Book Review: Funny Stuff: How Great Cartoonists Make Great Cartoons

 reviewed by Sam Cowling, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Denison University

Phil Witte and Rex Hesner. Funny Stuff: How Great Cartoonists Make Great Cartoons. Globe Pequot, 2024. US$29. https://www.prometheusbooks.com/9781633889804/funny-stuff/

     In the event of aliens arriving on this planet, they could do scarcely better than consulting Funny Stuff in their perhaps-less-than-urgent quest to understand the cultural institution of the single-panel gag cartoon. (“Aliens encounter Earthlings” is cliché #1 in the authors’ appendix of cartoon cliches.)

Over the course of a breezy ten chapters, Phil Witte and Rex Hesner draw upon a broad and deep familiarity with the form. For years, the two have been writing an online column, “Anatomy of a Cartoon,” to “look behind the gags to debate what makes a cartoon tick,” which is currently hosted by CartoonStock at https://www.cartoonstock.com/blog/category/anatomy-of-a-cartoon/ . The ambition of the book is similar: to “talk about what makes single-panel gag cartoons work, offer insights into the underlying humor, and provide a backstage look at the profession itself.”(ix) On this front, Witte and Hesner are quick to note a key constraint on their pursuit of this ambition—namely, to avoid “crush[ing] the humor out of the cartoons under the weight of excess analysis.”(ix) As they put it later, “[o]ur approach is refreshingly not academic.”(12) There is every reason to think that Witte and Hesner have succeeded in their aims. Their commentary is credible, lively, and appreciative. The menu of single-panel gag cartoons (“cartoons” from here on out) on display is wide-ranging and capably chosen. The efforts to detail the production-side of the practice of cartooning are interesting and illuminating. There are other books that seek to demystify the practice of cartooning—often through more intensive autobiography and individual reflection—but Funny Stuff engages enough cartoonists to throw cold water on the notion that there is a single method common among cartoonists.

Like any book peppered with Thurber, Booth, Chast, and Steinberg, the cartoon enthusiast will find half-remembered gems brought back onto the stage. The reader who happens upon this book with only a limited sense of the form will be treated to a survey of pieces in the orbit of The New Yorker parceled out in a topical ordering. Some chapters discuss formal features, touching upon the role of captions or upon the drawing style of cartoonists. Others map out (to whatever extent possible) the creative process of cartoon-making and idea-summoning. Several chapters focus on the general pursuit of humor and then give pride of place to the notion that humor stems from incongruity, which is then discussed via a happy hodge-podge of examples. Two concluding chapters examine the extent to which a sense of a cartoonist’s “psyche” might be on display in their oeuvre and then take up the question of how the practice of cartooning and pantheon of cartoonists is informed by questions around diversity and identity. Throughout, Witte and Hesner are keen to let the voices of cartoonists shine through in the form of judiciously chosen quotes or via concrete examples from specific creative processes. Readers will find their general sense of the cartoon form, as well as their critical repertoire much expanded, and, of course, they will also have a handful of new cartoonists whose work they are eager to track down.

The most delicate audience for the book is the diehard, the aficionado, or the connoisseur. Such a reader, if unable to summon suitable patience, will find themselves vexed that a favorite cartoon is omitted or that a preferred cartoonist receives insufficient (or, heaven forbid, no) attention. As an intermittently patient reader, I was regularly reassured by Witte and Hesner’s sense of things and, in most cases, the usual and helpfully unusual suspects are touched upon in due course. (Even so, I am unable to resist the urge to commend Mary Petty to those interested in what the authors describe as “lavish” styles, and Sam Cobean as a maestro of captionless, yet thought balloon-bearing, cartoons.)

There is a broader and perhaps thornier sort of complaint well-versed readers might make: where are the kindred, British cartooning voices like Pont and Fougasse? Witte and Hesner plausibly cite The New Yorker as the center of gravity for this art form since mid-century, but, despite this, there are ways to usefully gesture towards the broader history of the cartoon, especially at Punch, without collapsing into the drearily academic. Given the quality of their commentary in this edition of the book, one expects Witte and Hesner would have valuable observations about the differences between a quintessentially American cartoonist like Thurber and his British counterpoint, Pont.

Early on, Witte and Hesner describe Funny Stuff as “a tribute to a unique art form.”(ix) This is a laudable aim, especially in what seems to be an era of declining regard for the form. Even so, there is a tension that emerges from the conflict between, on the one hand, the hope of extolling the virtues and power of cartoons and, on the other hand, the project of deepening our understanding of the form. Even while Witte and Hesner disclaim their discussion as “non-academic,” their efforts are regularly taxonomic, intellectual, and inquisitive—e.g., partitioning out different kinds of humor, sorting cartoonists into rough categories, and cataloguing the kinds of interactions between drawing and caption. Due to the former aim, there is an understandable urgency in this book to showcase as many lovely cartoons as possible. Left unchecked, that would simply deliver another cartoon collection. But, in keeping with the latter aim, there is a clear commitment on the part of the authors to get to the bottom of things (as much as one might). I suspect, however, that this can’t be done solely through attending to the good and the excellent. This reader was unable to find a cartoon in Funny Stuff about which the authors didn’t have a kind word. So, as awkward as it might be in practice and as strange as it might sound in theory, I suspect this book would have been well-served to include a handful of clunkers, coupled with Witte and Hesner’s commentary upon them. As the authors’ discussion of the practice of cartooning makes evident, failure—typically, in the form of cartoons rejected as leaden or inscrutable—is an invisible yet inevitable part of the cartooning world. Partly for this reason, in our pursuit of understanding how cartoons work, it seems that the misfires, the duds, and the clunkers may prove no less instructive than successes.

