reviewed by C.T. Lim
Martin de la Iglesia. The Early Reception of Manga in the West. Ch. A. Bachmann Verlag, 2023. ISBN 978-3-96234-077-3. <http://www.christian-bachmann.de/b_bn13.html>
Comic studies’ publications in general are in bloom. One can imagine manga and anime scholarship studies in English (as distinct from scholarship written in Japanese) would constitute a big part of that given the popularity of manga and anime. Recent titles by Eike Exner and The Cambridge Companion to Manga and Anime edited by Jaqueline Berndt are notable. The Early Reception of Manga in the West is a fine addition to the list.
de la Iglesia posits the origins of the popularity of manga in the West dating to when the first translated manga was published by independent publishers in America in the 1980s. He argues against the general perception that the manga boom started in the late 1990s, when dubbed anime adaptations of manga such as Dragon Ball or Sailor Moon were shown on television.
de la Iglesia focused on four titles as the starting point of manga’s acceptance in the West: Lone Wolf and Cub, Japan Inc, Akira, Crying Freeman. These were titles translated and published in America and Germany in the 1980s and 1990s, which Iglesia dubbed as the first manga wave of 1987 to 1995 (in the book’s back matter).
He argues though that the impact of the early translated manga in the 1980s and 1990s was limited. Although one can say that the publication of the 1970’s Lone Wolf and Cub by First Comics was a big deal in the American direct sales market, as it featured covers and introductions by famed cartoonists including Frank Miller, a hot property in the 1980s. Miller was visibly influenced by Japanese gegika manga such as Lone Wolf and Cub in his 1980s comics Daredevil, the four-issue Wolverine mini-series and Ronin.
Lone Wolf and Cub was soon followed by The Legend of Kamui, Mai the Psychic Girl and Area 88. American readers would also have been exposed to translated manga in Frederik Schodt’s landmark book, Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (1983) and I Saw It!, a comic book version of Barefoot Gen published by Leonard Rifas in 1982. And this is where, when reading this book, I am reminded how our mind plays tricks on us. We remember things differently. Some things we remember as bigger than they actually were. In my mind, the publication of the English version of Lone Wolf and Cub was a major comic book event. In reality, Iglesia proves empirically that Lone Wolf and Cub was not that significant in the whole scheme of things for manga publication in the West. In short, looking at the reception and sales of Lone Wolf and Cub, and Japan Inc in America and Germany, they are not significant to manga’s breakthrough in the West. But the Marvel Comics’ imprint Epic’s edition of Akira was the game changer, despite its more expensive prestige format. (p. 144) The Western comic book format was a hinderance to the success of Lone Wolf and Cub and the graphic novel format did not make Japan Inc a best seller, but Akira broke through the market.
In terms of
argument, approach and structure, the author borrows heavily from reception
history, which is the fundamental art historical method used in this
study. Its overall aim is to find out what people in certain regions of the
world thought about manga at a certain time. (p. 10) Iglesia chose to focus on
people rather than manga readers to get a broader sense of the reading
audience. To quote:
Note that I deliberately use the generic term people instead of more specific ones such as manga fans or even manga readers. This is because the latter terms imply a particular subset of recipients who repeatedly or even regularly read manga and who already have a pre-formed opinion about manga that sets a positive expectation for their next act of reception; in other words, the act of manga reception has become a habit for them. In this study, the only prerequisite to qualify as a relevant recipient is that he or she has read at least one manga, or even only part of a manga.
But there is a
problem with this approach. To quote:
However, only a small fraction of these recipients have recorded their thoughts about their reception experience, and even less have done so in a form accessible to researchers today. The best bet for the researcher is to seek out records that have been both written down and published. The most common form of such records is a text in a magazine – most likely a specialised comic magazine (that is, a periodical that reports about comics, not an anthology of comics)… As a result, the group of recipients that I concentrate on is narrowed down to what I am going to refer to as journalists, be they professionals or amateurs, with vocational training in journalism or not. (p 10-11)
Iglesia is aware of
the limitations of taking journalists’ writings on manga at face value.
It is safe to say that the intent of a
journalist writing about a comic is not, for instance, to give an accurate and
objective picture of the manga reception of his or her time, and the intended
recipient of his or her message is not a researcher working 30 years in the
future. It is crucial to be aware of the original configuration of these acts
of communication – of the intended recipient and the original intent of the
journalist. We need to find out what the journalist wanted to achieve, as this
intent shapes the content of his or her message, in order to extract the
information we are interested in.
