Manga Lecture #1

I suppose that I should examine a little of the basics of manga, as a lot of people don’t have a proper understanding of what It means and what it represents. I give a lecture on this all the time, for both conventions and for classrooms, so I’ll be expanding on this. This will be the first of a series of posts on this subject, since the entire lecture can cover an hour and a half.

A word of warning though. Many of the manga I will be mentioning and recommending are mature in nature. These will be marked with an *.

But let’s jump right into it.

So what is manga, exactly? Manga, for all of you who don’t know, is a form of comics originating from Japan. The characters, 漫画, are literally translated as “whimsical pictures.” But though they originated from Japan, this style has spread around the world, and now comics produced in the manga style are found worldwide, with concentrations in Eastern Asia, and more and more frequently, the United States.

The origin of this form is the Second World War. While the origin of the style has roots in ancient Japan, it first blossomed after the end of Japan’s surrender. After the war, the country had been thrown into a depression. With the lack of money, Japan had to sacrifice a great deal so that life could go on. Entertainment was sacrificed in order to feed families.

But entertainment is necessary in a depression, to allow the population an escape for a while from the hardships of life. For this reason, a four panel comic, read right to left, and top to bottom, was created. It was dubbed manga, and it was a comic centered around the four panel joke. Panel #1: Introduction, Panel #2 : Set Up, Panel #3: Set Up, and Panel #4: Punchline. This continued for a while, but soon stagnated, (much like how the print comics in the Sunday newspapers stagnated).

It was not until a certain Artist came along that this model was challenged. Osamu Tezuka, nicknamed the Father of Manga, did not create manga, but changed the model that manga used. Tezuka realized that comics were not just a small spot to tell jokes, but could be used in a wider context, to tell a larger story. Many of the techniques still seen today were first thought of by this man.

He created what is known as dynamic storytelling, a style where the panels are not just flat squares, but slashed and angled to give meaning to the movement in the panel. In other words, if someone was falling, the panel might be angled downward, or if someone was driving, the panel might be stretched horizontally.

There are many other authors that contributed to this style, but that’s a post for another time.