An Essay: The Ages of Fan
[Written for and originally posted on Comicsnob.com]
A series of columns (six installments, and counting) where we look at just how American anime & manga fandom developed — to the point where today we use the phrase otaku, we know what it means, we know it’s not complimentary, and we call ourselves otaku anyway.
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The Ages of Fan I -- that guy Tezuka
Of course, those of the modern generation of fans bear little resemblance to myself (broke, alcoholic, 30 y.o. otaku fanboy loser... hm. actually, I think I'll put that on a t-shirt) just as the fans of my ilk (which we'll likely refer to as the Robotech generation in some future post; I was 11 during Robotech's first run) bear little resemblance to our forebears, the the brave pioneers who got hooked on Astro Boy, or Speed Racer, or Battle of the Planets, or Star Blazers, or... well I suppose this is why we are inaugurating this mess as an ongoing feature here on 5by8.
But as our first column on this topic we won't yet be looking at these American shores, but rather across the Pacific and back through time, past even Astro Boy, to the dark and dismal days right after the giant buzzkill known as World War II (the obvious nadir of Japan-US relations, except it wasn't... odd that) and more importantly back to the dark ages before manga. Back to 1947.
Manga, as a word, predates 1947 by at at least 150 years. Translation is always a tricky science, but the definition I most often see for manga, particularly in regard to the earliest efforts, is "whimsical pictures" ...or dare I say, [*cough*] "comics," if one cares to scratch even a millimeter into the entymology of that equivalent English term.
However, 1947 is the date I cite as the origin of manga because of that guy Tezuka and his book Shin Takarajima, most often translated as "New Treasure Island".
Here's why:
New Treasure Island was a cheap one-off targeted to kids, sold not through bookstores, but rather through toy stores. It was an akahon (a "red book," so named from the garish red ink used on the covers) printed on cheap recycled newsprint rather than the more expensive rice paper used for the "real" comics of the day.
Here's the thing: as a cheap one-off, it was free from a lot of editorial oversight, so Tezuka could tell the story he wanted. (Then as now, some publishers and editors seem certain that they know better than anyone else what is salable.) Additionally, at roughly 200 pages, it offered the kids some real value for thier lunch money. (also as opposed to the other manga of the day). And even though it was cheaply printed, it was expertly done.
- Are there other Japanese comics that predate Tezuka? Yes.
- Are there manga--that is, extended storylines-- that predate Tezuka? Yes.
- Were there other artists with cinematic sensibilities making comics in Japan, even as far back as when Osamu was a kid? Well, yeah, actually there were.
Did any of those turkeys sell a million copies?
Now ya see, this is were the deification and installation of Tezuka at the head of the manga-ka pantheon really begins to get some traction. New Treasure Island sold 400,000 copies during it's first print run, and I've seen uncorroborated but plausible sources that indicate that they sold twice that many in subsequent reprints. (over 60 years, in reprints... I'd bet it's sold two million, easy)
Let me backtrack a half step, and go back to "Cinematic sensibilties".
Osamu Tezuka was a movie fan going way back; (if internet sources are to be believed) due to a connection of his father's, he used to watch movie reels all the time, including Disney and Fleischer Cartoons. Whatever the provenance, it's hard to argue with the printed record: Tezuka's work certainly reflects a debt both to the cinematic arts and to western-style animation of the 30s and 40s. We can note the use of a "camera" perspective; with pans and close-ups, panels unfolding in "slo-mo", and a rather definite break with the proscenium arch utilized in so many comics up to this point.
What else can we blame on Tezuka?
Big Eyes. Yep, that was him. Though as I noted in 5by8 #1, he borrowed that from American cartoons, so it's always interesting to hear Americans complain about manga, but not Mickey.
There's gender-swapping characters, from Metropolis (1949). Someone else may have thought of it, but I think this is the first manga instance in print.
In 1950, there was Jungle Taitei (aka Kimba) -- which was the first long-running serial. Today most of what we call manga are serialized in chapters, running for months or years.
In 1954, Princess Knight, the first Shoujo manga--from Tezamu, and presumably ever (at least according to wiki)--premeired.
And shonen (or seinen) comics were of course developing: "the appearance in 1959 of the two weekly children's manga magazines, Shonen Magazine and Shonen Sunday, served to firmly establish the sort of manga culture we see today." Just as most manga are serialized--anthology magazines like these are where they're first printed.
In the meantime, we should note the women comickers of the magnificent 24s (from the 24th year of the Showa Era, alternately known in English as the fabulous 49ers) were just starting to grow up and read comics; as well as the genesis of the first "manga" generation, those lucky fanboys born in 1950. I'm sure we'll touch on both of these later.
All this is about Japanese comics and fans, though: '63 is the date of note for American audiences, and Astro Boy on American TV is where we'll pick up the column next week.
Further reading and references:
[first up: you really should read the comments to the original Comicsnob.com post, where my readers expose me as a lazy researcher and school me on some finer points of early manga.]
Wiki: Manga
Wiki: Shoujo
Matt Thorn -- Mangagaku: A History of Manga
Web Japan: Manga
Locus: Manga
Paul Gravett: Manga
Global License: Manga
Kyoto Manga Museum
wagging the dog
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(You know, in one of these columns I suppose we'll get to that word, otaku, where it comes from, what it means, and the rise of that bastard pseudolanguage Fan Japanese... but not today. Dateline Japan, 1963...)
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the Ages of Fan II -- 1963, Tezuka again, and landing on foreign shores
So, by the 60's the Manga idustry was humming along nicely. Of course, someone who isn't a wikipedia editor would argue that it always was doing just fine, thanks, but with the contributions of that guy Tezuka (ref. last weeks column, and comments) manga had shifted from a trifle aimed just at the kids market to a new art medium and commercial product with a growing number of fans of all ages.
