Book Review: Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics by Eike Exner (UPDATED)

Reviewed by John A. Lent, International Journal of Comic Art (UPDATED 12/28 with a response from Exner)

Eike Exner. Manga:  A New History of Japanese Comics. New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2025. 256 pp. US $37.50. ISBN:  978-0-3002-8094-4. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300280944/manga/

  In just his first two books so far [Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History and this one], the young--and independent--researcher, Eike Exner, has made monumental contributions to manga studies, revising historical points; taking exception to, and challenging, long-held “facts” and notions with newly-discovered evidence that he has uncovered; filling in gaps in manga’s timeline, and carefully and methodically analyzing nearly every aspect of manga.

A couple of his revisions pertained to the origin of the term “manga” and the connection between early audio-visual technology and comics. Exner reasoned, the claim that Hokusai Katsushika’s Hokusai Manga was connected to Japanese comics was unfounded; though some of the 19^th-Century woodblock printer’s manga were meant to be funny, none was of a narrative stripe and many were simply images of buildings and plants. To make his point, Exner made the analogy that to connect the sketches to comics is,

 

akin to suggesting that the history of Super Mario Bros. should be traced back to shōgi (Japanese chess) because they are both games. Games did not change from one thing into another; people decided to apply the word game to a new category of objects. Likewise, manga did not change or evolve from Hokusai’s manga into comics; people began using the word for a new category of objects, based on an assumed shared characteristic rather than a direct connection between the two (11).

 

To Exner’s thinking, the connection between early audio-visual technology and comics is more than “sheer coincidence” as commonly assumed. Rather, it is because of a “casual connection” that comics creation followed the “spread of pantomime cartoons, motion lines, pain stars, and depictions of sound, and coincided with the spread of film and sound recording” (22).

Among many misconceptions that Exner rectifies are the almost-sacrosanct image of the so-called “god of comics,” Tezuka Osamu, pointing out his tendency to exaggerate and, occasionally, lift whole scenes from others’ works, and that akahon (cheap comics that plagiarize popular characters with new stories) were published solely by small, short-lived firms, when actually, a huge percentage of them were the product of a large enterprise into other forms of entertainment.

Exner makes a herculean attempt to fill out the entire timeline of manga history, providing a six-page chronology from 1890 to 2017 as an appendix, and supplementing periods shortchanged in previous research, such as the 1920s, which, he showed, yielded the establishment of today’s top three comics publishers and the first Japanese magazine that topped a million circulation, namely, King.

At times, Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics goes into diversion mode, dishing out what can be classified as mini-instructional “lectures,” for example, on how styles change; the technical use of color, hatching, and stripping; the importance of viewing topics in a contextual manner, etc. When doubt clouds conclusions, Exner utilizes common sense logic--e.g., the “simplest explanation is most likely the correct one” (22) or the most plausible reason among a batch of notions should be chosen.

As is his nature, Exner spent many hours in national and university libraries across the United States and in Tokyo, scouring the original newspapers and magazines and referring to any relevant correspondence available. He also gathered data from collectors of manga and other researchers’ interviews. The book is thoroughly documented, with notes that carefully explain, add to, take exception to, and even supplement, what Exner wrote in his first book. It appears that interviews were not conducted.

One of the few shortcomings of the book is the sparse treatment of manga during the war years, 1940-1945, although Exner devotes some space to the 1930s’ wartime comics. But, for those five years of the early 1940s, it would be useful to know how many manga were published, by government and private publishers, under what restrictions, by whom, with what type of content, and with what effect? What were the contents of any decrees issued referring to censorship generally, and how did they apply to manga? Where there any instances of publishers or artists who dared to ignore censorship rules; any examples of underground publishing or artistry activity?

The other criticism of Manga… is directed at the publisher, Yale University Press. It would seem that a press of Ivy League prestige and out of respect for the work of a dedicated scholar, would have treated the work more professionally A large section of the book is barely readable, using a smaller and faint typeface--pages 214-248, that include a chronology, notes, bibliography, and index. A number of the images stood to be upgraded by enlargement and better placement while being photographed.

