COMICS AND THE ORIGINS OF MANGA: A Revisionist History | By Eike Exner

Eike Exner’s Comics and the Origins of Manga is an important work that uses the development of manga to open up new and important lines of inquiry about American comics and the meeting of technological change in sound and visual recording with print forms. Describing the way that his arguments emerged from a shift in research focus, Exner writes:

… that Japanese comics had come to resemble American ones because of [sic] the popularity of translations of the latter did not explain why no Japanese author had ‘figured out’ on his own that you could make characters talk to each other on the page using speech balloons. In order to find an answer to this question, I began to look more closely at the process by which American comics had come to incorporate speech balloons. (xiii)

This led Exner to diverse sources, close formal readings, and an examination of industry and innovation across two contexts of production. Through this novel direction of analysis focusing on speech and sound in comics form, Exner outlines links between recording technology and the evolution of graphic art that extend far beyond the manga example, which emerges as a case study rather than a limiting frame. The result is an important research contribution that is both readable and layered with fascinating research excavations.

Exner describes his central argument as follows: “Rather than being the result of a single ingenious idea, sound filled ‘audio-visual’ comics turned out to be the product of a long and complex development during which cartoonists in the late nineteenth century processed the experience of seeing motion and hearing sound replicated for the first time in history” (xiii). There are already critiques of the idea that manga and its “neighbouring” medium of Japanese animation spring from an unbroken, unproblematic line going back to “traditional” artistic forms such as prints and Buddhist picture scrolls. Linking to the transnational history of sound broadens the book’s contribution and appeal beyond the origins of manga and shapes Comics and the Origins of Manga as a transnational history of perceptions of sound and media technologies in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It tracks the presence, publication, and circulation of American comics and their influence in Japan through the particular lens of the representation of speech and sounds; the result is an important work that takes the field in a new direction.

Comics and the Origins of Manga begins with a series of questions demonstrating the lack of a clear consensus on manga’s origins before looking at the varied uses of “manga” as a descriptor over time. From its early use as a verb (to draw or sketch) to famed “Great Wave” artist Hokusai’s use of manga to describe his non-narrative sketches, to myriad modern uses. Exner then provides a historical sketch of the first sequential art published in Japanese newspapers, caricature art, Charles Wingman’s Japan Punch, and related developments. He historicizes the near ravenous desire for comics content in Japan, making the book a strong introduction to the medium’s history for both research and teaching purposes.

The body chapters develop the book’s key theme: the evolution of comics as an audio-visual medium. Here Exner traces the development of “talking manga,” which moved away from the sequential vignettes accompanied by explanatory text popular in the first decades of the twentieth century to a form more easily recognizable as “story manga.” This took place at the same time as the appearance of large numbers of American comic strips in Japanese translation. Importantly, Exner makes sure not to make this a simple story of Western influence on a Japan that was perpetually playing catchup. For example, he writes, “The influence of Japanese ukiyo-e prints on George McManus, whose Bringing Up Father in turn became the most influential and longest-running graphic narrative exemplifies the complexity of trans-national cultural influence” (10). Amid this balanced accounting of multi-directional influence, Exner provides a detailed history of the licensing and circulation of popular American titles including McManus’ work, E. C. Segar’s Popeye comics, and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat,and the specifics of the development of what became a transnational audio-visual representational norm using speech balloons and other devices, through sources overlooked in existing accounts.

As the book’s arguments develop, Exner broadens the granular account of the circulation of different titles into a discussion of how “Japan’s importation of Euro-American technology thus went hand in hand with its importation of Euro-American culture, including in the field of visual arts and visual culture” (6). While this statement is correct in a general sense, more on the particular business mechanisms through which American comics were imported and more industry history, or at least engagement with the limits of surviving sources, would trouble the sense of Japan as a singular, coherent cultural actor. For example, while the position of manga in Japanese newspapers is covered in detail, the book gives comparatively little sense of the place of newspapers in Japanese society as objects, commodities, and products of industrial processes. Exner’s observations about the newspaper and advertising industries, such as a discussion which measures the popularity of Bringing Up Father in Japan based on the prevalence of ads featuring the characters, could use more industry context: What did “normal” ads look like? How were these ads positioned compared with cartoon mascots like Rose O’Neill’s Kewpie (which to this day still defines a Japanese food brand), as well as characters of Japanese origin? While there are some areas such as these that could use more context or development, Exner’s Comics and the Origins of Manga is a scholarly must read for audiences interested in the history of manga, but also American comics, comics as a global medium, scholars working on media history, and historians of sound and the senses.

Matthew Penney

Concordia University, Montreal