Comics
and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History by Eike Exner. Rutgers, 2021. <https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/comics-and-the-origins-of-manga/9781978827226
>
Reviewed
by Sam Cowing, Denison University.
1.
Introduction
Chronicling
the history of comics is perilously difficult. While comics (or at least some
comics) now enjoy unprecedented cultural cache, their present standing does
nothing to remedy previously low cultural status and intentionally ephemeral
production practices. Thankfully, a number of brave souls have labored long and
carefully to provide us with a useful grip on the emergence and development of
comics in Western Europe and North America. Obviously, such efforts were never
going to supply us with a comprehensive history of comics, but with the
ascendent popularity of manga, substantial ignorance regarding manga’s history
has never been more conspicuous nor have questions about the relationship
between manga and other comics traditions ever been more urgent.
Eike
Exner’s efforts in this book are both timely and remarkable. Exner carefully
explores the development of manga and its changing status through the 1890s and
up through the 1930s. At each turn, Exner looks both forward to the forms of relatively
contemporary manga and backward to preceding Japanese print traditions. Taking
aim at historical accounts which position contemporary manga as nothing more
than the present incarnation of an isolated, centuries-long, and essentially
Japanese artistic tradition, Exner forcefully argues instead that
[C]ontemporary
manga and other audiovisual comics are in fact one and the same medium and did
not emerge from mutually alien traditions, as far too many histories of manga
and comics would have one believe. (178)
Exner’s
case against viewing manga as a hermetically sealed tradition draws on close
readings of the narrative and formal elements of early Japanese cartoonists
such as Imaizumi Ippyo, Kitazawa Rakuten, and Okamoto Ippei as well as a
detailed examination of the adaptation and reception of George McManus’ Bringing
Up Father and other foreign strips throughout the 1920s. Exner then
explores the influence of the latter on the subsequent production and
popularity of comics strips by Japanese cartoonists.
As
Exner notes, possible motivations for positing a culturally isolated lineage
between Japanese print traditions and contemporary manga are complex. Cultural
prestige, public interest, and nationalist sentiment are only three of many
factors that have sustained questionable manga historiography. When broaching
these issues, Exner is a subtle and convincing commentator. Better still, he is
capable of sifting through a complex visual record with an eye towards salient
detail. The result is a watershed contribution to comics studies that is mandatory
reading for scholars interested in manga and its history. In what follows, I
offer a rough sketch of Exner’s efforts and then examine a striking conjecture
about the nature of comics that emerges in this book: the historical dependence
of contemporary comics upon the invention of the phonograph.
2.
Overview
Given the
limited historical scholarship on manga available in English, a separate
overview of the economic context, material production, or narrative trends of
manga’s emergence would be terribly useful. It is an evident strength of
Exner’s book that he is attentive to each of these and many other dimensions of
manga, regularly observing important narrative developments (e.g., recurrent
characters, use of anthropomorphism), formal innovations (e.g., layout and
ordering conventions, generic styles), and professional developments among
creators. In addition to supplying a vivid sense of the manga “industry” in the
periods under study, Exner’s observations should spark productive historical
interest into lesser-known works and creators involved in the importation and
transformation of comics in Japan. The attentive reader is sure to leave this
book terribly curious about a previously unknown figure, puzzled by the
specific reception of this or that American strip, or desperate for a
translation of one of the many Japanese texts Exner draws upon.
Exner
sets out the ambitions for the book and a summative interrogation of competing
histories of manga in the introduction and epilogue, respectively. A prologue
charts some of the terminological history regarding manga and serves as a
crucial tool for evaluating the impact of imported American strips upon the
Japanese comics tradition. Like any good historian, Exner is eager to welcome
others along to dig deeper into the questions with which he is concerned. A
useful appendix lists foreign comics printed in Japan between 1908-1945, and,
at several points throughout the book, Exner makes clear that much more remains
to be discovered regarding this fecund era in comics history.