At some point when I'm coming back to the manga industry in Japan, we'll take a look at the gekiga genre, and seinan and josei comics and the transformation of shoujo (girls) comics when they started being drawn by, you know, women back in the 70s. (oh those wacky Japanese, what will they think of next?) But actually, I'm a little tired of bandying about Japanese terms that I myself am still a bit vague on, so I'm changing gears.
Let's talk about cartoons.
In the beginning, the first imports of Japanese visual culture to the States weren't manga, but cartoons. Oh I'm sure there is an apocryphal story out there of an American GI stationed in Okinawa or elsewhere in Japan who got hooked on their comic books even though he couldn't (initially) read the language; if there is, no one has posted his story to the 'net, yet. (or her story; it could just as easily have been an Army or Navy nurse from the 50s). But the first seeds of American fandom were planted in the 60s and because of TV, not print.
Tetsuwan Atom was a manga title started in 1951 by our friend Osamu Tezuka (what, him again?) and it had pretty long legs; Wikipedia lists it at 23 volumes and with an overall run from 1952 to 1968, and with that kind of longevity I'm guessing it was pretty popular. In 1962 when Tezuma decided to start an animation company to produce shows for the new and growing television market, falling back on an established property like Tetsuwan Atom was likely a no-brainer. It featured a kid robot fighting evil, and I'm sure a lot of the manga read like an old movie serial or episodic TV show already.
Tetsuwan Atom, "Mighty Atom," premeired on Japanese TV in January of 1963 and had a good run: 193 episodes over 4 years.
Not that Tezuma and his company, Mushi Production, were operating in a vacuum and suddenly invented TV cartoons on their own. Mushi Production was formed to compete with Toei Animation, which had already made a half dozen animated films, and had their own show (Ookami Shonen Ken, "Ken, the Wolf Boy") which also premiered in 1963. And Disney, both the man and the company, had been on the air for 9 years at that point, and his show (Originally "Disneyland" and later known as "Walt Disney Presents") used recycled theatrical shorts as a staple for decades. Hanna-Barbera had been chugging along for five years already, with 8 shows to its credit including the flagships Flintstones and Yogi Bear.
Tetsuwan Atom gets a little special recognition in that it was Japanese, one of the very first shows of it's kind (what we now call anime) and also the first export. Amazingly, the first English-dubbed episodes aired on American TV just 9 months after the Japanese debut. The show was now known as "Astro Boy", since DC comics already had a character called "Mighty Atom", and 104 of the 193 original episodes were bought up by NBC for translation into English. It had a great run for a few years, though as a black-and-white series it suffered as more and more households switched over to colour.
Since it was offered in syndication, I guess it is a hit-or-miss proposition as to whether or not you (or your dad... or grandpa) saw Astro Boy on local TV. But a few folks did. And quite a few have been fans ever since.
As a kids cartoon, let's say the oldest kid who would have fallen in love with the show during it's first airing was 7 or 8. This first-grader of 1963 would have then been 10 when he saw Kimba, the White Lion and Gigantor ('65), and aged 12 for the first run of Speed Racer ('67). He might have been a senior in college, or maybe a grad student studying Japanese, during the first runs of Battle of the Planets and Star Blazers. During the 80s he watched Robotech, because even with it's flaws it was still a good story (through the Macross plotline) and he probably traded fansubs of Harlock and other shows on video tape with a small but rabid circle of other fans. If he could then just tough out a few lean years, a lot of badly dubbed dialog on video tapes, and the emergence of Pokemon as a phenomenon, his persistence and faith would be duly rewarded.
Being a fan today, with cable networks and DVDs and the growing demand/supply chain reaction, is easy. Back then, it was work.
There are many many younger kids, because almost all of these shows had long life in syndication, but our oldest Otaku was born in 1955, and today he is 52 years old. We salute you Tetsuwan Otaku! You were the first of us.
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Further reading and references:
An article from Fred Ladd, the American Director of "Astro Boy"
wiki: Astro Boy
wiki: Anime in the United States of American
imdb: Astroboy
Also, Fred Patten's excellent book, Watching Anime, Reading Manga
Astro Boy (all 104 English Episodes) is available on DVD from The Right Stuf in two, count 'em, two box sets.
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As anyone who was alive during the time knows -- or who has researched the issue (I was alive, but I was also, through no fault of my own, a kid) -- after a 10-year drought, new anime finally returned to American TV screens in 1978 with Battle of the Planets. That Americanisation of an otherwise fine series has it's own meagre charms... but we're not going to dwell on it. No, just a couple of years later we have something worth talking about. But 1980 isn't the touchstone for this column, either.
Dateline New York, Lunacon, 1983.
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the Ages of Fan III -- '80, '83, Flying Battleships, the original BFG, and the first outposts of fandom.
Though the decade-long drought was a dark time indeed for your average anime fan, there were probably only two or three actual anime fans in that era. The kids and teens who were watching the shows in syndication only saw them as cartoons, and either didn't know or didn't put any weight on the shows' Japanese origins.
Consumers of visual culture, the type we refer to collectively as fandom and forming one of the core stereotypes of the geek, nerd, and dork phyla, had other things to chew on during this time period. Star Trek, from '66 to '69 and continuing for many years after in syndication, and Star Wars, in '77 and '80.
Also during this period, science fiction conventions -- up to this point dusty literary affairs, I would imagine -- began to change to accommodate the new TV and movie fans, and the new interests of old fans.
Many long-running (and still running) conventions can trace their origin to either this period, or right after. (One notable exception is the WorldCon which dates to the 30s, actually -- and I'm sure others will no doubt be name-checked in the comments on this column by their respective adherents.) This era is when conventions became the beast now known to fans everywhere, and taken as a given of the culture. Whether one is a trekker who performs Hamlet in the original Klingon, or a padawan who lists Jedi as his religion on census forms, the con is the place one goes to brag about such accomplishments. The most concise definition of a modern multi-genre, multi-focus, multi-day fan convention is "con" (often supplemented by the recommendation to "just go to one, you'll see").