Then again, who wants to waste time on bad cartoons when there are so very many good ones?

Book Review: Small Altars by Justin Gardiner

reviewed by Liz Brown, Outreach & Instruction Librarian, Kraemer Family Library, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

Justin Gardiner. Small Altars. North Adams: Tupelo Press, 2024. US$22. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/S/bo221357365.html

Small Altars is an extended eulogy to Gardiner’s brother Aaron, who died of synovial sarcoma in 2019. The literary press publisher marketed it as linked to the world of comic books, blurbing it with “In Small Altars, Justin Gardiner delves into the world of comic books and superheroes as a means for coming to terms with the many struggles of his brother’s life, as well as his untimely death, offering a lyric and honest portrayal of the tolls of mental illness, the redemptive powers of art and familial love, and the complex workings of grief.” Aaron “was born with a borderline learning disability” and schizoaffective disorder. The book describes the time Gardiner spent with Aaron during their childhood, growing apart as they aged, then returning to his brother’s side as an occasional caregiver. Threaded throughout are reflections on the activities and fandoms Aaron enjoyed - sci fi novels, Star Wars movies, piano music, Marvel comics and the Cinematic Universe, board and tabletop role-playing games.

However, Gardiner remains aloof and dismissive of the hobbies that his brother enjoyed, viewing poetry as a more “evolved” literary form, more worthy of adult and scholarly attention. Comics and their related franchises are “predictable” and “claustrophobic.” The Gardiner brothers may have watched the Marvel Cinematic Universe unfold side by side, but it is clear that Justin did not probe deeply into what held Aaron’s attention within their stories. Instead, he is perpetually pathologizing his brother, and even random strangers around him, putting forth many suppositions but demonstrating only surface level research into his wayward diagnoses. A love of comics is an escapist route back to childhood, according to Justin- the only time his brother’s behaviors met society's expectations and the only time Justin was not bored, tired, embarrassed, embittered by being associated with his brother. Gardiner veers away from any attempts to more deeply and empathetically understand his brother’s enjoyment of the mediums in favor of describing his own feelings and how uncomfortable he was interacting with his brother. Panel gutters are a looming space where Gardiner is unwilling to venture forth and examine with any kind of serious contemplation.

His brother’s lifelong efforts at playing the piano is similarly deemed a waste of time because Aaron “never composed his own songs or made any money off of it.” Gardiner briefly describes what Aaron did make money off of- working as a janitor for the Pearl Buck Center, a preschool for students with cognitive disabilities and where many of Aaron’s coworkers also had mental health or cognitive disabilities. "I knew full well how important Pearl Buck was to my brother, yet I avoided any direct contact with it..." While those feelings are valid and probably relatable to many people who don't have disabilities, this work does nothing to change people's expectations or behaviors in a way that uplifts the people who share Aaron’s experiences.

Ultimately, this title illuminates a gap in literature for thoughtful investigations into the role fandoms play for adults with cognitive impairments and mental disabilities. The topic is well worth investigating but readers would be better off directing their attention towards more empathetic and well-researched titles, such as The THUD (Mikael Ross and Nika Knight (trans.).  Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2001)

Book Review: Let’s Make Bread! A Comic Book Cookbook

 Reviewed by Christina Pasqua, University of Toronto

Ken Forkish and Sarah Becan. Let’s Make Bread! A Comic Book Cookbook. PenguinRandomHouse, 2024. US$22. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/697048/lets-make-bread-by-ken-forkish-and-sarah-becan/

When my husband and I started grad school, we got tired of having to regularly buy bread. We were already baking cakes and other sweet treats, so why not try the most essential item on our weekly grocery list? We started with Julia Child’s white sandwich bread and a friend’s recipe for peasant loaf, then dinner rolls, baguettes, challah, and brioche buns. Pizza dough and focaccia were already in our back pocket, thanks to my Italian grandmother, so by the time the pandemic hit, we were baking bread regularly enough that the shift to sourdough made sense. After a few years of trial and error—and with the help of Ken Forkish’s earlier book, Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast (2012)—our sourdough starter and boule baking skills are still going strong. Reading Let’s Make Bread!, co-authored by Forkish and Sarah Becan (illustrator of Let’s Make Dumplings and Let’s Make Ramen), I am reminded that our relationship with sourdough is not an uncommon one. Making bread is a long-term project that requires regular attention and care, is rarely perfect on the first attempt, but always worth the effort, and this comic book cookbook helps explain why.

 

Let’s Make Bread is approximately 150-pages and is divided into five main sections: The First Rise; Basics & Methods; Levain; Recipes; and The Final Proof. “The First Rise” is a short overview of who the co-authors are, what the book will cover, and what you’ll learn by the end of it. The “Basics & Methods” chapter, however, provides more extensive instructions on the equipment, ingredients, and techniques you will need to get started on your sourdough baking journey. For example, it explains how to weigh and mix ingredients, how to work the dough and shape it for either a loaf pan or a dutch oven, how to proof and bake your bread, and what to look out for when determining whether your loaf is done. I particularly enjoyed seeing the anatomy of a wheat berry and learning about the science behind how the dough’s moisture levels and environmental factors, such as time of year and temperatures in your baking area, can affect the outcome of your bread making process.