Some journalists were even comic publishers themselves at the same time. A different but no less problematic incentive for journalists to review comics was the opportunity to obtain review copies – particularly as there was usually no (or only little) monetary compensation – which tempts journalists to write unduly positive reviews in the hope of receiving more review copies from the same publisher in the future.
Furthermore,
The importance of the role of
journalists cannot be overstated, as they were a major part of, in the words of
Bourdieu, the whole set of agents whose combined efforts produce consumers
capable of knowing and recognizing the work of art as such. This means that the
production of »the meaning and value of the work, that is, the attitude of
readers towards individual manga titles, is to a certain extent shaped by
critics (as well as publishers, who Bourdieu mentions explicitly). So in
addition to trying to find out what a critic him- or herself thought about a
particular manga, we should also aim to estimate the influence of a
journalistic text on the attitude of the reader of that text towards the manga
in question. (p. 11)
Although in a footnote to this paragraph, Iglesia said that comic magazines are not widely read so their influence on readers would be limited. Again, this is a reminder not to take things at face value, but with a critical eye. The important point is this: the whole idea of perceiving manga as a genre has been brought about by these journalists. (p. 12)
So to unpack the above, this book is really about the reception of manga by journalists and, in turn how the views of these journalists influence others' views and reception. But I would say this is problematic because how do you prove this? It is an issue of causation that cannot be solved easily. You can show a co-relation, but you cannot prove causation. On page 214, it was suggested that “by mapping one reception environment (Japan) onto the other (USA), one could speculate about the chances that such a hypothetical early manga translation would have had.” I doubt that is so. The book also does not examine the influence of manga on the American comics creators such as Miller because Iglesia argues “this kind of reception is hardly relevant to the larger question about the propagation of manga among the general public”, (p. 13), I disagree as Frank Miller was so popular at one point that his fans would read manga because of him. I know I did.
Chapter-wise, Iglesia examines his case studies by looking at their publication and reception in America, then in Germany. Deep analysis and comparison is being done here by looking at issue six (1987) of Lone Wolf and Cub as it was also the only one to be included in the first German edition of the series. For the Akira chapters, he looks at issues like flipping the art, coloring, script, charts to show the rank sales of Akira in Advance Comics Top 100, the number of cyberpunk scenes in the Akira issues and which year they appeared in. Akira is central to Iglesia’s argument; that is, if you accept his argument.
There are some things I disagree with. While he has proved with sales figures and reviews that Lone Wolf and Cub was a “modest cult hit” (p. 63), I disagree with the assessment that its “relative lack of success was most likely due to (the) rather mediocre quality of the original material (compared to Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s Akira, for example)” (p. 63). This same subjective assessment was also leveled on Crying Freeman, which was described as a “mediocre series” in the back matter. While Akira is great and I would say superior to many other manga series, too much acclaim is given to it. One need not dismiss Lone Wolf and Cub and Crying Freeman to argue Akira was good or important. His position does not accord with the fact that Freeman’s author Ryôichi Ikegami was given a highly acclaimed lifetime achievement award and a retrospective at the Angouleme Comics Festival a few years ago.
I am also not convinced by the utility of Chapter 8, Online Survey. It had 22 responses and it was a checklist to find out which manga were read when, in order to pinpoint the breakthrough of manga in the West. (p. 201) There were no open-ended questions. While Igelsia explained why he chose to conduct a survey instead of conducting in-depth interviews to get more responses, I believe interviews with 20 respondents would be richer and the resulting data more meaningful.
Compared to the other case studies, the book devotes three chapters to Akira, both the manga, the anime and its connection to cyberpunk. He rightly pointed out the importance of cyberpunk in making the film popular, although the English edition of the manga was popular for other non-cyberpunk reasons. (p. 162) On this aspect of transmedia and intertextual context (p. 160), another area Iglesia could have explored is to compare the success of Akira as a film shown in the cinemas and Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon as anime shown on television, and how both events differ as turning points in making manga popular in the West. The difference in medium should tell another story. While outside the remit of this book, the impact of Ghost in the Shell film (1995) and the Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series would be interesting case studies. Other points he discussed are the importance of the adoption of the tankobon (roughly paperback) size in the eventual success of manga in the West (p. 199), and the issue of flipping artwork for publishing Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball. (p. 218)
All in all, I enjoyed
reading this book, as it brought me back to the 1980s of reading manga in
English. Being in Singapore, I have been reading manga in Chinese. Recently I
wrote a chapter on the reception of manga and anime in Singapore. This book
exposed me to other reception approaches and theories.
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