Simultaneously a record of comics art in Japan and an account of its trailblazing publishing industry, Exner\u2019s 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\u2019s Easygoing Daddy and Suiho Tagawa\u2019s Norakuro, and competing magazines vied for their publishing rights. These pre\u2013World 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\u2019s evolution. Exner (Comics and the Origins of Manga, 2021) details the influence of animation on creators like Astro Boy\u2019s Osamu Tezuka, as well as international cinema\u2019s effect on \u201960s- and \u201970s-era \u201cgekiga\u201d 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\u2019s break into the U.S. industry in the \u201990s and ends on the game-changing precipice of today\u2019s trends in digital publication. Despite its far-reaching scope, Manga\u2019s discussion of form and technique is limited: Exner returns to the abstruse term \u201ctransdiegetic\u201d to describe comics \u201cin 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.\u201d 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.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Simultaneously a record of comics art in Japan and an account of its trailblazing publishing industry, Exner\u2019s 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\u2019s Easygoing Daddy and Suiho Tagawa\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3746,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3745"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}