Since 1991, several anime-only (or primarily anime) conventions are also held each year, but that is roughly a decade past the scope of this instalment of the column, and a point we'll likely get to next week.
No, it is at these general-purpose sci-fi cons that our story strides boldly forward, and the next generation of proto-otaku begin to come into their own -- not as part of the main schedule of events, but rather in dark rooms apart from the overall convention. The first anime-screening rooms were just the hotel rooms of convention guests who happened to be fans, and who had VHS tapes of the shows.
But what were they watching?
The unexpected and unparalleled success of the original Star Wars changed the rules for science fiction, particularly sci-fi shows and movies, and sent everyone in Hollywood scurrying to find something else to meet the new demand for space opera. How handy it was that science fiction is one of the staples of Japanese animation.
The first to make the jump, post Star Wars, was re-written and adapted to fit a space setting, and re-titled "Battle of the Planets." I have no idea why. There was plenty of space stuff just kind of lying around -- They could even have gone the giant robot route, and maybe beaten Harmony Gold or World Events to the "false dawn" of the early 80s anime boom.
But these are easy points to pick out, in hindsight. And it really is a matter of slowly building on past success; even with the spikes in popularity, the overall curve trends pretty flat and may even level off some day.
So after the adaptation of Kagaku ninja tai Gatchaman into "Battle of the Planets", and the success had there, next up was Uchu Senkan Yamato, translated, with a few changes, as Star Blazers. What makes Yamato special?
There is Leiji Matsumoto, whose style is instantly recognisable even for the people who write off Japanese anime as "all looking the same". There was an epic story, left largely intact this time by the translation-and-adaptation grinder, with a lot of the darker "adult" material still in evidence. This wasn't just a cartoon for kids. And rather than being an episodic or monster-of-the-week recycler, Star Blazers told a longer, complete storyline, about the efforts of the Yamato/Argo to save the planet earth. In its first run it aired from 1980 to '82.
This was the bait that drew the ordinary sci-fi fan into the realm of Japanese anime. This was a show worth re-watching. And this is the first recorded instance of anime at a con. Casual, non-sanctioned anime rooms had been around for quite some time, but since I don't have a stack of programs from all the conventions for the decade or so prior to '83 and instead rely on printed sources, I can't authoritatively cite the "first" anime events; but we do have this:
Lunacon, New York, March 1983: Michael Pinto, Brian Cirulnick, and Robert Fenelon set up a "Star Blazers Room," kicking off an unbroken tradition of having anime viewing rooms at Lunacon that now dates back 24 years.
(ref. Fred Patten, Watching Anime, Reading Manga, in this case pulling from a chapter he wrote for the Complete Anime Guide, in 1997.)
There are other fans in other places who had been doing much the same thing, and perhaps for longer. ...I just don't have sources.
Later, anime-only conventions (like say, Anime Expo, starting in '91 or '92, depending on how one wants to parse it) would appear on the scene. And the original sci-fi fan cons are also still going, and growing. In fact, I got one of my first exposures to "real" anime (Sol Bianca in Japanese, subbed, among others I can't quite remember) in '88 as a young teen at the 2nd Dragon Con. Dad just dropped us off, not knowing...
The date I'm selecting for this era's fan is 1965. Our fan boy (or girl) born in '65 would have seen Speed Racer at some point in their youth, been 12 or 13 years old when Battle of the Planets graced our TV sets, and at age 15 would have first started watching Star Blazers. Unlike the initial wave of anime imports, or the butchering done to Science Ninja Team Gatchaman (damn I love that translation of the title), Star Blazers would have been an engaging storyline for our teen -- or for anyone who happened to tune in -- and would have captured their imagination. I choose '65, because for the 1983 Lunacon they would have been 18, and as stupid college kids & road-tripping fools (and sci-fi fans) no doubt went several cons.
Now 42 years old, I'd being willing to bet these Uchu Senkan Otaku are still fans of the genre, still going to cons (or running them) and are also busy raising the next generation of fandom. Somebody has been bringing all the damn kids to these things...
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Further readings and references:
Fred Patton's book Watching Anime, Reading Manga, without which I wouldn't be writing this column, or perhaps anything else for this blog for that matter.
-- The Lunacon ref. and the use of the phrase "False Dawn" for the 80s anime boomlet are both pulled directly from Fred.
wiki: Anime in the United States
wiki: Star Blazers
wiki: Battle of the Planets
wiki: science fiction conventions
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I was thinking of a different, more involved intro but honestly, what else do I need to say:
Robotech!
(no, no... imagine the voice-over guy saying it, with the Minucci/Ober score starting to swell in the background.)
Dateline 4 March 1985, on a TV station near you...
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the Ages of Fan IV -- '85: toys, shows, Robotech, cons, and the new fan culture
So we'll begin this week with an extended aside: occasionally in reviews and in other off-hand commentary, I've referred to one anime or another as a "recycler," a term which I have just now added to our glossary. This refers mostly to the re-use of animation sequences, but also to the re-use of plots. How many times can a giant monster attack Tokyo? (this is actually a zen koan.)
One of the earliest recyclers any of us in America will be familiar with is Voltron. Watch the lions assemble, here comes the force sword, and the monster of the week goes down in a blaze of vaguely non-violent carnage. Voltron has been a staple of the otaku and proto-otaku diet for decades now (before we even knew...) since the original U.S. airing in 1984. Voltron and other sentai ("task force") shows -- like say Power Rangers, not that I'm admitting that Power Rangers has anything to contribute to the current discussion past the obvious parallel I just cited -- owe an obvious debt to
Gatchaman (aka "Battle of the Planets"), right down to the fact that there are five members on the team. Gatchaman and Voltron may have become such a part of the fan landscape that you don't realize--or didn't even know--that kids TV series right up to today are still riffing on these old shows.
