Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics

Eike Exner’s Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History (Rutgers University Press, 2021) is quite possibly the best nonfiction work on comics that I have encountered. At once a display of the concrete impact of technological developments on art history and an in-depth view of international cross-pollination in early comics culture, it is a focused, eloquent text whose arguments are grounded and material enough to be convincing.

With his second book, the recent Yale University Press-issued Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics, Exner moves from a specific point in time — the transition from picture stories with extradiegetic narration to proper "comics" through the introduction of transdiegetic effects — to a loftier challenge, tracking Japanese comics from the beginnings described in the previous book into almost the present day.

In style and approach, Exner is an academic through and through. He is cautious, considered; among his more laudable habits is the repeated emphasis on not who “invented” a certain style or approach (a credit that’s largely unverifiable) but on who “popularized” it, even going so far as to state earlier instances of said style that simply did not catch on as much. (Though this may seem a minor point to praise, I can think of at least one recent effort of historiography that overplayed its hand by offering up ascriptions that are alluring simply because they are impossible to verify.) More broadly speaking, he is forever cognizant of the scope of his endeavor, never lingering for too long on a specific cartoonist or period to keep from shifting the center of importance; even when giving Tezuka his place of honor, Exner does so critically, casting doubt upon certain claims of the cartoonist’s and stressing not only his success and influence but also his more personal zealousness and jealousy at the success and influence of others, so as to remind the reader that no cartoonist or publication exists independent of their immediate surroundings.

Yet, for all the academic diligence, it is that same scope that ultimately defeats the author. Perhaps inevitably, at roughly 220 pages covering over a century, topics are broached but often discarded or not analyzed to a compelling extent. This is, in part, owing to that same principle of quantifiability reigning supreme — though Exner’s detailing of manga as a market force is extensive, backed up with an impressive amount of sales statistics, print runs, and what have you, one does get the occasional sense that he finds the art history aspect more difficult to discuss.

For example, around the time of the industry-wide transition from a monthly publishing schedule to a weekly one, he describes the emergence of the writer-artist collaborative dynamic, which he frames chiefly as a productivity mechanism, so that the artist, who in this dynamic is still regarded as the key author (note the phrasing on p. 133: “Gōseki Kojima’s […] Lone Wolf and Cub, written by Kazuo Koike”), may focus on drawing the serial. Though this is, of course, a shift with radical implications for any publication’s creative politics (the obvious comparison is the American-comics notion of writer-as-auteur, though the book avoids international comparisons when those aren’t directly pertinent), Exner fails to sufficiently elaborate on the obvious questions of status (draw versus dispensability; acknowledgment and compensation), presumably because they venture too deeply into broader themes of labor politics. A similar problem arises in the context of the studio/assistant system, which is discussed in largely dry and cursory terms.

The persistent focus on mainstream success is similarly telling. Exner’s survey of gekiga, for example, focuses on more sprawling, action-driven works, such as Shirato’s Legend of Kamui or Saitō’s Golgo 13 (leaving behind both the more ruminative, "real world" likes of Tatsumi or the Tsuge brothers and the more avant-garde, expansive likes of Sasaki Maki); later, the only noteworthy mention of the alternative and self-published spheres comes in the context of the cartoonists who started out in these circles only to "strike it big" in the mainstream, such as Rumiko Takahashi. The overall thesis appears to be one of subsumption, as either the cartoonists themselves or their stylistic influence filter from the outskirts into the mainstream; the inadvertent implication is shockingly dismissive, failing to engage with a deeper ideology of independent art outside the prism of commerce.

In his discussion of what he terms the “(re-)internationalization” of manga in the 1970s, too, Exner leaves something to be desired, as can be seen in Exner’s description of the rise of Katsuhiro Ōtomo. To explain the novelty of Ōtomo’s style, Exner must explain Moebius, and in order to do that he must offer a truncated history of Francophone comics, skipping from Hergé in the late ‘20s directly to the frustration with the stagnancy and lack of adult material which led to the establishment of Métal Hurlant in the ‘70s, with nothing in between, barring the vague acceptance and proliferation of comics in France. This description is, in itself, a bit strange (to say nothing of those forty intervening years that go utterly without description, Exner credits the invention of Hergé’s ligne claire to the influence of George McManus, even though Herge’s earlier McManus-influenced comics, like Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, were substantially looser and coarser than the common image of the "clear line"), but what leaps out readily is the fact that Ōtomo’s first encounter with Moebius’ art, in an issue of the Japanese edition of the magazine Starlog, is treated as a matter of fact. We know that, after the initial influence of American comics on early-20th-century manga, there was a marked decline in the translation of non-Japanese comics, and the manga industry became largely self-sufficient in its creation, partly due to the rising nationalism and isolationism in Japan during the 1930s and ‘40s, but there is little mention of foreign comics translated into Japanese in the ensuing decades. The sudden appearance of Moebius — and, for that matter, of Starlog, being a non-comics-centric venue — suddenly raises questions of cultural cross-pollination that Exner himself does not address.

Arguably, all of the problems I have mentioned are, in fact, the same problem, which is Exner’s failure to position manga within the context of its broader world. See, too, for that matter, the relative dearth of Japanese cultural and political discussion; where historical developments are mentioned, it is only because they impact the manga industry directly (in the prohibition that certain editors who promoted Japanese nationalism during WWII work in the field during the American occupation, for instance, or in the movements to ban books viewed as unfit for children). The result is the impression of an industry that, after the initial external push, exists largely independent of any and all surrounding conditions, as all manga looks inward into its own industry, its own art-form, its own peers. It is a view that is not "focused" so much as "limited."

If my criticisms err on the side of over-specificity, it is only because I have seen what Exner is capable of within that specificity. If Comics and the Origins of Manga is a successful attempt to exhaust a small neighborhood, Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics is an attempt to map out an entire city by focusing only on one main street. I do believe — sincerely, in no backhanded way — that Eike Exner is an able, competent historiographer. But it is in this sort of project that competence shows its limitations.

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