Book Review - The Early Reception of Manga in the West

 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. 

Book Review - The Color of Paper: Representing Race in the Comics Medium by Chris Gavaler

 reviewed by Hélène Tison

Chris Gavaler. The Color of Paper: Representing Race in the Comics Medium. Ohio State University Press, 2026. https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814216040.html

Chris Gavaler, a renowned comics scholar who has previously authored and co-authored several authoritative volumes of comics scholarship (such as The Comics Form: The Art of Sequenced Images in 2022; Creating Comics: A Writer’s and Illustrator’s Guide and Anthology in 2021; Superhero Comics in 2017) takes on the complex and fraught question of visual representations of race in graphic narratives: not only what formal elements are used to represent race, but how, combined with culturally constructed racial categories, they are interpreted by viewers.

The Color of Paper is technically detailed and precisely referenced; Gavaler offers a clear methodology, provides a very pedagogical presentation of elaborate concepts in order to determine “how a material image composed of ink on paper conveys the culturally constructed concept of a racial category,” (1) and how the white page relates to racial Whiteness. He explains in the Introduction: “I attend to the physical (or discursive) qualities of an image that produce representational (or diegetic) qualities as perceived by individual viewers, because how those formal processes contribute to larger racial constructions is not fully understood.” (5)

Gavaler combines his own very thorough formal analyses of a large number of comics, in color, grayscale or black and white, with data gathered through surveys in which viewers were asked to identify the race and ethnicity of comics characters. Gavaler acknowledges that the survey methodology is imperfect and considers the findings tentative; yet despite their shortcomings, they not only enable him (and his readers) to avoid generalizing from his (our) own perception, but they also do provide valuable input – and some unexpected results, at least for this reader: as an example, only 67% of initial respondents identified a childhood self-portrait of Ebony Flowers in Hot Comb as Black.

The volume, alternating theoretical demonstrations and the application of theory to concrete examples, is clearly structured in four parts. “Backgrounds” analyzes page whiteness, exploring the division between surface and mark, the structuring effects of the white page’s “negative spaces,” such as gutters, and the unmarked areas whose default color represents skin color. Part 2, “Languages,” looks at what it means to “read” an image – generally through a combination of symbolic reading and non-symbolic observation – and, keeping in mind that race is not reducible to appearance, what it means to read race in an image.

Based on this distinction and noting that there is currently no consensus concerning color analysis, the first chapter in Part 3 argues that non-realistic traditional coloring (CMYK) tends to encourage more symbolic reading than digital coloring, which appears more realistic. Gavaler then looks at black and white reprints of color comics, and at colored versions of initially black and white or grayscale comics, and at their reading by paired survey groups, to further determine the extent to which color contributes to denoting race.

Part 4, “Bodies,” opens up the discussion to include gender, and turns to the relation between visual representations of (fictional or non-fictional) characters in figurative art (including comics) and the world beyond, the world of the viewer; it proposes “a theory of visual representation based on viewer perceptions of authorial intent, while also revealing an inherent gap between perceptions of race and gender and the actual racial and gender identities of represented individuals.” (211) Finally, Gavaler discusses the ways in which the physical space of reading, the spatial, overlayed relations of viewer/ comics, and the positionalities of viewers and creators, complicate the White gaze and the assumptions of Whiteness that have been dominant throughout the historical span of the medium. 

Gavaler, who begins with a lucid discussion of what he describes as “the ambiguities of race as understood in the US,” or the “illogic of US racial thinking,” (8) does a sound, thorough and essential job, enabling his readers to make sense of our own readings of characters, putting clear and convincing words on perceptions that can otherwise remain imprecise. Inspired by such essential authors as Rebecca Wanzo and Qiana Whitted, and grounded in his impressive command of comics theory, he opts for a material, micro-level focus that is not only fruitful theoretically, but fascinating when, throughout the volume, he applies it to detailed analyses of a large number of extremely varied artists, from Herriman, Schulz, Sherald and Magritte to Eisner, Kirby, Miller, Heck, Grell, Hernandez, Abel, Bechdel, Passmore, Tomine, and Flowers, among many others.

This is an essential read for anyone interested in understanding the ways in which race is represented and perceived in comics, as well as for anyone keen on comics theory.

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.

Book Review: Conversations with Rick Veitch

 Reviewed by Joe Hilliard

Conversations with Rick Veitch, edited by Brannon Costello, University Press of Mississippi, 2025. 226 pages. $25 paperback, $110 hardcover. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Rick-Veitch

Conversations with Rick Veitch is the 34th volume in University Press of Mississippi's “Conversations with Comic Artists” Series. It follows the structure of previous volumes with an introductory overview essay, a chronology of the creator's life and career, and then a collection of interviews in chronological order, starting with the oldest from 1987 to a 2023 interview with the editor, Brannon Costello. Costello frames it all neatly in that introduction: "Veitch is both a shrewd observer of the pitfalls of the marketplace and an eloquent spokesman for the boundless potential of creativity." (x) And that's what makes this book so compelling. Not just Veitch's observations, but the consistency of his opinions over those 35 years. There are several strands that run throughout and intertwine with each other. As Veitch puts it: "[l]ike say you wanted to get a handle on the quantum, you might be able to through dreaming, because on the deepest level, we are made up of quantum bits, so why wouldn't we be able to dream about how we interact in the quantum realm?" (75-76)