 

The “Levain” chapter is perhaps the most practical and reflective of Forkish’s bread making philosophy, beginning with a definition of the term: “Levain is the French word for sourdough. Because I don’t want my breads to taste sour,” the cartoon Forkish explains, “I usually use the word ‘levain.’ Both words mean the same thing: a wild-yeast culture made up from many feedings of just flour and water” (44).

 

 

In addition to this lesson on yeast cultures, the chapter includes step-by-step instructions for getting your levain started, how to store, maintain (i.e., feed), share, and reactivate it (especially if you’ve left it in the fridge for a while), all while explaining the fermentation process at the cellular level. The next chapter gets right to the good stuff—Forkish’s tried and true recipes from the simple “Saturday Bread” you can make and enjoy in a single day to more labor-intensive (i.e., multi-day) recipes like the “Country Bread” or “fruity” pizza dough. Tips and tricks for shaping your pizza dough, making the perfect sauce, and choosing toppings are also thoughtfully included, amping up your culinary skills. Many helpful charts are also listed throughout the chapter highlighting everything from essential ingredients to a schedule of day-to-day tasks to ensure success for each recipe. One of my favorite pages from this chapter follows the “Bacon Bread” recipe. I love it not only for its vibrant use of color but also because it extends the reader’s bread making skills to the inevitable (and most important) step in baking: eating.

 

 

This page wonderfully showcases the flavor profile and versatility of Forkish’s bacon bread recipe, teaching the reader how best to serve it through simple kitchen hacks. Who doesn’t love a homemade crouton!? Finally, the book wraps up on a light summative note in “The Final Proof,” reiterating some of the main takeaways: that baking bread is delicious, rewarding, and fun!

 If this is sounding like an instruction manual, it’s because in many ways it is. As an avid reader of narrative comics, I found I was craving a bit more “story” out of this comic book cookbook. There are some elements of this scattered throughout, but it’s not as detailed as some of the food histories that you get in Becan’s other illustrated cookbooks. For this reason, I would say Let’s Make Bread is a companion piece to Forkish’s Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast, which goes into much more detail about the author’s career and relationship to bread making, as well as the history of sourdough and its key ingredients. Nonetheless, this comic stays true to the basics of Forkish’s philosophy. Visually, the color palette is simple, but the blue and green accents play nicely off the golden yellows and browns of the breads and the white background used in much of the panel design. The artist’s attention to detail is scrupulous. Every texture, stretch, fold, and crackle of the dough is accounted for, making this a very useful guide for the various sensory elements of sourdough baking.

 

I do less of the bread making and more of the bread eating in my household, so I appreciate how this book helped me understand the basic elements of baking without the pressure to do it for myself or, if I were to attempt these recipes, to be good at it. Instead, Let’s Make Bread! revels in the experimentation process. This comic book cookbook would make a perfect gift for an aspiring bread baker, old or young, especially visually oriented folks who prefer illustrated instructions when learning something new. It’s full of humor, great recipes, and yummy illustrations that will have you baking (and eating) bread in no time.

Book Review: Haruki Murakami : Manga Stories

 reviewed by Jon Holt

Haruki Murakami. Adapted by Jean-Christophe Deveney and illustrated by PMGL. Haruki Murakami: Manga Stories. New York: Tuttle, 2023.  144 pp.  $19.99. ISBN 9784805317648. https://www.tuttlepublishing.com/japan/haruki-murakami-manga-stories-1-9784805317648

            In the past two decades in Japan, there has been much effort to adapt classic literary works into manga for Japanese audiences.  Many simply fall flat.  This is true in the West as it is in Japan.  Gems like Robert Crumb’s adaptation of Kafka or Genesis appear far and few between.  The scale is even worse in Japan. For one such as Taniguchi Jirō Summit of the Gods, there will be ten more manga versions of novels that are so bad, so poorly conceived, so unskillfully rendered that one can only imagine this latter group was simply made for cheap profit.  To render literary greatness into visual-storytelling greatness may not be the main consideration for publishers.  In Japan today, much as it was one hundred years ago, publishers put out classic world literature in translations that Japanese adults and children could enjoy. There has been and still is a hunger by readers to experience, in a digestible form, manga that captures some of the parent work’s literary greatness.  Manga is an easy vehicle for that.  The worst of such series in Japan undoubtedly have to be those by East Press in their “Break-thru Reading” (Dokuha) series, where uncredited artists adapted into cheap 200 yen mini-paperbacks canonical works, such as Marx’s Capital, Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro, Miyazawa Kenji’s Night on the Milky Way Railway (Ginga tetsudō no yoru), Tolstoy’s Anna Karenna, and even haiku poet Masaoka Shiki’s My Six Foot Sickbed.[1]  A proud owner of these books I am not, but, as a professor of both Japanese literature and manga, one must try to know what is going on in one’s field.  I was surprised to see Tuttle Publishing, a major publisher of Japanese literary works in translation for decades, channel their energies into translating and adapting classic and important Japanese writers into manga.  I turn my attention to their recent manga adaptation of four short stories by the world-famous and almost-Nobel-Prize-winner Murakami Haruki.  I am sad to report that Murakami Haruki: Manga Stories is a dismal work of illustration and comic-book adaptation that is headed for the trash bin.

