reviewed by C.T. Lim
Martin de la Iglesia.
The Early Reception of Manga in the West. Ch. A. Bachmann Verlag, 2023. ISBN
978-3-96234-077-3. <http://www.christian-bachmann.de/b_bn13.html>
Comic studies’
publications in general are in bloom. One can imagine manga and anime
scholarship studies in English (as distinct from scholarship written in
Japanese) would constitute a big part of that given the popularity of manga and
anime. Recent titles by Eike Exner and The Cambridge Companion to Manga and
Anime edited by Jaqueline Berndt are notable. The Early Reception of
Manga in the West is a fine addition to the list.
de la Iglesia posits
the origins of the popularity of manga in the West dating to when the first
translated manga was published by independent publishers in America in the
1980s. He argues against the general perception that the manga boom started in
the late 1990s, when dubbed anime adaptations of manga such as Dragon
Ball or Sailor Moon were shown on television.
de la Iglesia
focused on four titles as the starting point of manga’s acceptance in the West:
Lone Wolf and Cub, Japan Inc, Akira, Crying Freeman. These were titles
translated and published in America and Germany in the 1980s and 1990s, which
Iglesia dubbed as the first manga wave of 1987 to 1995 (in the book’s back
matter).
He argues though
that the impact of the early translated manga in the 1980s and 1990s was
limited. Although one can say that the publication of the 1970’s Lone Wolf
and Cub by First Comics was a big deal in the American direct sales market,
as it featured covers and introductions by famed cartoonists including Frank
Miller, a hot property in the 1980s. Miller was visibly influenced by Japanese
gegika manga such as Lone Wolf and Cub in his 1980s comics Daredevil,
the four-issue Wolverine mini-series and Ronin.
Lone Wolf and Cub was soon followed by The Legend of
Kamui, Mai the Psychic Girl and Area 88. American readers would
also have been exposed to translated manga in Frederik Schodt’s landmark book, Manga!
Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (1983) and I Saw It!, a comic
book version of Barefoot Gen published by Leonard Rifas in 1982. And
this is where, when reading this book, I am reminded how our mind plays tricks
on us. We remember things differently. Some things we remember as bigger than
they actually were. In my mind, the publication of the English version of Lone
Wolf and Cub was a major comic book event. In reality, Iglesia proves
empirically that Lone Wolf and Cub was not that significant in the whole
scheme of things for manga publication in the West. In short, looking at the
reception and sales of Lone Wolf and Cub, and Japan Inc in
America and Germany, they are not significant to manga’s breakthrough in the
West. But the Marvel Comics’ imprint Epic’s edition of Akira was the
game changer, despite its more expensive prestige format. (p. 144) The Western
comic book format was a hinderance to the success of Lone Wolf and Cub
and the graphic novel format did not make Japan Inc a best seller, but
Akira broke through the market.
In terms of
argument, approach and structure, the author borrows heavily from reception
history, which is the fundamental art historical method used in this
study. Its overall aim is to find out what people in certain regions of the
world thought about manga at a certain time. (p. 10) Iglesia chose to focus on
people rather than manga readers to get a broader sense of the reading
audience. To quote:
Note that I deliberately use the
generic term people instead of more specific ones such as manga fans or even
manga readers. This is because the latter terms imply a particular subset of
recipients who repeatedly or even regularly read manga and who already have a
pre-formed opinion about manga that sets a positive expectation for their next
act of reception; in other words, the act of manga reception has become a habit
for them. In this study, the only prerequisite to qualify as a relevant
recipient is that he or she has read at least one manga, or even only part of a
manga.
But there is a
problem with this approach. To quote:
However, only a small fraction of
these recipients have recorded their thoughts about their reception experience,
and even less have done so in a form accessible to researchers today. The best
bet for the researcher is to seek out records that have been both written down
and published. The most common form of such records is a text in a magazine –
most likely a specialised comic magazine (that is, a periodical that reports
about comics, not an anthology of comics)… As a result, the group of recipients
that I concentrate on is narrowed down to what I am going to refer to as
journalists, be they professionals or amateurs, with vocational training in
journalism or not. (p 10-11)
Iglesia is aware of
the limitations of taking journalists’ writings on manga at face value.
It is safe to say that the intent of a
journalist writing about a comic is not, for instance, to give an accurate and
objective picture of the manga reception of his or her time, and the intended
recipient of his or her message is not a researcher working 30 years in the
future. It is crucial to be aware of the original configuration of these acts
of communication – of the intended recipient and the original intent of the
journalist. We need to find out what the journalist wanted to achieve, as this
intent shapes the content of his or her message, in order to extract the
information we are interested in.
