The Blog

   First Exam is Tomorrow...
And to show you how nice a person I am, I am currently in the process of typing up a stack of notes for my manga class, summarising various things and making them make more sense to me. Plus I figure that typing all of this up might help me remember a bunch of names and stories that I keep forgetting how to spell. Anyway, here is what I've done so far. (Notes in brackets are things that I do not believe to be as crucial, but are still worth generally remembering.)

History of Manga (Pre-War).

In the 7th century, caricatures were made behind the walls and ceilings of two temples, Yoshodaiji and Horyuji, near Nara city.
In the 12th century, Bishop Toba created the “Animal Scrolls”, Choju jinbutsu giga. These were scrolls showing animals in priests’ clothing, carrying various Buddhist religious duties. They represented people and their behaviour.

(During the Kamakura period (1192-1333), scrolls were made showing the six worlds of Buddhist cosmology. Pictures dealing with human frailties appeared, embracing taboo topics such as various maladies and aberrations, (eg. A man with hemorroids, a hermaphrodite, etc) displaying a “robust, uninhibited sense of humour”. An example would be the “farting contests” where *men* competed together to create the most vile smell possible.
Zen pictures were produced by the hundreds in the 16-17th centuries, which could suggest a profound beauty of be very off-colour. These were disposable art, and limited to the clergy, the aristocracy and the powerful warrior families.
In the mid-17th century, simple cartoons were sold near the town of Otsu near Kyoto. Otsu-e were originally Buddhist amulets for travellers, but became uninhibited secular cartoons with stock themes: women, demons and warriors. Produced in the thousands by artisans using paper patterns in a crude form of printing.)

Political aside: During the Edo period (1600-1868), Japan was ruled by a strict feudal dictatorship that controlled all of society, preventing social change. There was a strict class system (samurai, farmers, tradesmen and merchants), and all forms of political dissent (including art) were banned, as was interacting with foreign nations, on penalty of death. However, this system created a demand for cheap entertainment.

In the early 17th century, popular secular art became a reality due to the refinement in Japan of the woodblock-printing process. The most popular prints were the ukiyo-e illustrations of the “floating world”, which originally depicted men and woman in the red light district of Edo. Originally regarded as trash, the subject matter eventually diversified and the quality improved. Depicted the pleasures and pastimes of the day and oft-told historical tales in flowing lines and multiple colours. These tried to capture mood and impressions rather than being anatomically correct and where a cheap source of entertainment.

Also in existence were shunga, “spring pictures”, which were pornographic prints. Occasionally censored with little success by the authorities, until the 20th Century when the Japanese started to conform to Christian concepts of morality.

In 1702, the first comic book, Tobae Sankokushi was created, and started a fad amongst the merchants in Osaka for Toba-e, “Toba pictures”, named after Bishop Toba. These were printed in monochrome and compiled into booklets, sometimes the pictures were accompanied by text. They sold by the thousands.

(The Kibiyoshi (“yellow-cover”) were popular at the end of the 18th Century and told long stories, often published in a series. These were topic with strong story lines and were often banned for satirising the authorities.)

With the arrival of the Americans in 1853, a revolution took place in Japan, and European-style cartoons were introduced to the Japanese. Charles Wirgman was responsible for the Japan Punch, a Western-style humour magazine in Yokohoma, 1862-1887. It was primarily text, but contained satirical cartoons about the Japanese. George Bigot, a French art teacher, wrote the magazine Tôbaé in 1877, which satirised the government and got him in trouble on several occasions. These two introduced new ideas of shading, perspective, and anatomy, and as Wirgman introduced word balloons to depict speech, Bigot drew his stories in frames to create a narrative pattern.
New print techniques were introduced around this time, made manga a medium especially for the masses. In 1877, Marumaru Chimban was first printed, a Japanese humour magazine in the style of the British “Punch”, incorporating Japanese puns but in a British style, with both English and Japanese Captions.

Techniques.

There are three main types of manga:
one-frame cartoons
four-frame comic strips
story manga

Manga should be read from right-to-left and top-to-bottom.

Children’s manga is characterised by thick, simple lines.
Girl’s manga have more detailed lines than boys, and this increases for women’s manga.
The amount of detail is proportional to the age-group usually, though exceptions are made. (eg. The blocky images of the “office lady” strip).

Actual artistic techniques:
- “Blonde” hair: manga is drawn in black and white, and to help distinguish between characters hair shading and styles are often outrageous and unusual. Blonde (or other hair colours) is not meant to be indicative of the actual hair colour of the most-likely Japanese characters. Blonde characters are usually those that are intended to be bright and beautiful, 'lighter' (as they'll be less inky and more attractive on the page) and generally female.
- large eyes: this is another example of exploiting the black and white medium, where extra emotion and emphasis is made possible by drawing large eyes, so that the merest hint of a shimmer of tears can be more easily achieved in larger eyes than in smaller ones where such an emphasis may not be noticeable.
- Many manga conventions have arisen out of a need to convey greater emphasis within the limits of the medium. For example, stars appearing within the eyes of a character suggest great excitement, whereas hearts in their eyes (or in some cases, replacing the eyes) suggest that a character (usually female) has suddenly developed a crush on another person. These are used by the artist to make the emotions seem more dramatised and extreme.
It is also the case that once one manga artist comes up with a really good technique, others will copy it, so that conventions are established, and these special symbols become a sort of extra lingo for the audience, adding meaning to the image they are presented with. They will see one of these symbols and associate it with other manga they have seen before, and so a standard meaning is assigned to the particular convention.
Another reason for the special symbols is again that manga is drawn in black and white, and a number of symbols would help to add meaning that is not possible in a medium without colour and only shading.

More modern History:

Tezuka Osamu was responsible for the first story manga. Previous to this, all manga were short strips that appeared in journals and newspapers, not very respected. It was a sensation, aimed at boys and started a craze.
He was also responsible for the first girl’s story manga, Princess Knight, and the first animations. The first serial animations were Mighty Atom (Astro Boy) in black and white, and Jungle Emperor Leo (Kimba the white lion) in colour.

Prior to the introduction of videos and DVDs, animations were not as popular as written manga, for they were designed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible and were shown at a particular time and place. Written manga could be enjoyed at the individual’s leisure. The introduction of video allowed the individual to once again take his manga home and enjoy it whenever he wanted, creating a rise in the popularity of this form.

Many manga are adapted from stories into written manga, then to animation and sometimes live-action movies and stage plays. The order is not critical and varies from show to show.
Eg. Doraemon: written manga -> animation
Oshinbo: written manga -> animation -> movie
Rose of Versailles: written manga -> animation -> stage play
Asaki yume mishi: story -> written manga
Doctor Dolittle, Kiki’s delivery service: story -> animation
Pokemon: game -> animation -> manga

Changes are often made to the story to suit the new medium (eg Mimi wo subase ba) to make the story more appealing in its new form (eg. Making the boy a creator of violins rather than a painter).

Example question:
Read the handout, “Pre-texts, Metanarratives, and the Western Metaethic", and provide examples of what is possibly referred to by the term ‘pre-texts'.
What the author refers to as a pre-text is the source of the retelling of a story. An example would be "A Gest of Robin Hode" as the most-used pre-text for stories about Robin Hood, but any story of Robin Hood that influences the author of a new text is the pre-text to the retelling. Other examples of pre-texts are "The Arabian Nights", fairy tales and classical myths, all of which have been reversioned many times.

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