            I can understand why Tuttle would try their hand at manga adaptations, especially of a celebrated writer like Murakami, who has a huge following in Japan as well as in most countries across the globe.  Adapted by Jean-Christophe Deveney probably first into French and illustrated by PMGL, these short stories are bound in a beautiful, solid hardcover of about 150 pages for $19.99.  Given that a short story collection by Murakami retails for about the same price, it might seem a sensible price point set by Tuttle.  However, there is little inside to justify the price let alone this effort in “manga form” (back cover blurb).  Why not just buy the master’s short story collections in English, like after the quake or Birthday Stories (both from Vintage International)?  The magic of “closure” actually would be experienced more in English translation by Jay Rubin instead of the poor, uninspired translatorese by Deveney.  The images are an insult to the imaginative power that lurks in Murakami’s well-crafted short stories.

            Illustrated by PMGL (a.k.a., Koffi Gnato), these stories were published each separately in Japan in a booklet format as part of a series entitled Murakami Haruki: 9 Stories (Switch Publishing) from 2017 to 2021.  Each of the “9 Stories” sold for approximately 1700 yen (or something like $15-$20 at the time), so Tuttle’s collecting four of the stories into this format for $19.99 is something of a steal for Murakami fanatics who have might have been tempted to buy the originals from Japanese booksellers, like amazon.co.jp.  In France, Delcourt collected all nine Deveney-PMGL adaptations in one volume (Murakami: Le septième homme et autres récits, 2021) for a reasonable price, like Tuttle.  For our English-language version, Tuttle published four stories in one volume, featuring “The Seventh Man” (2020), “Where I’m Likely to Find It” (2019), “Birthday Girl” (2018), and “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo” (2017).  Tuttle will collect the remaining five stories of the nine in two separate follow-up volumes. Volume 2, with the stories “The Second Bakery Attack,” “Samsa in Love,” and “Thailand” was published this past spring.

            Anyone who has read Murakami before will recognize “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” which is the first story in the collection.  In the after the quake collection (2002 in English; originally published in Japanese in 2000 with the title Kami no kodomo-tachi wa mina odoru [All God’s Children Can Dance]),[2] this story is perhaps the most central of the six as they all in some way touch on the Kobe Earthquake of 1995 that devastated this major metropolitan area in central Japan.  Murakami’s after the quake stories show a battered, traumatized Japanese populace—no one really goes unaffected by the natural disaster—but he also presents a snapshot of Japanese at their most callous, most uninterested, and most disconnected time in the twentieth century. The characters are all essentially empty shells walking around their lives’ empty boxes (an important motif across all the tales).  It is one of Murakami’s greatest and most focused efforts to capture the Japanese people and their culture instead of his typical (and forte) tendency to show the world from the perspective of a largely inarticulate male first-person boku character, who usually is a stand-in for Murakami.  “Super-Frog” as a story is thus quite interesting because it traces a strange encounter that a washed-up and older schlub, a boring bank collections manager, has with a giant frog who appears in his apartment one evening and asks for his cooperation to stop a giant subterranean Worm from unleashing a giant earthquake upon Tokyo.  More than the magical fantasy element so common in many of Murakami’s works, this post-middle-aged bank representative is a portrait not of the artist but of the greater people of Tokyo, “people like you” (p. 20).  “Super-Frog” is a special Murakami story because the author turned his lens on regular Japanese in the 1990s, sympathizing with them:  even though such “ordinary people” like the protagonist Katagiri might be completely hum-drum, “no good at sports,” “tone-deaf,” “losing their hair,” and bad in the sack (p. 16), Frog (and by extension Murakami) praises them for being “trustworthy,” “quietly responsible,” never showing any hesitation to “enter the lion’s den” that shows their “courage [which] can only inspire respect!” (p. 15)—even though they may know nothing of the greatness of Anna Karenna.  In a strange Murakami-esque twist, the Super-Frog turns to the Japanese Everyman to stave off another disaster that would kill thousands and further demoralize the downtrodden public.  How should this genius story, which is all at once humorous, incredible, and inspiring, be visualized in comic form?  That I cannot say, but I found Deveney and PMGL’s handling of both the imagery and the panel layouts to be extremely uninspired.  Their “Super Frog” manga is representative of their overall failure to translate Murakami into a visual medium.  This is not “manga Murakami.”  It is illustrated-book Murakami.  As if anyone really needed such a thing.

            Across their twenty-page story, most panels are simply talking heads.  PMGL takes a combined realistic and exaggerated style to portray the two main characters.  Katagiri is drawn with warts and all:  his widow’s peak, his bald patches, his wrinkly face all show a kind of specificity that clearly places him past “middle age.”  The artist is capable of animating that face with exaggerated expressions to enhance more feeling into the otherwise dry dialogue script.  Frog, for his part, is drawn usually in a hard, heavily realistic manner.  The art looks like it is done with watercolors at times. Frog is given a naturalistic depiction in colors (not all Manga Stories are done in color).  It is clear that PMGL loves to draw and paint frogs.  Occasionally, Frog is given a more iconic and cartoony treatment when he howls with laughter or just acting more like a human than a frog.  This sway between what Scott McCloud would call the scale of reality and icon is what begins to destabilize this adaptation of Murakami’s story.  The reader of the manga, unlike the prose story, is forced to think this actually is real, after all.  In the original Murakami story, the reader instead can continually forestall any closure on deciding if the events in the story are real, a dream, a metaphor for the shattered Bubble-Economy Japan, and so on.  Why must be decide one way or the other? Deveney, PMGL, and Tuttle force us to see things with only one poor possibility.

