MANGA

Simultaneously a record of comics art in Japan and an account of its trailblazing publishing industry, Exner’s book traces the initial spark of Japanese cartooning back to the 1890s, when newspapers began syndicating (and at times outright copying) American-made cartoons. Artists soon began their own homespun stories like Yutaka Aso’s Easygoing Daddy and Suiho Tagawa’s Norakuro, and competing magazines vied for their publishing rights. These pre–World War II years proved that comics were a lucrative pursuit, and publishers created omnibus collections that influenced a new generation of creators after the war. Advancements in the entertainment industry directly affected manga’s evolution. Exner (Comics and the Origins of Manga, 2021) details the influence of animation on creators like Astro Boy’s Osamu Tezuka, as well as international cinema’s effect on ’60s- and ’70s-era “gekiga” manga for adults. Each evolution saw publishers pivoting to bottle the lightning: Monthly magazines split into parallel publications to separately target both boys and girls, and nimble distribution led to books being available in toy stores and, for a time, even as rentals. Exner follows these developments through manga’s break into the U.S. industry in the ’90s and ends on the game-changing precipice of today’s trends in digital publication. Despite its far-reaching scope, Manga’s discussion of form and technique is limited: Exner returns to the abstruse term “transdiegetic” to describe comics “in light of their function of translating certain phenomena in the diegesis (story world), such as motion, sound, and pain, into a different form to make them perceptible to the reader.” This description, repeated throughout the volume, feels like a tiring effort to prepare the reader for a classroom quiz. Despite a narrow technical approach, Exner remains a passionate historian and has crafted a record that finely pinpoints major cultural touchstones while incorporating lesser-known titles that will thrill more seasoned readers.