And it's best to start with Veitch himself, as both an outsider looking in and insider looking out. His life really encapsulates the comic book world from the early-70s to the present: from underground comix creator to student of the first class at the Joe Kubert School of Cartooning, to mainstream books like Swamp Thing and Aquaman at DC, to his around-the-world of independents with Alan Moore, to self-publishing, to educational comic work, to his newest ebooks. It's interesting to see even as he works on the production side, as detailed in the 1963 interviews and his discussions on self-publishing, he talks of the art, not the business. In 1992, a prescient Veitch is looking forward, seeing what the corporate beast is up to. "People in twentieth-century America live, eat, breather, and defecate superheroes. All the time. Without even thinking about it. But the only problem with that is nearly all the superheroes are owned – lock, stock, and work-for-hire – by a few major companies who have no reason to evolve their characters beyond a certain adolescent level. And if this archetype is as vital and important as I think it is to our culture, then it has to grow. To keep it stifled is in a way to keep our whole culture stifled." (43) His constant concern with the art form, not the business, permeates the interviews, and indeed, his life. "My goal has always been to promote the art form, to explore the art form, to feed the art form, and maybe the collapse or the semicollapse that we're watching now is actually a good thing, because maybe new ways to get comics from creators to readers will develop." (155) This is Veitch in 2021 talking about the covid-caused collapse of Diamond Comics well before its final 2025 implosion. Veitch has consistently had his finger on the pulse of the comic world. "The people who run the business in comics are not thinking about the art form." (155) And the art is preeminent to Veitch.

Intrinsically tied to his view of the art form is Veitch's work in dreams. His dream comics, his most personal work, rolls directly from his early reading of Jung to the present. "It's deeper than that, a unique art statement providing a fifty-year record of the dreams of a modern human being that culminates in a real transformation late in life. For anyone who is searching for the meaning in their interior lives, it provides a model and, more importantly, a reason to keep going. Decades of dreamworking churn through all of the bullshit we have accumulated and open a door to something really beautiful and indelible." (189) It's where the art comes from. His Roarin' Rick's Rare Bit Fiends goes deep into that well, exploring not just his dreams, but that of other creators. Indeed, he see dreams as a source, that quantum connection. "If Keith Richards got the base riff for "Satisfaction" in a dream, he's still the author. Now there are a couple of possibilities there. One is, it's something he heard a bazillion years ago and it just sort of surfaced, it came back. The other possibility is that music is a mystic realm, where this stuff all exists. I like to think of it that way." (82) That view is echoed in Jenny Boyd's Musicians in Tune: Seventy-Five Contemporary Musicians Discuss the Creative Process (Fireside, 1992) where she quotes Richards: "I don't sit down and try and write songs, I wake up in the middle of the night, and I've dreamt half of it. … I am not saying I write them all in my dreams – but that's the ideal way." (Boyd, 102) For some artists, dreams are the backbone of self, and creation.

This leads directly into the next major theme of Veitch's conversations. Fundamentally, he sees community as necessary for the continued development of comics, as not just an art form, but in any form. "We want everybody to succeed; we want the art form to grow. We want everybody to have a chance at doing it. Manhattan publishing is much more about straight capitalism, selfishness; everybody's in it for themselves. If you can screw your buddy, you've got to do it." (98) Going back to his time with Joe Kubert, at the beginning of his career, Veitch expands that communal aspect. "We [Kubert and Veitch] would sit, and I’d pitch an idea to him, and the two of us would start playing with it. That's when I first really learned the pleasures of collaboration, where two people kind of surrender their egos to the story itself. It's not about who comes up with the idea that gets used. It's that it's the right idea for that story." (207) It's a mentality he goes back to again and again. Not I. We. As he notes in discussing his 1980s work with Alan Moore, John Totleben, and Stephen Bissette. "It was like, We gotta fix this, this is a beautiful American – worldwide – art from, and it's being strangled by business practices. So that's the difference. We were ambitious for ourselves to a point, but I think we were more ambitious for the art form itself." (119) When Americans used to think bigger about what society could do, should do, as he reflects on his own art education, and getting into the Kubert school. "This is back when our government actually would step in and help people when there was unemployment." (86)

Editor Brannon Costello neatly ties Vietch’s career together with last interview, pulling these disparate thoughts into one beautiful knot. Quoting Vietch's Azoth: "[F]antasies are all about generating wish-fulfillment scenarios for our fears and desires. But imagination tackles reality head on. We use our imaginations to build things, solve problems, make art." (214). Leave it to Veitch for the final word, looking to the future, dreaming the future as he always has.

"I see myself as an artist now who, instead of doing dystopian things, needs to do things to provide solutions to the problems of our world, or at least provide a spiritual direction for people to look toward to find a meaning in their lives." (200)