 

            Another problem that the storytellers have with their original material is the way that they lay out the panels.  None of their panel transitions or page layouts is all that inspired (see pp. 10-11, Figure 1).  Most panels simply vacillate between one talking head to the next.  This is not comics as much as it is storyboarding for an anime short series.  All the panels really do is show that “Katagiri said” and then “Frog said” (markers which are almost never present in the original Murakami).  Truth be told, one must keep in mind that Murakami’s story really only consists of two characters talking to each other; asking and answering questions; recounting events for the listener to visualize.  In other words, nothing actually happens in the original story.  That is why it is a bit of a headscratcher for me why they chose to render this piece into “manga form.”  It has a charming frog character that must be fun to draw for PMGL.  Perhaps that’s why.

            Another cause for headscratching is the choice to have the onomatopoeia in the original Japanese (written in Romanization) by Misato Morita.  In fact, these sound effects are not in the Murakami story and were creatively added as “original onomatopoeia” by Morita.  How an Anglophone reader is supposed to make sense of “GERO GERO” and “JIRI JIRI” is beyond my comprehension as a Japanese language teacher.  I suspect that Delcourt and Tuttle believed that readers can automatically grasp these nuanced comic-book words by osmosis.  No one in the post-pandemic world apparently needs to study Japanese anymore—it’s all intuited.

All that being said, in “Super-Frog,” there were a few chances for the creative team to employ some interesting layouts, but with this, too, those opportunities go wasted at their hands.  For example, when Frog paints a horrific picture of all the kind of devastation that could result from Worm’s triggering the next Great Tokyo Earthquake, Murakami lists all the kinds of causalities, infrastructure damage, vain attempts to rescue and save the victims.  In the manga story, PMGT uses nearly all of one page in six “scene-to-scene” panel transitions (to borrow McCloud’s concept) that are truly sad—not because of the graphic depiction of human suffering, but because of the artist’s limited imagination.  Human suffering and devastation are implied by proxy.  A panel with a hand reaching up out of the ground next to a tennis shoe and a doll does not convey the horror of Worm.  Likewise, a perpendicular slab of concrete splitting a sedan into two in the next panel is symbolic of the kind of widespread destruction to property, but that seems to be all the devastation the artist could muster himself to draw.  With the stakes visualized thus for both the reader and for Katagiri, it is hard to fathom why Katagiri, in the next panel on the following page, is so impacted and reacts with such silence.  The visual setup is poor, so the payoff is poor.  Further proof of the artist’s failure to take advantage of the comic form and the power of illustration is seen on the following page (p. 14), where PMGL attempts to convey the horror of Worm in a splash page that fails because of the murky tones that make it really impossible to see Worm.  Admittedly, Murakami describes him as “having no mouth or anus,” so it might be really impossible to make heads or tails of this mythical creature, but PMGL’s attempt just confuses the reader:  are we supposed to see something that isn’t really there?  One would expect a greater creative payoff from the artist who dedicates a full page to the villain of the story.  In conclusion, given the original story itself almost seems to resist adaptation because of its talky pacing and unclear descriptions, the creative team really painted themselves into a corner by taking on a story like this, which ultimately depends on a large imaginative contribution from its reader.  However, good manga shouldn’t be like that.  Good manga can make use of quiet or simply non-verbal scenes to convey mood or feeling (I know I sound like a hardcore McCloudian here).  But Deveney and PMGL’s manga trades nuance and suggestion of the original for verbal noise and overwrought visualizations.

In fact, all four stories in the tome are guilty of these sins.  Having read the original stories, I can attest that the other three fail to capture the brilliance of Murakami’s fiction.  In another after the quake story, “Honey Pie,” who does feature a Murakami-esque male writer character, that first-person narrator-character decides to change his style and focus, wanting instead to “write about people who dream and wait of the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.”[3] No one reading Tuttle’s Manga Stories would feel that kind of Murakami magic from this sham of a manga.  Manga Stories is, at best, a coffee-table book one puts out to catch the eye of guests at a party to desperately show off one’s literary taste.

 

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[1] For a discussion of the failures of East Press and their adaptation of Shiki’s My Six-Foot Sickbed, see my “Literature Short on Time” in Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature, edited by Rachael Hutchinson and Leith Morton, (Routledge, 2016), 26-41.

[2] For the English-language collection of these stories, Murakami insisted that the title appear entirely in lowercase.

[3] Haruki Murakami , after the quake, trans. Jay Rubin, (New York: Vintage International, 2002), 147.

Exhibition Review: Asian Comics: Evolution of an Art Form

Review and photos by Charles Hatfield

Asian Comics: Evolution of an Art Form. Paul Gravett (curator). Santa Ana, California: Bowers Museum, March 9-September 8, 2024. Admission  US$28.

https://www.bowers.org/index.php/current-exhibition/asian-comics-evolution-of-an-art-form

     Asian Comics: Evolution of an Art Form, now at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California, is a massive traveling exhibition of comic art and artifacts representing some twenty countries across Asia. Consisting of over 400 works, it takes hours to see thoroughly, and I can attest that it is worth revisiting (I have been four times, but have not exhausted what it has to offer). Launched in Europe in 2017, this is the first international exhibition of its type, and is both instructive and stunning. Asian Comics will be on view at the Bowers until September 8, 2024, and, I gather, may then tour further in the United States. I hope so.

