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The The Zine Volume 4 Issue 10: Special Manga Supplement

What is this? Why is it laid out in this strange way? Why can’t I read these comics like other comics?

What you are looking at is a peculiar and beautiful product of trade, war, occupation, and several generations of cultural cross pollination. All of this taking place between two countries: the United States and Japan.

It all started in the 1930’s when American publishers started packaging old newspaper comic strips into what we today call the comic book. These were wildly popular among youth at the time and soon original stories were being created exclusively for the new comic book format.

The children who grew up reading these comics were the same people who invaded and occupied Japan after World War Two. Occupation can be a boring way to spend your time so they brought their comic books with. These comic books were among the many cultural products of the United States that entered Japan after the war.

Soon artists like Osamu Tezuka were applying Japanese concepts, language, and aesthetics to the American comic book format. This has continued to develop into the Japanese comic format called Manga. It would be easy to assume that Manga is a derivation of American comics, but its ties to historically Japanese forms of art are just as influential making it just as much Japanese as it is American.

Manga artists changed the direction in which page elements were read to match the conventions of Japanese language. Pictures were streamlined and facial expressions exaggerated to mimic the fast paced reading style of Kanji and to speed up production. To this day they continue to add to the ever-growing catalogue of unique comics language called symbolia. [Examples of symbolia would be the symbolic use of stars around the head called squeans signifying disorientation, a sweat droplets called plewds to signify stress (see page 2 panel 1), and a bulging vein symbol for anger (see page 10 panel 1 bottom of balloon on left)].

Through the red scare of the 1950’s and the cultural disillusion of the 1960’s censorship and stagnation combined so that American Comics lost their relevance and readers lost interest. However in the 1980’s and 1990’s American soldiers based in Japan were reading Manga and watching Anime (Japanese Animation). Soon they were bringing these cultural products back with them to share with other Americans. As demand has grown Japanese publishers have translated and published a wider variety of Manga for the American market with it’s own distinctive look and language.

During this period kids in St. Paul developed an insatiable appetite for Manga due to the fact that censorship killed stories of romance, horror, war, and crime produced by American comic publishers. Girls learned that there are places in the world where women make comics that are fun to read. These students started making stories of their own heavily influenced by Manga and these budding efforts are what you are about to read. No one knows what exciting developments they will contribute to the language of comics or if these American Manga artists will be adored by future generations of Japanese and American readers, but here we see the continuation of history looping back on its self.

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