East & West– The difference between American and Japanese Comics

This morn­ing I came across this post from a blog called ” He’s Just So Stack­able ” and the title to the post was Comic Books Are Good.

What caught my eye actu­ally was the title of the post, so of course I had to take a gan­der at what was being writ­ten, and of course I had to leave my two cents worth of opin­ion which was this…

The begin­ning of the post started with this.…

”

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of reading.

Of course, there are many peo­ple who wouldn’t call what I was read­ing real read­ing, because I’ve been read­ing a lot of comics lately. Peo­ple who say comics aren’t real read­ing can go read the lat­est Danielle Steele novel or some­thing equally productive.

Any­ways, I started with the mini-series lead­ing up to DC’s big Infi­nite Cri­sis from a cou­ple of years back. I had read many of the spoil­ers for that big thing, but I found it enjoy­able regard­less. To be hon­est, I also enjoyed Zero Hour way back when, so maybe my opin­ion doesn’t count for much.

Gen­er­ally, I find myself pretty non-critical (for the most part) when I’m read­ing a super­hero comic. Still, I found the whole thing too seri­ous. That’s prob­a­bly why I enjoyed the Day of Vengeance lead-up so enjoy­able, because Bill Will­ing­ham knows how to make a comic fun and still have high stakes (go read his Ver­tigo series Fables. I haven’t read it for a few years, but it was great up to issue 20, and con­tin­ues that way, by all accounts). ”

And to which I had left the fol­low­ing comment…

” Nice title for the post.

I’ve always found ( on a gen­eral read­ing level ) that comics are good. I learned to read because of comics, and I also took a major inter­est in every­thing to do with art and ani­ma­tion ( ini­tially ) due to read­ing comics. The prob­lem ( here in the US ) has always been that we triv­i­al­ize the comic, unless a major event hap­pens and becomes newsworthy…two exam­ples would be per­tain­ing to ” Death ” in comics..The Death of Super­man, as far as I can remem­ber was the first time that the news media actu­ally ran any type of reports on comics in gen­eral that was not aimed as a major witch hunt to dig out some sort of ” sub­ver­sive ” issue in the comics page. And very recently the ” Death of Cap­tain Amer­ica ” was a fea­tured arti­cle in the news, along with a post on USA Today.com ( I believe ) just the other day about the ” New Red ” Hulk, and Marvel’s try­ing to get some cheap pub­lic­ity for the new Hulk movie due this sum­mer movie season.

I could write a bit more here, but I might just save it for my blog and a nice com­par­i­son between East and West atti­tudes towards the Comic…”

Lew

So I thought that a com­par­i­son of the Amer­i­can Comic and the Japan­ese Comic ( Manga, for those of you who might not have been sure..) was in order…

The Amer­i­can Comic

The early for­mat of the comic book was intro­duced in the 1930’s with a book called Famous Fun­nies, which was a com­pi­la­tion of Sun­day comics, this was basi­cally a col­lec­tion of the Sun­day fun­nies with­out the whole newspaper.

This col­lec­tion of comics was to be fol­lowed up later with the release of the first actual for­mat printed comic book, and the intro­duc­tion of the first super hero, a char­ac­ter named Super­man, intro­duced by two kids named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shus­ter.

Siegel was an Amer­i­can writer, and Shus­ter was a Cana­dian born Artist, who were liv­ing in Cleav­land Ohio at the time of their col­lab­o­ra­tion of superman.

The intro­duc­tion of Super­man her­alded in what would be termed the Golden Age of comics, to be fol­lowed later by the Sil­ver, Bronze and the Mod­ern Age of comics.

Okay, so there was your lit­tle bit of comics lineage…the real thing that I want to talk about as far as the Amer­i­can comic is this one name…

Fred­er­ick Wertham.

Wertham wrote a book…

Wertham’s book, Seduc­tion of the Inno­cent, a book pub­lished in 1954, warned that the comic book was a bad form of pop­u­lar lit­er­a­ture, and was a major cause of juve­nile delin­quency. The book would be at best a minor bestseller.…at it’s worst, it was what gal­va­nized par­ents and would later be the main cause for a US Con­gres­sional com­mit­tee to be launched, and this com­mit­tee would take a cold and hard look at the comics indus­try, and thus was the Comics Code Author­ity launched, vol­un­tar­ily by the the comic book pub­lish­ers to self cen­sor their own titles.

I refer to this inci­dent because of how we as Amer­i­cans still look at the comic today, but before I con­tinue I want to take a look at the Japan­ese comic…

The Japan­ese comic is called Manga.

Now I have seen at least two dif­fer­ent mean­ings for the term Manga, this expla­na­tion was taken from the book I am cur­rently read­ing,  Manga — Sixty Years of Japan­ese Comics…

” From the Oxford Eng­lish Dictionary…they are Japan­ese comic books and car­toon films with a sci­ence fic­tion and fan­tasy theme “…this is wrong on two counts…”

Manga are not Japan­ese films, and they deal with a wide range of sub­ject matter..the other expla­na­tion reads like this…

Taken from Wike­pe­dia… ” Manga, lit­er­ally trans­lated, means “whim­si­cal pic­tures”. The word first came into com­mon usage in the late 18th cen­tury with the pub­li­ca­tion of such works as Sant? Ky?den’s pic­ture­book “Shiji no yukikai” (1798), and in the early 19th cen­tury with such works as Aikawa Minwa’s “Manga hyakujo” (1814) and the cel­e­brated Hoku­sai manga con­tain­ing assorted draw­ings from the sketch­book of the famous ukiyo-e artist Hoku­sai. “

From what I have read so far, the manga comic in Japan is a wide­spread phe­nom­e­non, and is an accepted part of their culture.

In Japan, Manga are not just for children…Men, Women, and Chil­dren ( and or teenagers, male & female ) all read Manga.

It is com­mon place in japan for the busi­ness man to be on a train, either on the way to or from work read­ing a Manga mag­a­zine or book.

As a mat­ter of fact, the Japan­ese have built up the manga to the point where it, the Manga Comic, is able to stand up to the dom­i­nance of film and television.

This is how rooted into their cul­ture, the Japan­ese comic, the Manga is in Japan…

There are no con­gres­sional hear­ings into the comic in Japan…but rather in Japan, the comic is a strong, accepted, and appar­ently wide spread, accepted read­ing medium, that is accepted by all…with out the stigma or ridicule…

While here in the US, we still frown upon the comic… we still keep the comic book hid­den from view…we still make fun of the adult who reads it…we still only get excited about it when it can be newsworthy…

And just maybe, because of our own cul­tural dif­fer­ences with our Japan­ese coun­ter­parts, those who read the Comic, or if you will the Manga, and just maybe, our own short sight­ed­ness, the Amer­i­can comic will always be rel­e­gated to being noth­ing more than a minor note in our Amer­i­can culture.