Old and Rental Manga

As I said, I have been planning to do articles on various topics for a long time now.  I decided to do this one first since I read A Drifting Life about a month ago, and that made me curious enough to purchase the two later books I’m going to talk about.

Basically, I’ve got three books here published between 1947 and 1956 that I thought I might show off a bit.  I thought they were interesting, and I don’t have much to say about them aside from showing the images, so be warned that the following will be very image intensive.  Also be warned that I don’t have a scanner, so the images will be blurry and dark.  I apologize.  I’m editing them now, and I’m kind of embarrassed, but I still want to write the article… so bear with me.

And, as always, I hate posting images, but I couldn’t help myself when it came to these books.  If anyone has any objections, I will take them down, just say the word.

The first book I’m going to talk about today is New Treasure Island, which a lot of you probably know as the first major work by Osamu Tezuka (I believe he had one before this called Ma-chan’s Diary, so it’s not quite the first).  It came out in 1947, so WWII had been over for a couple years when this hit the stands.  Japan’s economy was still crippled, however, and there wasn’t a lot of money to spend on… anything, like food and shelter, let alone books.  This book sold incredibly well anyway.  It must be some book.  My first impression of it was this reaction page from Fujiko Fujio’s (Doraemon’s creators) biography, which is in Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics.

They’re talking about how they borrowed the book without permission and it opens with a shocking, flowing scene which was revolutionary at the time.  Let’s take a look at the first passage.

Exciting stuff, no?  It’s cool, in its way, but there would be no way to publish this in English that would not make me feel ripped off for buying it.  There are format issues, as you can see here (every page is like that, with a single row of vertical panels and gray bars in the margins).  I have no idea what the size of the original book was, but it doesn’t seem to match with current formats.  There’s the fact that there are a good number of wordless sequences like this one.  And it’s extremely, EXTREMELY primitive.  It’s cool to look at, sure, but we already have some series in English that came out a little after this one, the “Sci-Fi Trilogy” published by Dark Horse that consists of Lost World, Next World, and Metropolis.  Of those three, Lost World is the oldest and bears the closest resemblance to New Treasure Island.  Lost World also has format issues, is quite primitive art-wise, and additionally suffers from being the most goddamn insane, incoherent book I’ve ever read in my life.  It’s totally awesome, in its way, and if you’re interested in this, you should pick it up, but I don’t think it’s an enjoyable read.  Neither is Metropolis, really, but Nextworld is quite good considering the time period.

Actually, I like the comparison between what I have and the book that the Fujiko Fujio duo is looking at.  They start differently.  I remember reading that Tezuka was famous for revising his comics pretty frequently, so we may just be seeing an example of that.  Or, looking at that, my edition may have removed “chapter breaks,” which is really unfortunate since it seems a page of the actual manga goes along with them.  I can’t remember if there were chapter breaks in the Sci-Fi trilogy, but they were definitely in the second book I’m going to talk about.  EDIT: Apparently there’s a bit of controversy surrounding this book.  See http://tezukainenglish.com/?q=node/67 for details, but this edition is apparently a later reconstruction of the book by Tezuka.  What an excellent article.  Now I want to see the other edition of the book to see how different they are.

The most interesting thing about this book, especially after reading A Drifting Life, is its emphasis on action.  While the art style and story are quite antiquated, Tatsumi talks in his book about how manga in the 50s was all about showing action, and he himself tried to adapt cinematic techniques to the comic page.  While WWII and pre-WWII era superhero comics (or Disney comics, for that matter) had developed art and story beyond this level, those can be very hard to read because even those stories have not aged well, and they are only a couple levels removed from reading a book.  The art merely goes along with the narration in the panel, and is fairly static even during action scenes.  We didn’t have anything like that sequence above in America for a number of years.  Hell, it’s still pretty cool to this day, but again, very primitive.

Well, I may not be 100% telling the truth that the storytelling was a bit further along.  I’ve read some pretty hilariously insane Captain Marvel comics.  The early attempts were unintentional, but the later ones that were trying to be funny are still a lot funnier today than they ever were when they came out.

Anyway, back to New Treasure Island.  We also have to bear in mind the warnings at the beginning of nearly every volume of Tezuka manga published in English (apparently put in at the request of the Tezuka estate).