Some journalists were even comic
publishers themselves at the same time. A different but no less problematic
incentive for journalists to review comics was the opportunity to obtain review
copies – particularly as there was usually no (or only little) monetary
compensation – which tempts journalists to write unduly positive reviews in the
hope of receiving more review copies from the same publisher in the
future.
Furthermore,
The importance of the role of
journalists cannot be overstated, as they were a major part of, in the words of
Bourdieu, the whole set of agents whose combined efforts produce consumers
capable of knowing and recognizing the work of art as such. This means that the
production of »the meaning and value of the work, that is, the attitude of
readers towards individual manga titles, is to a certain extent shaped by
critics (as well as publishers, who Bourdieu mentions explicitly). So in
addition to trying to find out what a critic him- or herself thought about a
particular manga, we should also aim to estimate the influence of a
journalistic text on the attitude of the reader of that text towards the manga
in question. (p. 11)
Although in a
footnote to this paragraph, Iglesia said that comic magazines are not widely
read so their influence on readers would be limited. Again, this is a reminder
not to take things at face value, but with a critical eye. The important
point is this: the whole idea of perceiving manga as a genre has been brought
about by these journalists. (p. 12)
So to unpack the
above, this book is really about the reception of manga by journalists and, in
turn how the views of these journalists influence others' views and reception.
But I would say this is problematic because how do you prove this? It is an issue
of causation that cannot be solved easily. You can show a co-relation, but you
cannot prove causation. On page 214, it was suggested that “by mapping one
reception environment (Japan) onto the other (USA), one could speculate about
the chances that such a hypothetical early manga translation would have had.” I
doubt that is so. The book also does not examine the influence of manga on
the American comics creators such as Miller because Iglesia argues “this kind
of reception is hardly relevant to the larger question about the propagation of
manga among the general public”, (p. 13), I disagree as Frank Miller was so
popular at one point that his fans would read manga because of him. I know I
did.
Chapter-wise,
Iglesia examines his case studies by looking at their publication and reception
in America, then in Germany. Deep analysis and comparison is being done here by
looking at issue six (1987) of Lone Wolf and Cub as it was also the only
one to be included in the first German edition of the series. For the Akira chapters,
he looks at issues like flipping the art, coloring, script, charts to show the
rank sales of Akira in Advance Comics Top 100, the number of cyberpunk
scenes in the Akira issues and which year they appeared in. Akira
is central to Iglesia’s argument; that is, if you accept his argument.
There are some
things I disagree with. While he has proved with sales figures and reviews that
Lone Wolf and Cub was a “modest cult hit” (p. 63), I disagree with the
assessment that its “relative lack of success was most likely due to (the)
rather mediocre quality of the original material (compared to Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s
Akira, for example)” (p. 63). This same subjective assessment was also
leveled on Crying Freeman, which was described as a “mediocre series” in
the back matter. While Akira is great and I would say superior to many
other manga series, too much acclaim is given to it. One need not dismiss Lone
Wolf and Cub and Crying Freeman to argue Akira was good or
important. His position does not accord with the fact that Freeman’s
author Ryôichi Ikegami was given a highly acclaimed lifetime achievement award
and a retrospective at the Angouleme Comics Festival a few years ago.
I am also not
convinced by the utility of Chapter 8, Online Survey. It had 22 responses and
it was a checklist to find out which manga were read when, in order to pinpoint
the breakthrough of manga in the West. (p. 201) There were no open-ended
questions. While Igelsia explained why he chose to conduct a survey instead of
conducting in-depth interviews to get more responses, I believe interviews with
20 respondents would be richer and the resulting data more meaningful.
Compared to the
other case studies, the book devotes three chapters to Akira, both the
manga, the anime and its connection to cyberpunk. He rightly pointed out the
importance of cyberpunk in making the film popular, although the English
edition of the manga was popular for other non-cyberpunk reasons. (p. 162) On
this aspect of transmedia and intertextual context (p. 160), another area
Iglesia could have explored is to compare the success of Akira as a film
shown in the cinemas and Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon as anime
shown on television, and how both events differ as turning points in making
manga popular in the West. The difference in medium should tell another story.
While outside the remit of this book, the impact of Ghost in the Shell
film (1995) and the Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series would be
interesting case studies. Other points he discussed are the importance of
the adoption of the tankobon (roughly paperback) size in the eventual success
of manga in the West (p. 199), and the issue of flipping artwork for publishing
Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball. (p. 218)
All in all, I enjoyed
reading this book, as it brought me back to the 1980s of reading manga in
English. Being in Singapore, I have been reading manga in Chinese. Recently I
wrote a chapter on the reception of manga and anime in Singapore. This book
exposed me to other reception approaches and theories.
Posts
