
machine.

“People talk about [Tezuka] as the ‘father,’ [and] he was in a lot of ways,”
says Joanne Bernardi, director of the Film and Media
Studies Program and associate professor of Japanese at the University
of Rochester. “He was the one who
introduced this new style. It caught on. It fed into a whole lot of social and
cultural ethos at the time. It completely meshed with the whole idea of
technology outracing and outpacing and undermining humanity. The fact that
there had been this atomic bomb and this traumatic experience in Japan that was
due to technology. The bomb really seems to infect popular culture, at least.
It definitely overshadows other aspects about the war.”

Sitting on her parents’ sofa in the
early ’60s, Prof. Bernardi was on the frontlines as
the first Japanese animations entered American family rooms on Saturday
mornings. “[Tezuka] really did make a big change with
Astro Boy,” she says. “Astro
Boy was his flagship character. To our American consciousness, he was the only
one exported.”

“There was a young girl sitting beside me…. [F]or nearly the whole time since we
had left Ueno Station she had been reading a thick comic book. The girl rose,
put her comic down, and walked the length of the car to the toilet. A green
TOILET OCCUPIED light went on, and while that light burned I read the comic. I
was instructed and cautioned. The comic strips showed decapitations,
cannibalism, people bristling with arrows like Saint Sebastian, people in
flames, shrieking armies of marauders dismembering villagers, limbless people
with dripping stumps, and, in general, mayhem. The drawings were not good, but
they were clear. Between the bloody stories there were short comic ones and
three of these depended for their effects on farting: a trapped man or woman
bending over, exposing a great moon of buttock and emitting a jet of stink
(gusts of soot drawn in wiggly lines and clouds) in the captors’ faces. The
green light went off and I dropped the comic. The girl
returned to her seat and, so help me God, serenely returned to this
distressing comic.” — Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar

Ignoring the fact that he seems to
feel all right touching his fellow passenger’s stuff, Theroux does accurately
describe the contents of the common manga weekly, in
many ways not too far removed from Mad
Magazine or a Hollywood Western. On the other hand, “There’s also this idea
that the violence and sex in anime — this is today — that seems to be blown
out of proportion,” Bernardi reminds us. “That’s been
a much bigger impediment to [adults] appreciating anime. The kids don’t bother
with [worrying about] it.”

In manga,
graphic storytelling is a form of communication unlimited by topic: Genius Idiot, Ajihei the Cook, Fighting MahJongg, Chronicle of a Ninja Military’s
Accomplishment, Sabu the Pin Artist, BloodsprayMahJongg Tiles,
Enema Rock Climbing, No-Panty MahJongg With the Tables Turned, Tale of Genji, Kid Cop, Diary of a
Sentimental Tomboy, and Wild Rider MahJongg Tiles at Sunrise.
Despite a remarkable reliance on the violent possibilities inherent in
mah-jongg, the very fact that there are multiple successful series about
American football, the Japanese stock exchange, and the trauma of new mothers
debuting at their local playground speaks to a format that has attained a
significant degree of universality.

For clarity’s sake, the primary manga taxonomy is shonen (boys’) and shojo (girls’), carried on in the US
with the two most popular magazines: Shonen Jump and Shojo Beat.

“Shonen Jump titles are about kids who try really hard and succeed,” says
Luke Morgan, co-owner of a Henrietta shop called Hammergirl
Anime. “American comics are overwhelmingly targeted to the teenage and college
male market. Manga is a medium as opposed to a genre.
On our shelves right now, I can think of comics that are targeted toward
40-year-old salarymen to elementary school girls to a
cooking channel in a book to political discourse to anything. Trying to
categorize what manga is about is saying, so how
would you describe film? There are so many different types.”

Stylistically, manga
is also different, Morgan continues.

“Unlike American comics, manga is scene-oriented and American comics are
action-oriented,” he says. “A good example of the scene versus action: In
American comics when people are talking at the breakfast table, they will have
a picture of the person talking. In a Japanese comic, they’ll have a picture of
the tea with the steam coming off of it. That sets the scene for what’s going
on. It has a much more expansive feel.”

“What’s so wonderful about manga is the stories aren’t conventional like many American
graphic novels,” says Elizabeth Kovach, president of the RIT Anime Club.
“They’re unique plots with characters who seem to run
much deeper than most from the US.
It’s hard to truly define, but I loved anime and manga
when I was a kid because it was different. The hero didn’t always win, sometimes people got hurt, or died. That was completely
different from what was on TV or in comic books available to me. It’s still
very true to this day and you’ll see that some of the best American graphic
novels are influenced by Japanese Manga.”

As
it turns out, Rochester is a
hotbed of manga interest. The RIT Anime Club is “the
largest Anime Club on the East Coast,” says Kovach.

“They are quite big — one of the
main reasons we stayed in Rochester,”
adds Morgan.

For their part, Morgan and Gabrielle Varry took their investment dollar and put it where their
interests lay.

“We found ourselves often driving
quarterly to Toronto, New York
City, or even New Jersey to anime
stores to shop,” Morgan says. “And between us and the people who went with us,
because it was a good number of people when we’d drive to these places, we’d
spend a lot of money there. So, we decided that we would try to open our own
store.”

They have a shop in the JeffersonPlaza, just west of West Henrietta.
The flat-screen television hanging by the door shows anime to anyone
interested. Manga merchandise lines the walls where
DVDs and books don’t fill the floor space. The coups de grace though are the
Pachinko machines in the back. Unlike their brethren in the homeland, these
machines are purely for amusement.