To be 100% fair, this type of thing existed in American comics at this time as well (superhero comics were actually a great deal more offensive than this during WWII).  As the warnings at the beginning of the books say, it wasn’t Tezuka’s intention to be insensitive, and he wouldn’t be drawing this way today, it’s just a product of the times.

If you’re still interested in New Treasure Island, there’s no reason in the world not to buy the Japanese edition of it.  Mine had a helpful English summary of the entire book in the front.  There’s not a lot of text in the comic itself, and after reading the summary, the entire story makes sense, more or less, or at least as much sense as a relatively sane Tezuka story can make.  We still get a few oddities mixed in with the fairly straightforward Treasure Island-type plot, like our friendly Tarzan man:

For some reason, he’s rendered more realistically than any other person in the book.

There are a few really nice touches that stand out to this day.

I took a picture of this four times and this was the best one.  Anyway, here Pete imagines the animal park that the island could be turned into.

I always like this gag.  Here, the Pirate Captain is about to be eaten by lions.

This gag isn’t commented on, which makes it even better.  I don’t know how well it comes across here, but I love the face the tree is making in that second-to-last panel.

Because I can’t give up an opportunity to talk about Tezuka’s Star System, this book features his character Kenichi.  You can see him in this book in the top illustration, then below that is Kenichi 30 years later in Black Jack.  The curl of hair and the way his eyes are drawn give him away.  Oddly enough, Kenichi is called Pete in this story, which is also the name of Walt Disney’s oldest character.  Kenichi is one of Tezuka’s oldest characters (obviously), but there are a few more people in this book that reappear later.  The mustache captain that you see at the end of the first sequence is a man who I believe is named Makeru Butamo.  He reappears infrequently and tends to be kind of a jerk, but isn’t so much in this story.  We even get a very early appearance from Lamp, sans the candle notch at the back of his head.

Lamp plays a bad guy here, which is pretty consistent with most of his appearances.  He’s a spy that calls the pirate captain in after he realizes Pete has a treasure map.  Lamp, another curly-haired villain named Hamegg, and the portly man with the mustache named Shunsaku Ban are the three characters that seem to appear the most in Tezuka’s stories.  Lamp is in this, one of Tezuka’s first series, and reappears again and again for forty years all the way through Adolf, one of Tezuka’s last series.

But yes.  Let’s move on to a different book now.

This is a book called “Forest Children,” published in 1955.  It’s a facsimile edition of a rental manga, so everything about it is just how it appeared back in the day, so to speak.  It’s a small jacketed hardcover book with a cover price of 100 yen.

It’s about the same size as a regular manga volume, which surprised me after the format disparities in New Treasure Island.  It’s a little thinner since it’s only 100 pages long.

The book has these absolutely stunning illustrations on the back cover and inside covers, respectively.

It’s basically a kind of weird, nutty retelling of Hansel and Gretel.  The beginning of the book is in full color.

I adore the color choices.  The bright watercolors are unlike anything you would expect, and make all of this quite vibrant.  The character designs are pretty antiquated, but I found myself looking at the color more than the art itself.  I nearly missed this.

I like it.

Here we get a full-page illustration.  I don’t have anything to say that will inform this any more than just looking at it.  It’s absolutely lovely.

I didn’t choose this book at random, though, nor did I choose it simply because it was a facsimile of a rental manga.  It’s actually the debut work of one of my favorite artists.  Because I’m entirely uninformed on the subject, I’m going to say he’s a pioneer of shoujo manga.  He drew some very early shoujo in the late 50s and early 60s.  His website claims that he was the first to draw a romantic comedy manga.  The oldest volume of shoujo manga published in English is one of his books*.

The color randomly stops at page 17, and we are treated to a multitude of ink colors that change at random intervals throughout the rest of the book, akin to a modern manga magazine.

Unfortunately, the weird character designs and bizarre, rough art style are much more noticeable without the color.

The artist was 18 when he drew this, and prior to being published professionally, he had apparently been drawing manga since the age of 10.  I’m pretty sure that this rough gag style was pretty standard in manga at the time, judging by some of the work that we see examples of in A Drifting Life.  As much as I hate bad drawings (which I’m going to go ahead and call the animals here), there’s still a lot to like about this art.  His depictions of nature are quite lovely.