Readers of Manga:  A New History of Japanese Comics, or any work by Exner for that matter, can expect the excellence associated with his name--research that is very comprehensive and wide-ranging, an abundance of information that is rigorously scrutinized and carefully analyzed, and writing that is clear and concise--even casual and seemingly effortless at times--, meant to instruct, educate, and entertain. A full package, to my thinking.

[Full Disclosure:  The reviewer was one of five individuals who wrote testimonials for this book.]

A version of this review will appear in IJOCA 27-1. 

UPDATE: Notes from Eike Exner:

I'm very grateful for the kind review (and John's previous support for my work). 

I'll add two small points of clarification: the reason for the little space devoted to manga between 1942 and 1945 is that there were only a handful of serialized strips during this time and I already had to ask for an extension to the original word limit. Discussing that period in greater detail would have given it undue prominence compared to its historical importance. My next book will examine the period in great detail, however. 

Yale University Press is not primarily to blame for the images not being perfectly aligned. Many materials were only available from institutions that will only make physical copies for patrons. I could have tried purchasing more historical materials myself but that would not have been possible for all. Most images should ideally be larger, but the larger the images, the weaker the claim to fair use, for which there are no clear standards. 

One reason why I went with YUP is that they were willing to claim fair use, which not all presses are. I looked into asking for permission for all images but learned that this is not practically feasible; in many cases it's not even simple to find out who currently holds the rights to works by deceased creators, and even if you do figure this out it's often not clear how to reach the rightsholders. It was also important to me to include those images that I thought were most useful to understand the history, not whatever images I could get permission for, which would skew the visual representation towards certain creators.

Exhibit Review: Background at the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology in Poland

 Reviewed by José Alaniz, University of Washington, Seattle

Background. Ewa Borysiewicz, Barbara Trojanowska, and Jakub Woynarowski (curators); Bartek Buczek and Emilia Kina (exhibit designers); and Magda Budzyńska (graphic designer). Kraków, Poland: Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology. May 17 - September 15, 2024. https://manggha.pl/en

Fig 1. The exhibition space for Background at the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology. Photo by José Alaniz.  

 

 With a field of vision encompassing what felt like a US football field, the cavernous confines of Kraków’s Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology[1] proved the ideal venue for “Background,” an exhibit all about spatial relationships in art and life.

Curated by two art historians and an artist,[2] the exhibit centered, in the words of its introduction:

the role of the background as an active component, one that interacts with its surroundings. Its agency lies in its capacity to initiate and influence events. This, however, unfolds along a logic different from human reasoning. The background engages in interactions with characters, but its influence is more subtle than that exerted by human actions.

Rather than positioning “background” and “characters” in mutual opposition, we aim to present them as complementary elements of a narrative. We seek to highlight a mode of experiencing reality that is not solely centered on human narration but open to non-human perspectives, conveyed through representations of natural features and elements such as rocks, water, wind and plants. These enable narratives to unfold outside human measures of time and often independently of human notions of purposefulness, tending to focus on utility.

     And while the exhibit’s focus resonated with the Humanities’ turn to Posthumanism and New Materialism – e.g. Mel Chen on animacy, or Jane Bennet’s “vibrant matter” – Background destabilized other oft-unexamined presumptions in art, like the distinction between original and copy, the standard account of modern art’s development in Western Europe, even the traditional hierarchies about what counts as art and gallery space.[3] As the introduction further put it: “Dividing the spheres in which people realize themselves creatively into ‘pop culture’ and ‘high culture’ is an arbitrary convention.” Take that, Clement Greenberg!

Even the conventional gallery lighting scheme was subverted, with vast stretches of darkness as central to the experience as were the angled wooden vitrines (elegantly crafted works of art in their own right) designed by Bartek Buczek.

Moreover, exploring these aesthetic/philosophical matters through Japanese graphic narrative and related forms made tremendous sense, given manga’s well-known use of interludes, unpeopled landscapes and other contemplative modes that punctuate the storytelling in ways relatively rare in more “action-driven” national traditions.