The
first of the four main chapters discusses the production and reception of Bringing
up Father, beginning in 1923 and running for seventeen consecutive years in
the Asahi Graph. Exner scrutinizes the varying adaptation strategies in
early installments that sought to bridge the reading practices of American
creators with those of Japanese audiences—most notably, with regard to panel
order and speech balloon orientation. As Exner notes elsewhere, the reprinting
of foreign strips while ignoring the formality of copyright was a widespread
phenomenon. Questions about why Asahi Graph editor in chief Suzuki
Bunshiro seized upon McManus’ work and what role printing rights played in this
choice are potentially productive and usefully specific questions that one might
now explore further given Exner’s pioneering work.
Chapter
Two is, in some ways, a detour from the main aims of the book. It offers a
theory of the narrative and formal function of speech balloons, drawing from
several episodes in non-Japanese comics. I examine Exner’s theory below, but
the historiographic rationale for this chapter is that the emergence of what
Exner calls “audiovisual comics”—roughly, comics that feature speech balloons
and other emanata—is historically specific to the Western comics idiom.
The absence of audiovisual comics from the Japanese print tradition, despite
the presence of sequential graphic storytelling is subsequently marshalled as
evidence of the impact of American comics’ importation. In particular, the
adoption of speech balloons in contemporary manga is argued to be dependent
upon their deployment in strips like Bringing Up Father in the 1920s.
In
Chapter Three, Exner surveys the broader landscape of imported comics strips
and examines trends that follow upon the distinctive reception of audiovisual
strips. The continuing challenge of translation and competing practical
and formal responses are examined. Exner also takes up the material question of
how exactly the adaptation and reprinting was undertaken by Japanese periodicals.
Additionally, the significance of editorial choices by figures like Inui
Shin’ichiro and the role of comics-oriented periodicals like Shinseinen
and Manga Man are discussed, especially as sites for innovation by
Japanese cartoonists.
Chapter
Four supplies a partial account of “fully audiovisual” manga created by
Japanese mangaka. Exner charts the path of several creators from the
period preceding the importation of foreign strips to an increasingly mature
manga industry, one driven by audience enthusiasm for speech balloon-laden
narrative rather than pre-1920s picture stories. Touching upon the formative
influence of imported strips on Osamu Tezuka, Exner sketches a rough proposal
for credibly explaining the subsequent divergences regarding style and
transdiegetic elements between the manga tradition and foreign comics. Notably,
this sketch leaves aside any controversial claims about the availability and
impact of foreign comics throughout World War II. Much like those who
invariably point to Japanese Punch and the British satirical tradition
in framing the history of manga, those who place undue weight on anecdotes
about the discarded comics of American G.I.s will find Exner’s observations an
important corrective.
3. Exner
on Speech Balloons
If one
hopes to provide a historical account of the emergence of contemporary or what Exner
calls “audiovisual” manga, a theory of what makes manga contemporary and, in
particular, what separates contemporary manga from its precursors is needed. For
Exner, the principal divide between contemporary manga and preceding comic
strips is the presence of transdiegetic elements—most notably, the speech
balloon. And, as Exner argues, this innovation stems from the importation of
foreign strips. As he puts it, “most significant change in narrative manga
brought about by the translation of American comics was this shift from picture
story to audiovisual comic strip.” (165) This historical argument can be
mounted with fairly modest assumptions about the nature of speech balloons and
their history outside of manga. But, in Chapter Two Exner departs from the
history of manga, narrowly conceived, to develop a theory of the function of
speech balloons as well as their historical origin. Exner builds upon previous
work by Thierry Smolderen here, but the result is a distinctive proposal sure
to be of interest to anyone concerned with how comics work.