Organized by London’s Barbican Centre, Asian Comics is the brainchild of curator Paul Gravett, a well-traveled comics historian and leading English-language scholar on Japanese manga (I should note that Gravett is a longtime colleague and friend of mine, and that the Bowers comped my first visit to the exhibition). To create this show, a process that started in 2014, Gravett collaborated with the Barbican’s Patrick Moran and more than twenty advisors from various countries. The exhibition’s design, including architecture and interiors, digital installations, and branding, is the work of the London-born international firm Pentagram.

Originally titled Mangasia: Wonderlands of Asian Comics, the retitled American version of the exhibit consists of roughly half Japanese work and half comics from other countries and areas, including Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, North Korea, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Tibet, and Vietnam. The blueprint for the exhibit is Gravett’s book Mangasia: The Definitive Guide to Asian Comics (Thames and Hudson, 2017). While rightly acknowledging the prevalence of manga as an international influence, the show goes beyond the Japanophilic stereotype implied by the original Mangasia title. National traditions are treated as distinct, not interchangeable, and the show’s text is properly sensitive to the history of conflict and competition among Asian nations (as well as the influence of Western imperialism and the Cold War). Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Indonesian, and South Korean works are particularly well represented.

The show, as Mangasia, toured six to seven years ago, running at the Palazzo Esposizioni in Rome (October 2017-January 2018), the Villa Reale in Monza, Italy (February-June 2018), and then Le Lieu Unique in Nantes, France (June-September 2018). Its current run at the Bowers marks its American debut and the first time it has been seen since 2018. The exhibit incorporates published comics, autographic original art, digital reproductions, woodblock prints, scroll paintings, digital video, and sundry objects. Published comics are the most heavily represented, but originals are plentiful, and the digital reproductions are exacting (for example, facsimiles of boards from Tezuka’s Buddha fooled me completely). I especially enjoyed those items that stretched my understanding of “comics,” such as two examples of the Kaavad, a Rajasthani tradition in which elaborately hinged boxes covered in sequential art unfold to tell a story—essentially, portable shrines, brought to life by an oral storyteller (as demonstrated in an accompanying video).

My experience of Asian Comics began with a gala opening that my family and I attended on March 8th, a Friday night. A lowkey reception in the Bowers’ sculpture garden was followed by a fairly quick walkthrough of the exhibition, and capped by a well-attended introductory talk by Paul Gravett in the museum’s auditorium. That Sunday, March 10th, Gravett followed up with a more extensive and formal lecture in the same venue, which, again, my family and I attended—and on that day I spent the better part of three hours within the exhibition, where I took hundreds of photos. We returned a third time on Saturday, April 6, for a stimulating lecture on “The Shared Origins of Modern Comics” by scholar Eike Exner (author of the monograph Comics and the Origins of Manga). Again, I spent much time in the exhibit. Finally, we revisited the exhibition on Saturday, July 13, for a sort of refresher course (and much notetaking).

Curator Paul Gravett

Throughout my several visits, my first impressions have not changed. Asian Comics is a triumph of research and design, immersive, transporting, and super-informative. It looks great and is easy to navigate. This is a superbly crafted presentation—evidently a turnkey exhibition, one whose design elements are pre-prepared and provided complete to the host museum, then adapted as needed. Online photos from Italy and France suggest a high degree of consistency from venue to venue despite drastically different spaces. At the Bowers, the show occupies roughly a third of the first floor. It makes for a dense and winding experience—not crowded, but very rich.

Approached through a long, narrow foyer, the exhibit opens with a digital marquee visible from far off, flanked by wall murals referencing Osamu Tezuka, Junko Mizuno, and other artists. Passing between the murals and under the marquee, you enter a corridor overhung with vividly crimson drapery printed with comic art. Japanese work dominates this space, but above my head, the first thing I noticed was Nestor Redondo and Mars Ravelo’s classic Filipina superheroine, Darna. The surroundings—walls and ceiling—are made of paper printed with varied and striking imagery, evoking printed comics and Asian paper craft. The effect is brilliant. From there, you are swept down a tunnel of red and black, and around corners, until you reach a transition to yellow, visually noting a new subject section.

Like the Mangasia book, the show divides into six domains, each clearly themed and color-coded. First comes “Mapping Asian Comics” (in red), then “Fables & Folklore” (yellow), “Recreating and Revising the Past” (white), “Stories and Storytellers” (green), “Censorship and Sensibility” (pink), and finally “Asian Comics Go Multimedia” (purple). This scheme, intuitive and subtly didactic, imparts a holistic design in which I never felt lost. The wall text (plentiful yet never a drag) comes in dynamic panels recalling comics pages, another evocative design choice. Pentagram’s use of paper is a wonderful example of simple materials put to mesmerizing use.

The exhibition tends to proceed from manga to broader views, as if using Japanese landmarks to sketch out the larger field. This strategy, while of course debatable, yields big dividends in terms of narrative and flow. For example, the first vitrine samples diverse manga from a seventy-year span (1937 to 2007) but is paired with a second containing works from a dozen different countries, some perhaps expected (China, India, the Philippines, South Korea) but others surprising (Mongolia, Sri Lanka). Right after this, another vitrine poses mid-19th century Japanese ukiyo-e prints beside contemporary Chinese and South Korean works. Radical juxtaposition of cultures, periods, and genres is the show’s logic—that, and a resolve to find commonality across differences. Admittedly, this syncretic approach presents challenges, not least the danger of flattening “Asia” into homogeneity, but it also highlights transnational themes and affinities.