The children are drawn kind of… well, poorly too.  But it’s hard to deny the charm of what’s going on, especially when a frogman shows up to lead them away.  And to be completely fair, I see shades of the children that appear in his later work in these two as far as proportions and whatnot go, and I can’t fault his later depictions of children.

Here’s the evil Hansel and Gretel witch.  She’s evil enough to beat up that beaverman-looking thing there.

For the record, this artist is one of the only people aside from Tezuka that causes me to yank my hair out in frustration while I read his stories and ponder what kind of person thinks of these disturbing things.  Not so much in this story (though there is a lot of weirdness here), but definitely in his later work.

They encounter the witch by biting her nose, thinking it’s delicious candy.

And that’s about all there is to see in this book.  For the most part, the art is this extremely rough, cartoony style with touches of brilliance.  Aside from the lovely color work, we also get the occasional abstract panel to enjoy.  These don’t photograph that well, but here’s an example anyway.

Somehow, I totally missed any of the ink changes.  Oh well.  We’ll see some in the next book.

Same artist, from 1956.  Still a rental manga with the same dimensions as the first, except this one is about 130 pages.  Soko no Naimachi is the title, I believe, though I had a lot of trouble with this one.  My Japanese is terrible, and I got bored trying to labor through the story, so I’m not clear on what’s going on.  This is a detective story starring Misaki Itirou, a character who would go on to star in a few other books by this author, but didn’t seem to make it out of the 50s.

The freaky way that value and shading is done on the relatively flat character design and illustration in general on that cover has always, always bothered me.  There’s also something fascinating about it too, since it looks so wrong, but apparently it was not an uncommon style, since again, I noticed the treatment on a lot of the manga in A Drifting Life.

The intro is in color again, though a detective story doesn’t lend itself to color as well as the Hansel and Gretel book above.  There’s still something to like mixed in, though.

Despite the fact that this is a relatively straight-faced detective story, the art has a cartoony quality that I feel is loads better than the other story, which lent itself more to the style.

There’s lots of punching, kicking, shooting, and fighting in general in this book.  I thought of Tatsumi while perusing it, because it seems to be the epitome of the hard-boiled gekiga style that he was describing from this period in A Drifting Life.  The cartooniness of the art works against that, but that’s a dichotomy that this artist would embrace in later years.

I kind of liked that this guy from the cover kept reappearing throughout the book.  Here’s a good example of one of the ink changes I was talking about, too.

This book ends in style.  I love this panel.

Now, there is a trace of who the artist is mixed in somewhere among those images.  Aside from that, unless you were already familiar with these two books, I’d like to think it would be impossible to guess.  But let me go about the reveal slowly.  Let’s take a look at the artist as a young man, a photo included with these books.

It was blurry in the original, and I can’t tell what he’s holding there, either.  Does he look familiar?  No?  Well, he does look much different today.  In fact, he’s the only artist I would recognize if I saw him walking down the street.

Let’s take a look at the single solitary panel in these two books that hints at his later style.  If you blink you’ll miss it in the book, but it’s the only thing in all of it that bears any resemblance at all to his famous later work.

Any guesses?  Well, let’s look at some of his other work from ten or fifteen years down the line.

That’s right, KAZUO UMEZU DREW THAT FRIENDS OF THE FOREST CRAP UP THERE.  I love that man so, so much.  I’d been wanting to see these books for a few years, but reading A Drifting Life put me over the edge and I bought them.  I’m so glad I did, because the massive, massive difference in art style amuses me greatly.

The two books here came in a set, part of a series showcasing his early work in rental manga.  Some of his early shoujo stories are among them.  For the curious, Reptilia really is the oldest volume of shoujo manga published in English*.   It ran in none other than Shoujo Friend in 1966.

*And to clarify, because I do not want to admit Reptilia is not the oldest volume of shoujo manga published in English, you can get a snippet of Princess Knight in Shoujo Beat, which is around 10 years older than Reptilia.  For the true nerd (hint: I am buying these right now), you can find a 2-volume bilingual version of Princess Knight published by Kodansha, but this was not distributed in America and is intended more as an aid for learning English, I think.  The final volume of Phoenix is also an eary shoujo romance draft of the series, which is bizarre and surreal when compared to the rest of Phoenix, and also 5-10 years older than Reptilia.  Tezuka’s older work beat Reptilia in terms of age, but only on technicalities, dammit!  My vote stays with Reptilia.