2022 Eisner Award Winner for Best Academic/Scholarly Work
Japanese comics, commonly known as manga, are a global sensation. Critics, scholars, and everyday readers have often viewed this artform through an Orientalist framework, treating manga as the exotic antithesis to American and European comics. In reality, the history of manga is deeply intertwined with Japan’s avid importation of Western technology and popular culture in the early twentieth century.
Comics and the Origins of Manga reveals how popular U.S. comics characters like Jiggs and Maggie, the Katzenjammer Kids, Felix the Cat, and Popeye achieved immense fame in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. Modern comics had earlier developed in the United States in response to new technologies like motion pictures and sound recording, which revolutionized visual storytelling by prompting the invention of devices like speed lines and speech balloons. As audiovisual entertainment like movies and record players spread through Japan, comics followed suit. Their immediate popularity quickly encouraged Japanese editors and cartoonists to enthusiastically embrace the foreign medium and make it their own, paving the way for manga as we know it today.
By challenging the conventional wisdom that manga evolved from centuries of prior Japanese art and explaining why manga and other comics around the world share the same origin story, Comics and the Origins of Manga offers a new understanding of this increasingly influential artform.
ISBN-13: 9781978827226
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Publication Date: 11-12-2021
Pages: 270
Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range: 16 - 18 Years
EIKE EXNER is an independent scholar who has taught at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and Josai International University in Tokyo. His research has appeared in the International Journal of Comic Art, ImageTexT, and The Comics World, and he has received the John A. Lent Award in Comics Studies.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Preface xi
A Note on Images xv
Introduction 1
Prologue: The Historical Origins and Changing Meaning of "Manga" up to 1923 13
1 "Popular in Society at Large": The First Talking Manga 25
2 "Listen Vunce!": The Audiovisual Revolution in Graphic Narrative 54
3 When Krazy Kat Spoke Japanese: Japan's Massive Importation of Foreign Audiovisual Comics 96
4 From Aso Yutaka to Tezuka Osamu: How Manga Made in Japan Adopted the Form of Audiovisual Comics 139
Epilogue: The Myth of Manga as a "Traditional Mode of Expression" 180
Appendix: List of Foreign Comics in Japan, 1908-1945 193
Brief Chronology 201
Acknowledgments 203
Notes 205
Bibliography 235
Index 243
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