Exner’s
theory of speech balloons comprises a taxonomic proposal, a functional thesis,
and a historical hypothesis. The taxonomic proposal distinguishes speech
balloons as transdiegetic elements of the comics form. Unlike the intradiegetic
text that appears on objects like signs and clothing within the narrative world
of a comic, speech balloons themselves are unseeable by characters. But, unlike
other unseeable extradiegetic elements (e.g., box narration, panel
borders), speech balloons also impact the narrative world by conveying dialogue
that characters might hear. Given their peculiar role, Exner takes them to be
most aptly described as hybrid, transdiegetic elements.
There
are alternative taxonomies we might adopt regarding the visual technology of
comics, but it is a virtue of Exner’s account that it makes apparent the
peculiarity of speech balloons. And, within this taxonomy, there is room for
competing views about how exactly speech balloons serve their transdiegetic function.
According to Exner, speech balloons are basically depictive entities, functioning
as sound images. There is, however, reason to be cautious about assuming the
sound image view or something like it.
Suppose,
for example, a comic includes a speech balloon with internal text reading “I
am.” Suppose that a subsequent reprint of the comic revises this text to read
“Eye yam.” Such a change is a substantive (and presumably illicit) alteration
to the comic precisely because speech balloons convey more than sonic
information. They present us with interpreted sonic information, which discriminates
between sonically equivalent events on the basis of the semantic content of
speech. For this reason, speech balloons prove even weirder than Exner
acknowledges: they must convey information, not only about what sounds are made,
but what is meant through the production of sounds. We should, for this
reason, view speech balloons as more like pictures of speech acts than as pictures
of uninterpreted sonic events.
Exner’s
historical hypothesis binds the history of speech balloons to the history of
sound-recording technology, asserting that “audiovisual comics developed in
response to new conceptions and technologies of vision and hearing… with the
invention and spread of the phonograph being particular essential to the
creation of audiovisual comics.” (175) Exner holds this connection to be far
from accidental, claiming that speech balloons are more or less unimaginable in
advance of the phonograph. This conjecture about our conceptual powers and, in
turn, the emergence of modern comics warrants closer scrutiny than a review
permits. Here, however, it is worth noting that the case for the historical hypothesis
looks rather different if we demure from the sound image view.
In
arguing for the dependence of the speech balloon upon phonographic technology,
Exner suggests that, if speech balloons had developed prior to the phonograph,
we ought to have observed the appearance of non-linguistic sounds as a kind of
intermediary form.(58) Presumably this is because such sounds are, in some
intuitive sense, less complicated and therefore likely easier to depict.
Notice, however, that if speech balloons present, not “raw” sound images, but
instead interpreted sonic information (e.g., sounds qua speech
acts), we would actually expect the reverse.
In
the case of ordinary speech balloons, we exploit standing correspondences
between text and spoken language. When it comes to presenting non-linguistic
sounds, we are no less required to exploit linguistic conventions—in this case,
distinctive ones that introduce lexical items to pick out non-linguistic sounds.
Contrary to the intuition that comics present unmediated sound images of what
happens when a car speeds by or a dog vocalizes, when we deploy ‘woosh’ or
‘woof’ in comics, we rely upon baroque, culture-specific linguistic conventions
for interpreting and relaying sonic events. While an account of these conventions
is a job of cognitive linguistics, there is no reason to believe it would
antedate the more familiar linguistic conventions that are exploited in the
ordinary speech balloon. Indeed, the capricious nature of how we represent
animals sounds suggests it is an especially complex affair. Rather than
generating the prediction that we should see “zip” and “plop” as precursors to
the speech balloon, once we recognize transdiegetic text in comics typically presents
interpreted sonic information, we should suspect that “ordinary” speech
balloons would be first on the scene.
Importantly,
Exner’s critical intervention in the history of manga remains intact even if we
reject the more tendentious theses regarding the nature of speech balloons. It
is, however, a testament to the richness of this book that, alongside
re-shaping how we ought to view the history of manga, it challenges some basic
assumptions about the nature of the comics medium.
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