The “Fables & Folklore” section epitomizes this. Spotlighting depictions of spirits and the supernatural as well as adaptations of ancient and classical epics, this area juxtaposes works by renowned Japanese mangaka like Shigeru Mizuki, Masashi Kishimoto, and Junji Ito with a startling variety of others: for example, influential krasue (ghost) comics by Thailand’s Tawee Witsanukorn (from roughly the early 1970s); various issues of India’s famed Amar Chitra Katha (starting in the late 1960s); many Wajang Purwa adaptations by Indonesia’s S. Ardisoma (from the late 1950s); a beautiful scroll (patachitra) painting depicting Krishna by Bengali artist Gurupada Chitrakar (2004); an illuminated page from the Bhagavad Gita (anonymously created circa 1820 to 1840); diverse depictions of the Monkey King; and various originals in voluptuous brush-inked style from Indonesia and the Philippines. Hanging overhead—a lovely touch—are paper lanterns bearing shadow puppet-like silhouettes of monsters from Filipino folklore (adapted from the book The Lost Journal of Alejandro Pardo by Tan, Hontiveros, et al., 2022).

If “Fables & Folklore” stresses commonality, the next section, “Recreating and Revising the Past,” highlights difference. Devoted to national histories and international conflicts, this area challenges any synthetic notion of shared Asianness and is, not coincidentally, the show’s most thickly documented portion. With detailed timelines starting in the mid-nineteenth century, it synopsizes generations of divisive and painful conflict, including imperialism, war, and decolonial struggles. Here the show emphasizes the potential of comics as both propaganda and witness, indoctrination and activism. Works on view span from classic manga (such as Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen) to Chinese lianhuanhua to South Korean and North Korean volumes to Cambodian Prum Vannak’s harrowing memoir of enslavement onboard a Thai fishing vessel, The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea (2013).

The exhibit’s back half gestures in many directions at once. “Stories and Storytellers” focuses on comics creators, from revered auteurs to striving independent artists, and emphasizes markets, struggles for creators’ rights, and material processes. From an unfinished page by Tezuka, to a comic book script by Mars Ravelo, there’s a lot to take in. A roughly 10 x 13-foot installation in the form of a house with glass walls recreates studios used by the late mangaka Takashi Fukutani and by the team behind the popular online manhua Queen’s Palace. Next to this is a drawing station offering visitors a chance to cartoon, a reading area including scores of manga magazines, giant wall photos of Japanese newsstands, and a defiant blurb, “Print is not dead.”

However, this all intermingles with the next section, “Asian Comics Go Multimedia,” which suggests a different sort of triumphalism. Here comic art more or less dissolves out into and informs pop culture at large. This section embraces film adaptations, anime, manga-inspired fashion from collections by Mikio Sakabe and Jenny Fax, and the Vocaloid/virtual popstar Hatsune Miku (shown in a concert video). Nearby, in a motion-controlled installation, visitors can play the role of a huge mech (reminding me of an Iron Man installation I saw in the exhibition Marvel: Universe of Super Heroes in 2018). This area marks the exhibition’s big finish, and contains varied delights: for example, a focus on Leping Zhang’s character Sanmao, production cels from Otomo’s film Akira, and the revelation that Satyajit Ray storyboarded his first film, Pather Panchali (1955), in comics form.

Yet the most striking element here, in the show’s back half, is a curtained installation devoted to “images which may not be suitable for visitors under the age of 18”—that is, an adults-only alcove focusing on “Censorship and Sensibility.” This is a potentially controversial thing to include in a show determined to wow a general audience, but I believe it works well.

One could question the logic of this move, as there is much throughout Asian Comics that caregivers might wish to hide from young children. Visitors are advised from the start that the show’s varied “artistic expressions” may include “instances of nudity and violence,” and startling images can be found most everywhere. Moreover, not everything in the curtained “adult” area is explicit; some works seem to have been sequestered simply because they are queer-themed. For example, the selections from Shimura’s Sweet Blue Flowers and Yamaji’s Love My Life, both gentle, character-based queer manga, are quite understated. That said, the curtained area does contain many shocks, from Joji Akiyama’s notorious children’s manga Asura (1970), with its themes of famine and cannibalism, to classic horrors by Umezu and Maruo, to savagely satirical pages by heta-uma icon Takashi Nemoto. Vintage Japanese shunga (erotic art) and muzan-e (“atrocity pictures”) sit beside recent examples of yaoi, yuri, and gay manga of varied explicitness. Some works shown here are elegantly erotic, for instance pages by Chikae Ide, and some are repulsive, like the leering Sleep Rape, a Thai exploitation comic. Some are droll, such as a spread from South Korean Dae-Joong Kim’s “Beautiful Memories of the City of Cocks,” and some overtly political, like Rakudenashiko’s “arrest story,” which recounts the legal persecution of her feminist work on grounds of “obscenity” (a first for any Japanese woman). Cordoning off most of these examples in a separate alcove was probably a wise move, though the differences among them struck me more than anything they had in common.

In sum, Asian Comics is a bountiful, often surprising exhibition, well worth a long visit for scholars and fans who can possibly get to it, wherever it may go in the future. Gravett has cast the net wide, gathering in various artistic traditions under the rubric “comics” and thus affirming the form’s multifaceted cultural and historical relevance (interestingly, Eike Exner’s more specific conception of comics, shared on April 6, contrasted with the show’s inclusive approach). The show’s transnational scope and synoptic ambition are likely to provoke arguments, but the bottom line is, the fields of comics studies and comic art exhibiting are richer for this project. I’ve been exhorting students, colleagues, and friend to go to this show, and I’ll keep on doing that. Go!

