I almost didn’t read Frederik L. Schodt’s Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics. I’ve been reading a lot of manga lately, so a history of the subject sounded appealing. Had it not been for the Covid-19 pandemic, however, it might have been a near miss.

You see, I’d checked the book out of the public library, but the dense text and its textbook-like format, with its multiple sidebars and explanatory notes, put me off. As its due date approached, I still hadn’t read more than a few pages and I was about to return it. That’s when San Francisco issued its “stay at home” order for the pandemic and the entire library system shut down, book deposit boxes and all. As a result, Schodt’s book was mine for the duration, so I decided to put on my thinking cap and give it a whirl.

I’m glad I did. Manga! Manga! has maintained its reputation as the definitive English-language work on the subject, and despite being somewhat dated – it was the first such work ever written – it deserves its accolades.

Bringing manga across the Pacific

Kodansha International first published Manga! Manga! in hardcover in 1983. It was reprinted in paperback in 1986, and then in a revised edition with additional material in 1997. And while a lot has happened in the world of manga since 1997, Schodt’s book still serves as an intelligent introduction to the subject for Western audiences who haven’t quite got a handle on what manga is and how it differs from other forms of comics worldwide.

Schodt devotes a large portion of the book to the history of manga. He traces its origins back to early scrolls and woodcuts that used sequential illustration to tell stories, in much the same way that works such as the Bayeux Tapestry are often considered major influences on the early Western cartooning tradition. He further explains how the influence of Western cartoonists helped crystallize the form of modern manga, by suggesting such elements as speech balloons and serialized narratives.

As expected, Schodt discusses the influence of early Japanese masters, particularly Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka was still alive when Manga! Manga! was first published, and although he would only live for a few more years, his mind-boggling output would top 150,000 pages at the time of his death. His most popular works, Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion (the latter being the inspiration for Disney’s The Lion King) represent just a small portion of his works. His contributions to the form are innumerable, and even today he is recognized with such nicknames as “the Father of Manga” and even “the God of Manga.”

Manga vs. comics

That is all well and good, but this book is meant as a primer for Western readers, so it’s appropriate that Schodt pays special attention to those aspects of manga that Westerners might find unusual or hard to understand. For example, he explains how American censors in postwar Japan deemed samurai stories and other classical Japanese subjects “too warlike,” forcing manga creators to channel their explorations of traditional Japanese values into genres such as science fiction, sports, car racing, martial arts, or organized crime (yakuza).

Manga for girls, known as shojo manga, are not ignored. In particular, their tendency to include homosexual themes – both male and female – is explored, as is the phenomenon of the “Beautiful Boy,” a visual trope which may have been inspired by fashion illustration.

There are also those manga published for older male readers. Few Western readers will understand the appeal of “salaryman” manga, which chronicle the day-to-day drudgery of the Japanese office worker, and yet many such serials have spanned years. Other older readers may get lost in stories about famous gamblers and their travails playing mah jongg, another genre that will be mostly lost on non-Japanese.

And then, of course, there is hentai, the genre of erotic manga which, under the influence of uniquely Japanese mores and censorship, has given rise to not just what seems to be a disturbing fascination with nonconsensual sex, but also the bizarre subgenre lovingly Christened by Western spectators as “tentacle rape porn.” Far from a fringe phenomenon, it’s not uncommon to see manga bookstores devote as much as a third of their shelf space to such material.

Inside the manga mill

More interesting to me, however, is the business of manga in Japan. Schodt discusses this in detail, beginning with the explosion in manga’s popularity fueled by the emergence of “pay libraries” in the postwar era, on through the weekly magazine serialization model that continues to this day.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Schodt’s description of the manga business is that it’s a true industry, designed to produce new product at as fast a clip as the market will bear. The result for manga creators is often a life of almost backbreaking labor. Aiming for the standard set by Tezuka, the most successful creators are judged by the volume of their output. The more often they are published, the more they are recognized by fans, and the more they reap the financial rewards; but as a result, they are often virtually chained to their drawing boards.

Not that they are all alone in their endeavors. Many manga creators employ assistants to aid with things like research and drawing backgrounds. Tezuka himself was known to employ as many as ten assistants toward the end of his career. And Schodt describes editors as being ubiquitous in the manga business, handling everything from approving story ideas, characters, and plot points, to tracking creators down after a night of drinking and dragging them out of bed, so they can resume drawing.

All of this might sound like a real drag to those with an artistic temperament. And yet, as compared to mainstream Western comics, which often operate on an “assembly line” model, manga remains a medium where lone creators can really call the shots and produce work that they control throughout the entire production cycle, from script to page. This has always been the case for manga, where few creators have any formal training, but it’s an idea that only recently has begun to take hold in Western comics.

Markets on both sides of the ocean

How ironic, then, that many manga creators dream of breaking into the Western market. The Japanese market is all but saturated, and few creators can hope to become a breakout success, given the tight control exerted by domestic publishers. According to Schodt, many creators therefore look to the United States and beyond as new opportunities.

We’ve seen this happen, to some extent. The years since Manga! Manga! Was published have seen an explosion of interest in manga in the West, both in terms of its influence on Western creators and in raw book sales. Large book chains such as Barnes and Noble and especially Borders (now defunct) have proven fertile markets for translated manga collections, particularly among young readers.

But it’s not so much manga itself but anime – manga’s animation companion – that has fueled Western interest in Japanese pop culture. It’s not uncommon today to see anime programs take regular slots on American cable TV. At the same time, anime has boosted manga’s profitability in Japan. The most popular manga are all but guaranteed to receive anime adaptations, along with the corresponding toys, stickers, candies, and other merchandising of every conceivable kind.

I’m tempted to say that in the decades since Schodt wrote Manga! Manga!, the commercialization of manga has reached its apex. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem likely. Even in an era that has given birth to Gundam Build Fighters and its sequels – anime that focus not on fantasy space battles, but on kids who make such battles come to life literally by building plastic robot model kits sold by Bandai – there’s probably still room to squeeze plenty of yen out of manga franchises, in much the same way in which Hollywood has capitalized on Western comic books in recent years.

A manga primer for the ages

Still, truly original and creative manga isn’t going away, and I plan to seek out more of it in the coming years – even if the commercialization mega-machine has already sunk its claws into it. Schodt closes out Manga! Manga! with samples of manga from various genres, and while they are a bit dated, they are still representative. I was surprised to find I particularly liked The Rose of Versailles, a shojo manga (for girls) featuring a fictionalized version of the historical Marie Antoinette.

In all, I thoroughly enjoyed Manga! Manga!, and I’m glad it’s still available. (As far as I can tell, it was last reprinted in 2013.) Its format can be off-putting, and readers who are only familiar with products of the modern anime era may not immediately find much that they recognize. Still, it’s an admirable study of the massive manga phenomenon and how it arrived at where it is today, if only through a historical lens. For folks who are interested in not just the enjoyment of comics, but how they are produced and their origins worldwide, I give it my highest recommendation.