Attempts to dethrone the primacy of foreground figures in Western European and US comics have mostly been the province of the avant garde; cue “posthuman” cinematic works like Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961) (to pick one prominent postwar example). In comics, we have experiments like the Swiss artist Niklaus Rüegg’s SPUK (Thesen gegen den Frühling) (“Spook: Theses on Spring,” 2004), which removed all the characters from a set of classic Donald Duck comics, leaving only the settings (empty rooms, bare lawns). Perhaps no Westerner has done as much in this vein as the conceptualist Greek-Belgian artist Ilan Manouach; see his Noirs (2014), in which the background in a sense overflows the foreground, such that the “black” Smurfs blend in to the point of illegibility.

As the show’s organizers declare, the value of foregrounding background comes down to how the move nudges a viewer to displace a human-centered positionality, even a single-point perspective, in favor of a broader understanding of space/time – to such a degree that some works abandon the figure itself, passing on to abstraction. And again, while we see some of this in the “inverted perspective” of Byzantine religious art, Background demonstrates that Asian artists were doing this for much longer and in more diverse ways. In fact, one of the ancillary lessons of the exhibit is how much of the material we might think of as modern has ancient correlates.

To that end, the exhibit featured reproductions of backgrounds used in cult anime productions; 19^th-century woodblock prints; comic books by Yuichi Yokoyama, Tiger Tateishi, Satoshi Kon and others; poster designs; textiles; ceramics; and video game elements by FromSoftware and Kojima Productions, to name a few.

Fig 2. Katsushika Hokusai. Woodblock print from his A Garden of Pictures (Kokusai Gaen, 1843), with waterfall as barcode. 

None stopped me in my tracks like two works from the famed master Katsushika Hokusai (of The Great Wave Off Kanagawa fame). An ukiyo-e print from his A Garden of Pictures (Kokusai Gaen, 1843) shows a fairly conventional landscape dominated by a waterfall. But it’s how he renders the cascading water itself that struck me: with several vertical brushstrokes varying in thickness. They looked like a barcode. That same eerie time warp feeling – like seeing a period portrait of Abraham Lincoln with an iPad – was heightened still further by another Hokusai, a sample pattern from his Banshoku Zukô (Designs for All Artisans, 1835). Here he dispenses completely with figuration, leaving nothing but barcode. Mind-bending.

A series of large posters commemorating Japanese urban spaces by Koichi Sato approach the austerity of a Rothko in their utter refusal to straightforwardly depict their stated subjects. Instead, you get what resemble a colorful detail of a sunset in The Golden Pond (1995) or an effect of looking up at a starless sky in Urban Frontier — Tokyo ’96 (1996), with the off-frame city’s glow pulsing in the bottom half of the frame. A very full emptiness.

Whereas Koji Iyama’s Nippon poster series (n.d.), while strongly recalling the dour Suprematism of an El Lissitzky, takes a more playful approach. Iyama transmutes the Japanese word for Japan, Nippon (rendered in kanji as 日本), into increasingly abstract shapes of geometrical precision. Dominated by white space, these images dissolve the distinction between foreground and background – yet, quirkily, they still signify “Japan.” 

Fig 3. Koji Iyama’s Nippon poster series (n.d.), playing off the kanji rendering of the Japanese word for Japan.

For all its modernist sheen, though, Iyama’s posters have early 19^th-century roots, as pointed out to me by co-curator Woynarowski. It was then that Japanese monk/painter Sengai Gibon executed his ink drawing popularly known as Circle-Triangle-Square (Maru-sankaku-shikaku, ca. 1825), aka The Universe. Just as someone today might reflexively try to scan Hokusai’s waterfall with their phone, Sengai’s 200-year-old drawing would not look out of place in a 20^th-century avant garde exhibit. We may well read Iyama’s jokey Nippon series as an homage.