The two rivals, the princess, the big guy, the pee-wee/sidekick -- these are anime archetypes now, but at one point it was all brand new... Voltron, even with it's faults, is part of the anime canon; like Speed Racer or Astroboy before it. This was the first introduction to Japanese visual culture for many young American fans. If you aren't six years old, though, Voltron (Hyakuju-ou GoLion, in the Japanese original) lacks a certain something. Voltron is certainly important, but we need to wait until the following year (1985) to find the next milestone for our otaku timeline.
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Maybe you've heard of Robotech, or it's lesser-known-but-better alter-ego, Macross. I say "maybe" as in "maybe you're an indigenous warm blooded sentient mammal or visiting alien species who has been on the planet for at least 10 years."
The success of Robotech has nothing to do with the merits of the original series, Macross. It's not like there's some sort of freak-genius adaptation that made the American show an instant icon in sci-fi television either. In many ways, Macross/Robotech is just a rip-off of the earlier Gundam series, and the original English dub, while inspired in it's own way, did nothing to alleviate the faults of the original -- they were merely masked because no one watching it had ever seen Gundam, let alone would have known enough Japanese to begin nitpicking the adaptation. Heck, at the moment I can't find the half-remembered sources, but I could swear that even the creators of Macross half-intended it as a Gundam rip-off, occasionally playing up points in the new series for comedic effect. I mean, the battleship transforms into a giant robot; is anyone taking this seriously?
Oh, we all took it all too seriously.
Robotech had a head start: the model kits were already available. In fact, before it was used as a show title "Robotech" was a blanket brandname used by Revell for a number of model kits derived from several unrelated Japanese properties, including Macross. This may be a contributing factor to the latter aggregation that now defines Robotech: Carl Macek and Harmony Gold had a show they knew would be a winner, but the trick was they only had 36 episodes. To make the property more palatable to to U.S. syndication customers, who were looking for enough eps to do weekday daily broadcasts (a minimum of 65 eps; that's one each daily weekdays, for 13 weeks) some drastic measure seemed to be called for. This is how two unrelated series (Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada) were tagged on to the end of Macross. It helped (and no doubt made the licensing a bit easier) that all three series were produced by the same anime studio, Tatsunoko Productions, so there were some vague compatibilities in both style and production values. Further continuity was manufactured by a over-arcing gloss provided via creative translation, some narrative voice-overs not present in the original, and a new music track to provide further continuity across the three story arcs. All this, to get us to the 85 episode epic known to American audiences as Robotech.
There was the TV show, and there were models and toys. There were trading cards and role playing games. Later, there were books and comics (not manga, but American style comics; reprints collected into trade paperback are still available from Wildstorm).
And the show itself must have run through all 85 episodes several times over, because a number of my younger friends (as in, up to 12 years younger) also harbour fond memories of this show.
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Robotech and Voltron inspired an explosion of anime fandom, briefly, in the mid 80s. Bolstered by the fans of previous generations (say, those raised on Astro Boy or Star Blazers) and enjoying a false sense of importance that ephemeral fans can bring to any property, the Robotech geeks went forth and staked ground they thought would be "Robotech" for decades to come.
It was of course premature. It is great to have demand for anime, but it would be another decade before the ability to supply shows to sate that demand would be in place. There was Robotech... and that was it.
But for a while things looked fantastic. All the different Robotech things had a multiplying effect, and while the timing was still just a bit early, some of the newly founded institutions had real sticking power; the long, slow decline of Robotech made it the vehicle for fandom through the long drought until the mid 90s.
And at least two Robotech institutions are still in operation today. In October of 1986, there was the first convention devoted just to Robotech, in Anaheim; it would run in one form or another for the next 20 years -- and Harmony Gold still carries on in slightly modified (perhaps expanded would be the way to phrase it) form with The Robotech Convention Tour, which likely has a stop this year at some con near you. In early 1988 a fanzine named "Protoculture Addicts" published it's first issue, and though repurposed as a general anime magazine, is still found on your local newsstand.
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Let's say you were born in 1973. You would have been 7 when Star Blazers first aired, perhaps a little older if you caught the show in later syndication. As a 10 or 11 year old, you would have watched Voltron, and still been able to enjoy it -- though Robotech, a slightly more challenging show, would have hit you a year or two later at exactly the same time that you first thought you were leaving childhood behind.
After the next long drought, in '93 when you were at college, MTV started re-running Speed Racer (after midnight, but you'd stay up for every episode). Maybe you saw Sailor Moon, starting in '95, or got hooked on Dragon Ball in '96 (or depending on your preferences, maybe even both).
At this point, on the cusp of the new "kids" anime boom, when Pokemon started showing up on broadcast TV, you'd be around 25 years old and wondering if this kids stuff is all the anime that American TV had to offer, cable or otherwise. But if you look for it, at this point, in 1998, there would be all sorts of new series just now becoming available on the new DVD format. If you'd managed to cash in, even in small part, on the dot-com boom and now had both a little disposable income and fond memories for the cartoons of your youth -- well then, this new market niche would have an immediate appeal. Some skill at internet searches would no doubt lead you to this whole new world of licensed anime, and eventually to manga too. From this point, compounded over the following eight years, it's hard to say just where one might end up...
Hi, my name is Matt, and I'm an otaku.
I'm 33 years old, and I am Macross Otaku; there are many of us, and I'm not even the oldest member of this group. Someone out there was printing magazines, and organizing conventions. But as merely a fan I would like to think I'm indicative of the type: one of many teens who saw Robotech and became hooked.
From this point forward, being an otaku is no longer a odd hobby of just a few. We step into our own (though still small) spotlight to take our place as part of overall fandom. That is to say, it's still a marginal hobby, but we're now well known to fellow fans, and as the numbers continue to grow, the general public has also become aware.
In past posts I've referred to Robotech as my gateway drug; just good enough to get me hooked, but not quite enough to keep me satisfied. It engendered a lingering hunger.
further readings and references:
Fred Patton's book Watching Anime, Reading Manga, an excellent resource on early fandom.
wiki: Anime in the United States
wiki: Robotech
- Super Dimension Fortress Macross
- Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross
- Genesis Climber Mospeada
Wiki: Voltron
wiki: Mecha
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It's not ironic, necessarily; we all tend to overuse that word, "ironic". But it is interesting to note that before anime and manga became the consuming passion of a few, it had to explode across several media to become a fad known to many: Pokémon.