Book Reviews: Soseki Natsume’s Botchan: the manga edition & Akutagawa’s Rashômon and Other Stories

 

reviewed by Liz Brown

Kaori Okura and Makiko Itoh (trans). 2024. Soseki Natsume’s Botchan: the manga edition. Tuttle Publishing. US $14.99 ISBN: 9784805317822. https://www.tuttlepublishing.com/japan/soseki-natsumes-botchan-the-manga-edition-9784805317822

mkdeville and Philippe Nicioux (ills). 2024. Akutagawa’s Rashômon and Other Stories. Tuttle Publishing. US $15.99. ISBN: 9784805318393. https://www.tuttlepublishing.com/japan/akutagawas-rashomon-and-other-stories-9784805318393

Comic adaptations of classics have recently become instrumental tools in literature classrooms for their ability to create and sustain interest in traditional stories, after being used for many years as the equivalent of study guides in lieu of reading the actual book. The Manga Classics imprint was created specifically with classrooms in mind since manga remains one of the most popular comic formats among teens and young adults. Canonical works of literature have been adapted into manga formats, such as Junji Ito’s version of Frankenstein and Osamu Tezuka’s adaptation of Crime and Punishment. However, there is a gap in cultural exchange within comics publishing. Overwhelmingly, it is works from the Western canon that are being developed into comics form- manga and otherwise- leaving classic Eastern tales unadapted or unpublished in the English market. Soseki Natsume’s Botchan: the manga edition begins to fill this gap.

Botchan is one of a series of manga adaptations of the Japanese literary canon into comic format by Tuttle Publishing, including other classics such as Akutagawa’s Rashomon and Other Stories. Works in this series include adaptations by both Japanese and Western artists. They would make a worthwhile inclusion in libraries and reading lists developed for students of literature, especially Japanese literature.

Botchan is a foundational novel in Japanese literature. Written by one of Japan’s preeminent modern novelists and published in 1906, it is a bildungsroman tale of a young man’s everyday experience of family drama and workplace farce during the Meiji Era- when Japan was expanding and opening up to international influence. The eponymous character is frequently compared with Holden Caulfield of The Catcher in the Rye or Huckleberry Finn for his brash, irreverent, yet honest character- clearly flawed but still sympathetic to readers. As a major work of Japanese literature, manga lovers can see Botchan’s pervasive influence within tropes of male characters in contemporary works such as Katsuki Bakugo (My Hero Academia) and Shoyo Hinata (Haikyuu!!) And the novel’s focus on everyday life -- navigating faculty room pettiness and trying to find amusement in a rural town -- carry over into confirming the slice-of-life as a hallmark genre within manga. 

Kaori Okura’s rendition of Botchan is a restrained and faithful adaptation of the novel. She avoids opportunities to play up or exaggerate the embedded humor -- there are no Dr. Slump poop-on-a-stick gags when a character has to fish money out of a toilet and references to the red light district are handled at an arm’s length -- which makes this work an excellent choice for embedding the work in a classroom context. Her drawings depict the mild caricature of the narrator’s playful descriptions of his fellow characters, who are designated by Botchan’s nicknames for them -- “Porcupine,” “Badger,” and “Green Squash” -- rather than their given names. A primary criticism of the novel about the ambiguous relationship between Botchan and his family’s maid, Kiyo, is further complicated in this adaptation because the drawings downplay the age gap between Botchan and Kiyo. The novel establishes at least a twenty-year age difference between the characters while the Okura’s drawings soften Kiyo’s perceived age, in order to make the implications of Botchan and Kiyo’s close relationship more conventionally acceptable.

Akutagawa’s Rashômon is another comic adaptation of the Japanese literary canon, this time from a duo of French comic artists. Rashômon was originally a short story, collected among others by Ryunosuke Akutagawa in 1915. The title is better known for its film version, adapted into cinema by Akira Kurosawa in 1950. The film is not a direct translation of the short stories, melding several of Akutagawa’s narratives together and featuring Kurosawa’s signature artistic flourishes and deviations. This collection attempts to provide a bridge between the two mediums, drawing on the connections that comics have with both the written word and moving picture.

It features four of Akutagawa’s stories. Like the film, the comic unites the stories “Rashômon” and “In a Grove” around the character of Tojômaru, a bandit famously played by actor Toshiro Mifune. The other stories, “Otomi’s Virginity” and “The Martyr,” are standalone. “Otomi’s Virginity” is a tense psychodrama between two characters (and a cat) in an abandoned town. The story is depicted in such a way as to present the narrative as ripe for adaptation into film or live theater. “The Martyr” is a parable about a young monk who suffers after an accusation is flung his way, only to have a surprising twist vindicate him after it is too late. Illustrator Philippe Nicloux’s expressive brushwork manages to convey motion and force, especially in the hand-written sound effects, but without losing texture and detail, such as patterns of the shadow of leaves. Evidence of how he has studied both film and Japanese art forms come through in his work. However, it is also clear that this adaptation represents a cultural exchange that has gone back and forth across Eastern / Western boundaries multiple times, especially in “The Martyr.” Untangling the influences will require a great deal of deliberation. Because of the sexual themes in several of the stories, readers looking to use this comic in the classroom might want to direct it towards upper high school and university classes. 

A version of this review will appear in print in issue 26:1.