Background presented comic art primarily in book form, opened to ambient pages from Seiichi Hayashi’s Red-Colored Elegy (1970); Tiger Tateishi’s colorful Moon Trax (2023), showing non-representational shapes paired with/riffing off of Hokusai’s aforementioned famous wave (which brought to mind Eisenstein’s plasmatic line), as well as his Cheat Sheets (2023), its alien environments strongly recalling Jim Woodring’s Unifactor; and Yokoyama’s Travel (2006) and Garden (2011). 

Fig 4. Display of Yuichi Yokoyama’s works.

 

Fig 5. DayDream Gaming’s Elden Ring — Ambient Walking Tour (2023), based on the videogame Elden Ring (2022) by Hidetaka Miyazaki.

The latter, with their propulsive traversal of a surreal milieu, paired well with the YouTube channel DayDream Gaming’s Elden Ring — Ambient Walking Tour (2023), based on the videogame Elden Ring (2022) by Hidetaka Miyazaki, and Death Stranding – Relaxing Walking in the Rain (2023), based on the game Death Stranding (2019) by Hideo Kojima. 

Here there is no background – or if you will, everything is background, i.e. environs for the characters, backs turned, to explore. These videos last for hours, with no action other than the figure’s movement through the fantasy surroundings. The effect (I’m told) is hypnotic, mesmerizing, what Woynarowski called “a highly contemplative mode of storytelling.” Tarkovsky for the 21^st century. Or maybe Casper David Friedrich, his Romantic subject not just pondering the sea of fog, lording over it, but plunging into its animated depths.

The exhibit provided a number of wall-mounted screens for visitors to view the walking tours. It also displayed some pages from Elden Ring: Official Art Book Vol. II (2022), the better to appreciate the background art. 

Fig 6. DayDream Gaming’s Death Stranding – Relaxing Walking in the Rain (2023), based on the game Death Stranding (2019) by Hideo Kojima.

Another section sampled the detailed backgrounds from cult anime works like Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), coupled with clips and selections from the original manga version (1982), and other Studio Ghibli classics. I was taken by Toshiharu Mizutani’s Akira, Cut No. 1 (1988/2023), a lovely color solegraph of a Tokyo cityscape carved in twain by a massive thoroughfare, like the Grand Canyon. Mizutani served as art director on the film version of Akira (directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988).

Fig 7. Toshiharu Mizutani’s Akira, Cut No. 1 (1988/2023).

 Background was a triumph, the perfect marriage of subject, venue and execution. It more than fulfilled its remit, powerfully demonstrating how in these astounding Japanese works the background achieves a status as important as the actors – if not more so. I also very much appreciated how the show’s design encouraged the visitor to wander; it had no order, no beginning, no end. No foreground except what you chose.

“We didn’t want to create a linear story, but many existing stories,” said Woynarowski.  “This underlies our idea that there is no center in this structure, just as there’s no foreground and background. We wanted to focus on non-human environments, non-human stories. Of course, man is still present here, but it’s not the most important part of the story. It’s decentered.”

In our era of Anthropocene, with human activity destroying the planetary biosphere, nothing and no one can ever really escape … us. Woynarowski and I talked about that too as we navigated the gallery space. But to Background’s achievements I would add this: any experience that gets us to think – even momentarily – beyond human concerns and human egoism is crucial. It’s a step out of the very deep, very dark hole we’ve dug for ourselves.   

As the show’s introduction put it, “the background is not neutral: it has agency and is often governed by a non-human logic.”

That may be our only hope.  

 

[1] The Museum was founded in 1994 at the behest of film director Andrzej Wajda (1926-2016), a great devotee of Japanese culture.

[2] Borysiewicz is a co-editor of MOST, an online journal devoted to Eastern/Central European contemporary art/culture; Trojanowska is a curator at the Manggha Museum; and Jakub Woynarowski is a noted contemporary artist, comics artist and director of the Narrative Drawing Program at Kraków’s Academy of Fine Arts (see interview elsewhere in this volume).  

[3] Background even encompassed within itself an entirely separate, unrelated exhibit!