Though before Pokémon there was Mario. Before Mario came the NES -- strike that, Mario came with the NES. And a whole generation of fans was inoculated with Japanese visual sensibilities before they even learned how to read. We're about to run roughshod over another decade-and-a-half of fan history, but we're starting in the 80's.
Dateline 1985. Pick any American suburb; the Japanese had landed.
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The Ages of Fan V -- Games Are Culture Too, Pokémonetisation, Taking the High Middle Ground; and yes, the children are in fact the future.
In October of 1985, a smallish electronics company (originally founded in 1889 to print playing cards) released a home console system to play game cartridges. This wasn't a brand new thing, either for that company or for the market: Nintendo had done a number of arcade games, enjoying some success (Donkey Kong, anyone?) and the Atari 2600 had enough time before 1985 to pioneer the market (1977), peak (1982), and begin a long slow journey into oblivion. Actually, I'd also cite 1982 as the end of the 2600, because that was the year Atari released E.T., a game so bad that it gave me mental scars from which I am still recovering. The home console market crashed after that Christmas. (Atari is back as a brand, of course, though it is a tortuous path to follow from Pong to the new Atari.)
In 1985 Nintendo came on strong, faced down the competition, suffered setbacks in some segments in the years to follow but managed to corner the hand-held market, and barring something phenomenally stupid will be around for another 120 years as an entertainment company in one form or another. But it isn't the corporate history or the hardware that is of interest, at least for the purposes of this column: it's the characters.
Though one could perhaps cite Pitfall Harry as the first character who was more than an unnamed movable sprite, he was pre-dated by two years by that plucky Italian/Japanese plumber, Mario, who gets the nod as the first and longest lasting video game character. (He even has his own wikipedia entry.) Mario was born in 1981 (making him 25, or maybe 26, today) and while he fought in anonymity for a year or two under the nom de guerre "Jumpman", by 1983 and with the introduction of the Japanese Famicom, he was standing boldly in the spotlight -- with his brother Luigi, as always, relegated to the shadows. (Luigi's Shooting Spree coming soon to a console near you... oh... um. [*long intake of breath through teeth*] yeah, sorry. I guess it's still too soon to make jokes.)
While "Jumpman" and his nemesis Donkey Kong ruled the arcades, Harry did beat Mario to living rooms in America. It wasn't until 1985, as noted above, that Nintendo repackaged their Famicom for the US market as the NES. The NES sold a lot of units (as in, "a lot" of people live in the UK: 60 million in either case) and for many kids, Christmas of '85 (or '86, or '87-89, even) was their introduction to gaming and to both Mario and Japanese-style graphics. Even though they were just 8-bit sprites, there's no denying that Super Mario Bros. looked different from just about anything that had come before.
And so it begins. A quiet invasion, as it were. The kids play the games, get used to the characters, and by the time something from Japan shows up on their local TV station, they don't even think: they line up to buy.
Pokémon had a head start, obviously, since it was a popular Game Boy title in Japan before making the hop across the Pacific. A pair of modified Game Boy titles (Red and Blue) came out in the States in late September of '98, three weeks after the début of the new kids TV show -- not on cable but in (relatively) wide release as part of the Kids WB! block. So begins the new multi-channel strategy, and while it is successful Pokémon is merely the herald, not the mighty Galactus of anime itself.
Pokémon made a mint-- is still making a mint, I should say. But it is in many ways a self-contained phenomenon: A kid can be a fan of Pokémon but still not "get" anime, because to the kid (like his mom or dad back in the 60s or 70s) it's not a Japanese kids' show, it's just a kids' show. Pokémon is Japanese in the same way that Pizza is Italian: sure, eventually we all know where it came from, but the origin is incidental to our enjoyment of the product.
We can blame Lucas for some of this as well. (and boy oh boy do I like blaming George Lucas. Jar Jar my ass... and Han shot first, dammit! [mumble mumble] Howard the Duck was bad enough...) Despite his many flaws Georgie-boy either thought up or heartily agreed to some of the first mass licensing schemes, and because of him we not only have movies and sequels and prequels and regrettable TV specials, but also a full line of toys, games, and LucasArts (which was cool; but I am now boycotting the company as a whole because they dropped the Sam & Max sequel -- slack capably taken up by Telltale Games).
The rant aside, Lucas showed that if you have something popular, you license the heck out of it and laugh all the way to the bank. While Pokémon exerts greater creative control over its property than Lucas ever did (I can wait a minute while the sheer absurdity of that statement fully sinks in. . . . . . ) like Lucas, the Pokémon Company does employ a multi-channel strategy, and even as we speak are indoctrinating -- via TV shows, games, and manga -- a new generation of small fans who, in the parlance, "gotta catch 'em all!"
The Poké-freaks are not our demographic, though they are one of the populations from which otaku are drafted. (and I suppose, one could be a Pokémon-otaku without caring a gnat's whisker for anything else from Japan... theoretically). And the Nintendo-legions aren't otaku either. Gamers are gamers, otaku are otaku, and the overlap is a correlation, not causation. However, there was a period of 11 years between the NES and DBZ, and that decade-and-a-smidge was the vital time period when Japanese visual culture had a blank check to re-write the sensibilities of a whole generation of kids.
Just like earlier generations were primed by Astro Boy, Star Blazers, and Robotech.
There were multiple groups of many ages ready for the New Age that came about from broadband access, multiple licensees, web forums and fan sites, a plethora of internet shopping options, and (possibly illegal) downloads that are now in 2007, par for the course. Before the vast magnifying lens of the internet made all this possible, though, we had to cast our seed upon the wasteland -- cast it far, for the wasteland before '98 was vast -- and wait for small pockets to take root.