For folks who want to dip their toes
in the manga ocean, an anime convention may be the perfect place to
start. Morgan offers this description: “Usually a convention is a weekend event
that attracts anywhere between 3000 and 60,000 people. They feature guests both
from Japan and America;
dealers set out their wares; they have industry panels, specific panels about
shows; a number of contests; cosplay where people
dress up.”

Rochester
hosts at least one convention on a smaller scale.

“Tora-Con
is our annual convention,” says Kovach. “In the spring of 2005 we beat all the
odds and nearly 300 people came out to see what it was about. It is a one-day
Anime Convention that is very family- and student-friendly.
We have all the elements of a larger convention including screenings, panels, cosplay contest, artist alley, and dealer’s room. Planning
is already in the works for April 29,
2006.”

A new group, Rochester New York
Otaku, has recently formed and they are hoping to stage their own convention in
the next year (www.rochecon.com).

Manga is
better

We consulted a committee of the
newest generation of manga-maniacs. They’ve been
raised on Pokemon,
Sailor Moon, Hamtaro, and Hello Kitty and live at a time when manga
is in their public library and anime is on their television. Our komikku coffee klatch consisted of: Duncan, 11; Rose, 11;
Aaron, 9; and Tess, 9.

City: So, let’s talk a little about manga.

Tess: Cool.

Rose: Yes!

Tess: It rocks!

Aaron: It thoroughly rocks!

Tess: It’s confusing when you have to read it backwards, but you get
used to it.

Rose: I think it’s sort of like American comics, except you read it right to left,
instead of left to right.

Aaron: They’ve got chibi!

Rose: They’ve got a lot more variety. I don’t know for sure, but all I’ve seen of
American comics, they’ve been like…

Tess: Superheroes.

Rose: Yeah. And this has got different things. You’ve got ninjas. You’ve got demons.
You’ve got people going back in time. I think comic books and manga are different. Because comic books, most people think
of magazines. Manga, you think of novels.

Aaron: Yeah, books.

Tess: All the American comics that I read are male superheroes that
aren’t defeated and they’re never defeated and they’re great and mighty. I’d
rather read about real fighting (bow and arrows and swords and stuff), not like
superpowers (where you can lift anything). That’s boring. I haven’t read any
American comics that are about female superheroes. They’re always Superman and Spiderman. The Fantastic Four have one girl.

Duncan: I think the manga
is better, partly because I like the style more. And also there is a better
storyline. It’s not just sold for publicity, like some way to get money like a
lot of American comics are. The people who draw manga
actually think up a good storyline. They don’t have different storylines
throughout the comic. The person either makes it come to a close or they just
keep making it. They just keep on going.

It’s more like you’re reading 50
books of it to come to an actual conclusion which is about four chapters per
book. Not like just three for Superman and it takes a little bit less for one.
You’re getting one chapter whereas in manga you get
four. It’s like you get more out of it and it actually follows a storyline. You
don’t have bloop and bloop
and bloop — three comics for one set of stuff and
then another three for a completely different story and then you’re teleported
somewhere else. It’s just got a better setup to it.

Rose: American comics are usually about superheroes and there’s not very much
variety. With manga, you’ve got everything. And it’s
not based on stories completely that have already been done.

City: Who’s your favorite character?

Rose: In Inuyasha,
it would probably be Sango or Miroku.
Sango is a female who is a demon exterminator and
she’s got this big, huge boomerang that she can actually use. She comes from
the village of demon exterminators. You first encounter her where her brother
has been taken over by the evil guy named Miroku. And
her brother kills her father and everybody else. And while this is going on,
their village is being attacked by other demons. So, everybody is killed
except….

Tess:Sango.

Rose:Sango. So, I think that’s really cool.

Aaron: Oh, yeah!

Rose: And then she’s got a demon pet that looks like a two-tailed cat demon that
starts out really small and cute and it can get bigger.

Rose: And then there’s Miroku who is a Buddhist monk with
questionable morals.

Tess: Very questionable morals.

Rose: ‘Cause he’s got a curse that was inflicted upon his grandfather called wind
tunnel which is this hole in his left hand.

Tess: Right.

Rose: Yeah, right, okay. So, if he unleashes it, it can suck anything in, except for
these poison wasps. So, once he gets old enough, the thing will swallow him up
which happened to his grandfather and father. So, he has to have a baby to pass
on the line. So, every time he comes across a beautiful woman, he asks her to
bear the baby. It’s kind of funny because they always reject him.

Aaron:Kakashi from Naruto and the AzumangaDaioh biting cat.

Tess: I like Kikyo. She died and then she was
brought back to life again and then she almost died and then she got brought
back to life again. She died again and got back to life again. She sort of
keeps dying and then being brought back to life.

Rose: She should be dead like three times.

Tess: She’s a priestess and she hates Inuyasha.

Rose: They kind of have a romantic background.

Aaron:Eeehhh….

Tess: They used to like each other, but then she thought that he did
something that was really bad, so she killed him. Well, she put a hundred-year
curse on him.

Duncan: I have very many favorite characters.
My first one of them is Naruto.

Aaron:
Gahh!

Duncan: You haven’t read Volume 29. As the story progresses, he gets better. You know that
lightning thing on his hand?

Aaron: What lightning thing?

Rose: You’ve read beyond everybody, okay?

Duncan: It’s in Volume 4.

Aaron: I’m on Volume 3.

Duncan:Ohhh, he
gets really strong and powerful. I also like Orphen
from Orphen.
He’s a sorcerer but he was trained by the leader of the Tower
of Fangs which is where the
sorcerers train. He’s more powerful really than any other person at the Tower
of Fangs, but he’s on work-for-hire
because he’s broke.