As much as I'd like to completely discount the effects of video gaming (and Pokémon) on the health and vibrancy of the industry today, we can't ignore the effect that these games have had on fandom (particularly Japanese-flavoured fandom) as a whole. They primed the pump; without Mario, I doubt we'd have the the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya or 200 or so similar anime available on DVD to the American market. Without Pokémon, we wouldn't have Pastel or Parasyte or any number of other manga that start with "P".
The whole mess had to become so much bigger -- diluted, in one way -- but also amplified by being encountered by so many new fans, before fans of Japanese visual culture could claim their new kingdom. Before we were fans, before we were otaku, many of us were just gamers or kids watching afternoon cartoons, and looking for something fun.
Yeah yeah, in keeping with the conceit that grew from the bad pun I chose for the title of this series: we'll pick the year 1992. In addition to being the year I graduated high school, the proto-otaku born in this year would have been 6 for the first blush of the Pokémon craze, would have been able to watch more anime on cable before turning 10 than I could manage for my first two decades (lucky bastards) and are just now turning 15. I'm sure I'll meet these young otaku at some convention, and while I'm wearing something sensible (in keeping with my adopted role as a pseudo-journalist) they will be cosplaying as Naruto, Rukia, Misa, and Winry.
"Japan" going mainstream is part of what makes otaku: not all kids become fans, and not all fans become otaku, but without recognition we're just extremely odd folks with a very odd hobby. Mario and Pikachu are now as much a part of the landscape as Mickey and Bugs -- anime & manga are new to some but still very much an accepted part of the overall culture. Otaku can't exist in a vacuum: oddly, the culture must be fairly well known before the people who obsess over it can be recognised and ostracised.
further reading and references:
wiki: the NES
wiki: itsa me, Mario
wiki: Pokemon, with or without the é
Lucas Sucks, also
Lucas sucks because Han Shot First, dammitt.
##
Hey, you guys remember when I used to write a column on manga? After a trip down three-and-a-half decades of memory lane and a whole load of anime, games, toys, movies, tv, and cheap shots at George Lucas -- let's get back to comics, shall we?
Researching the earliest days of manga proved to be a little difficult. (Wikipedia was no help in this case, so I couldn't use my usual lazy-blogger-shortcut.) Fortunately, I have the internet, search engines, a six pack of beer, a whole slew of half-remembered keywords, and the tenacity to track this stuff down.
My results aren't comprehensive -- there's a pretty thick book just begging to written on this topic -- but for the purposes of this instalment of 5by8, I can assemble some trivia and links and sketch a rough outline of the early history of manga in the United States. As near as I grok it, it's only been 19 years.
Dateline 1988: art house theatres, dusty comic shops, newsstands, and kid's afternoon TV (again).
##
The Ages of Fan VI: Can you believe it took me five columns to get back to manga?
Actually, we can check in five years earlier than 1988 for the first radar blip: Frederick Schodt wrote a book called Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics, first published in 1983. At the time, there was only the barest trickle of manga available in the States, and nothing was translated yet. And in Fred's own words, "Certainly, it has never sold that many copies, but it has developed something of a cult following among manga aficionados." Not surprisingly, since it included 90+ full pages of translated excerpts from manga to prove his points. (you know, nothing big, just Phoenix, Barefoot Gen, and Rose of Versailles.) Fred really was a man ahead of his time. Other later books from Fred, "Dreamland Japan" and "America and the Four Japans," aren't required reading but quite interesting as well, and he gets full credit as the guy who first brought manga -- or at least, the concept of manga translated to English -- to the states.
Manga theory is fine and all, but it was another five years before we would see theory put into practice. Anyone heard of a film called "Akira"?
Akira, 1988
From what I understand, in it's first US run Akira only played in small art-house theatres and did decent but not outstanding box office. Despite that, it would become a staple of convention screenings, and later DVD rentals and sales. If only for its impact on American fans, Akira has to be considered a classic, and a milestone.
But it's a pretty good flick, too. As good as it is though, the manga is better.
Someone must have recognised that the manga was good stuff, because an imprint of Marvel, Epic Comics took on the Akira comic (which was still an on-going series in Japan at the time; Akira didn't conclude there until 1990) and released a version for the American audience. To look more like US comics, the art was flipped to read left-to-right, and for some reason was also colourised. The Epic run of Akira ended in '95; thankfully the comic is now available in trades from Dark Horse (restored to the glorious black & white).
The success (however modest) of Akira comics combined with the growing popularity of anime adaptations on American TV sets then prompted the next growth in the industry.
Animerica and Viz: 1993
The first real inroads (logically) followed the path that proved so successful in Japan: Magazines. Animerica put out a lot of manga (in monthly instalments) and had the market pretty much to itself for 4 or 5 years. Later spin-offs include Pulp, aimed at an older market and something I think would be successful even today if Viz would revive the line, and a little something called Shonen Jump -- the kid brother that grew and grew and now is the face of Viz Media (along with twin sister Shojo Beat) while Animerica, the pioneer, is relegated to occasional appearances as a free give-away at conventions and certain bookstores. There was also the Animerica Extra (now defunct) which transitioned to shoujo comics late in it's life and whose mission is carried on by Shojo Beat.
Good stuff all around. And yet... even with a whole stack of manga over at Viz, things didn't quite blow up into a major new comics market. Don't get me wrong, Viz was doing well and certainly was a nice side line for Japanese parent companies Shueisha and Shogakukan. And one could certainly argue that with basic cable picking up on anime in the 90s, it might have been only a matter of time before the market as we now know it developed -- but Viz doesn't get the credit. More often than not, a late-comer and copy cat gets all the accolades for inventing the US manga market
"and the girls will show us the way". Mixx, 1997, and the re-badged Mixx: Tokyopop, 2002.
Instituted primarily as a vehicle for the recently acquired Sailor Moon license, and with a few other titles added (also-shoujo Magic Knight Reyearth, and shounen Parasyte and Ice Blade -- hence the Mixx) the new MixxZine débuted in 1997. At this point Viz and other early licensees (like Dark Horse) had the market pretty much to themselves. Still, there are several metric tonnes of manga coming out of Japan each and every year, so the market was wide open.
So enter Mixx Media. The standards eastablished by MixxZine (and sister publication Smile, when the decision was made to split the shounen and shoujo titles) along with the quality of the first compilations of their licensed titles did nothing to ingratiate the new company to the fan base. Complaints about typos, mistranslations, delays, and paper quality would dog Mixx through most of its early days.
An aside on translation: Since Japanese reads right-to-left, it can be a bit difficult to adapt into English. Early efforts did the logical thing, flip the art to print a mirror image instead, which corrects some problems but introduces others. -- Everyone is suddenly left-handed, and t-shirt logos or signs in English suddenly read backwards -- not to mention all the original Japanese sound-effects that are now unintelligible in either Japanese or English. It takes a fair amount of touch-up art to fix the soundFX and other art issues, on top of the cost of translators and letterers just to cover the basics of adaptation.
Someone at what-is-now-Tokyopop had a genius idea: take shortcuts.
While counter-intuitive at first, it is an obvious step: instead of paying an artist to flip the book ($$$$), teach the kids to read backwards ($free). Amazingly, we all bought it wholesale. They also left the Japanese hiragana soundFX on the page, only occasionally with an English subtitle to explain it -- often letting context do the job. Simultaneously, they announced that no longer would they publish single-issue floppies, but instead would exclusively release paperback-novel-sized collections (the rough equivalent, or often exact transliteration, of the original Japanese tankoban). The shortcuts let Tokyopop drop the price by about 30%, giving them a competitive and psychological advantage: now that the manga compilations were only $9.99, they had passed a magic threshold in the consumers mind, "Well, this looks different, and hey it's less than $10!"
The Authentic Manga bit was amazingly successful. In fact, the fans responded to it so well that they were now willing to forgive Tokyopop for the typos, mistranslations, and other quality issues that had yet to be fixed. As other publishers saw both the cost benefits and the increase in sales, unflipped, less modified manga became the norm at nearly all US manga publishers.
With books instead of magazines -- and with the transition to bookstores as well, as opposed to relying on the direct market -- the modern US Manga industry was born.
And it's only been five years since then... Amazing.
While fans have of course been around much longer (which is what I've been writing about for more than a month) it is only relatively recently that we've been given the opportunity to spend large amounts of money on manga. At $10 a pop, an otaku could easily spend $10,000 on manga this year and they wouldn't even be able to keep up with all the new releases. Thousands of books are out and at least a thousand new ones come out each and every year -- and while the industry will undergo the usual ups and downs of business cycles, that does nothing to affect the backlist, and the occasional downturn is only temporary and self-correcting. As long as they publish comics in Japan, and with the now-proven business models, someone is going to bring manga to the America market and they should be able to make a little coin while they do it.
Ah yes, but enough big picture crap. What was the state of manga circa 2002? Let's look at the new (as in '02 vintage) Tokyopop:
- Manga: Real Bout High School, Mars, Dragon Knights, Cowboy Bebop, Chobits, Love Hina, Initial D, Paradise Kiss, Angelic Layer, Peach Girl, Cardcaptor Sakura, Wish, Kare Kano
- Manhwa: Island, Ragnarok, Priest
To me, that looks like a 50-50 split, shounen-to-shoujo. Add on Sailor Moon and Magic Knight Rayearth from the Mixx and the girls seem to have an advantage. So even if some writers like to talk about the new shoujo boom, girls' comics are nothing new -- If you look at the origins of the trade paperback manga market then the women have always been ahead of the curve. While the boys have monopolized most of the press to date, this industry has been quietly built on properties like Sailor Moon and other shoujo titles. No wonder they still comprise 60% of manga customers. No wonder even manga-ka like Oh!great, not the shining example of gender equality in comics, is introducing a few bishounen sensibilities in his latest series.
Has it only been five years? Even looking at the first examples of translated manga ('88-95) I don't feel like I'm behind the curve at all. I am in fact the exact age I need to be.
This isn't our last instalment of the "Ages of Fan" but at this point the gimmick breaks down and I can't cap it off with the usual trite conclusion: it's not a single generation of fans, or even an easily identifiable market. Folks of all ages buy manga, and we're interested in many different types of manga. The best trend that I can see are the kids who have never known a world without it. While they don't buy anything yet -- at least the sponges who clog the aisles at my store while they mooch for hours on end don't buy anything -- it shows that there is still a healthy interest, and as the new fans grow into their disposable income later, their annoying habits will translate into future sales for the genre. That doesn't make their current behaviour less annoying, however. Damn kids... "Ya gonna buy that, slick?"
##
Further Readings and References:
- Frederik L. Schodt's own comments on his 1983 book Manga! Manga!
- Once again: Matt Thorn, who's been doing my manga schtick for longer, and with more academic rigor. (this makes me the other other other (other?) Matt now blogging about comics, methinks.)
- wiki: Tokyopop
- An unofficial history of Tokyopop from Tangerine Dreams. (This site is great, how did it slip under my radar for so long? [*adds link to weekly web trawl*]) Michelle @ Tangerine Dreams also gives us a pointer to the staggeringly comprehensive Unofficial History of MixxZine, in the archives of AnimeFringe.
- wiki: Viz Media LLC
- wiki: Shonen Jump and Shojo Beat
- the Animerica Index, by way of The Internet Archive. (this index is no longer available from Viz's site, but nothing dies on the internet. A nod goes out to ANN for the pointer to the archived index)
- A brief history of manga, as posted to the Manganews forum
- An interview with Dark Horse's Michael Gombos at Dark, But Shining
- A word or two about manga from Dark Horse's Carl Horn
- wiki: Sailor Moon (the English Adaptations)
- wiki: Sailor Moon
- Comics Journal Special Edition 2005
- wiki: Akira (film)
- the fansite Akira2019 on the Epic Comics version of Akira
A series of columns (six installments, and counting) where we look at just how American anime & manga fandom developed — to the point where today we use the phrase otaku, we know what it means, we know it’s not complimentary, and we call ourselves otaku anyway.
##
The Ages of Fan I -- that guy Tezuka
Of course, those of the modern generation of fans bear little resemblance to myself (broke, alcoholic, 30 y.o. otaku fanboy loser... hm. actually, I think I'll put that on a t-shirt) just as the fans of my ilk (which we'll likely refer to as the Robotech generation in some future post; I was 11 during Robotech's first run) bear little resemblance to our forebears, the the brave pioneers who got hooked on Astro Boy, or Speed Racer, or Battle of the Planets, or Star Blazers, or... well I suppose this is why we are inaugurating this mess as an ongoing feature here on 5by8.
But as our first column on this topic we won't yet be looking at these American shores, but rather across the Pacific and back through time, past even Astro Boy, to the dark and dismal days right after the giant buzzkill known as World War II (the obvious nadir of Japan-US relations, except it wasn't... odd that) and more importantly back to the dark ages before manga. Back to 1947.
Manga, as a word, predates 1947 by at at least 150 years. Translation is always a tricky science, but the definition I most often see for manga, particularly in regard to the earliest efforts, is "whimsical pictures" ...or dare I say, [*cough*] "comics," if one cares to scratch even a millimeter into the entymology of that equivalent English term.
However, 1947 is the date I cite as the origin of manga because of that guy Tezuka and his book Shin Takarajima, most often translated as "New Treasure Island".
Here's why:
New Treasure Island was a cheap one-off targeted to kids, sold not through bookstores, but rather through toy stores. It was an akahon (a "red book," so named from the garish red ink used on the covers) printed on cheap recycled newsprint rather than the more expensive rice paper used for the "real" comics of the day.
Here's the thing: as a cheap one-off, it was free from a lot of editorial oversight, so Tezuka could tell the story he wanted. (Then as now, some publishers and editors seem certain that they know better than anyone else what is salable.) Additionally, at roughly 200 pages, it offered the kids some real value for thier lunch money. (also as opposed to the other manga of the day). And even though it was cheaply printed, it was expertly done.
- Are there other Japanese comics that predate Tezuka? Yes.
- Are there manga--that is, extended storylines-- that predate Tezuka? Yes.
- Were there other artists with cinematic sensibilities making comics in Japan, even as far back as when Osamu was a kid? Well, yeah, actually there were.
Did any of those turkeys sell a million copies?
Now ya see, this is were the deification and installation of Tezuka at the head of the manga-ka pantheon really begins to get some traction. New Treasure Island sold 400,000 copies during it's first print run, and I've seen uncorroborated but plausible sources that indicate that they sold twice that many in subsequent reprints. (over 60 years, in reprints... I'd bet it's sold two million, easy)
Let me backtrack a half step, and go back to "Cinematic sensibilties".
Osamu Tezuka was a movie fan going way back; (if internet sources are to be believed) due to a connection of his father's, he used to watch movie reels all the time, including Disney and Fleischer Cartoons. Whatever the provenance, it's hard to argue with the printed record: Tezuka's work certainly reflects a debt both to the cinematic arts and to western-style animation of the 30s and 40s. We can note the use of a "camera" perspective; with pans and close-ups, panels unfolding in "slo-mo", and a rather definite break with the proscenium arch utilized in so many comics up to this point.
What else can we blame on Tezuka?
Big Eyes. Yep, that was him. Though as I noted in 5by8 #1, he borrowed that from American cartoons, so it's always interesting to hear Americans complain about manga, but not Mickey.
There's gender-swapping characters, from Metropolis (1949). Someone else may have thought of it, but I think this is the first manga instance in print.
In 1950, there was Jungle Taitei (aka Kimba) -- which was the first long-running serial. Today most of what we call manga are serialized in chapters, running for months or years.
In 1954, Princess Knight, the first Shoujo manga--from Tezamu, and presumably ever (at least according to wiki)--premeired.
And shonen (or seinen) comics were of course developing: "the appearance in 1959 of the two weekly children's manga magazines, Shonen Magazine and Shonen Sunday, served to firmly establish the sort of manga culture we see today." Just as most manga are serialized--anthology magazines like these are where they're first printed.
In the meantime, we should note the women comickers of the magnificent 24s (from the 24th year of the Showa Era, alternately known in English as the fabulous 49ers) were just starting to grow up and read comics; as well as the genesis of the first "manga" generation, those lucky fanboys born in 1950. I'm sure we'll touch on both of these later.
All this is about Japanese comics and fans, though: '63 is the date of note for American audiences, and Astro Boy on American TV is where we'll pick up the column next week.
Further reading and references:
[first up: you really should read the comments to the original Comicsnob.com post, where my readers expose me as a lazy researcher and school me on some finer points of early manga.]
Wiki: Manga
Wiki: Shoujo
Matt Thorn -- Mangagaku: A History of Manga
Web Japan: Manga
Locus: Manga
Paul Gravett: Manga
Global License: Manga
Kyoto Manga Museum
wagging the dog
##
(You know, in one of these columns I suppose we'll get to that word, otaku, where it comes from, what it means, and the rise of that bastard pseudolanguage Fan Japanese... but not today. Dateline Japan, 1963...)
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the Ages of Fan II -- 1963, Tezuka again, and landing on foreign shores
So, by the 60's the Manga idustry was humming along nicely. Of course, someone who isn't a wikipedia editor would argue that it always was doing just fine, thanks, but with the contributions of that guy Tezuka (ref. last weeks column, and comments) manga had shifted from a trifle aimed just at the kids market to a new art medium and commercial product with a growing number of fans of all ages.
At some point when I'm coming back to the manga industry in Japan, we'll take a look at the gekiga genre, and seinan and josei comics and the transformation of shoujo (girls) comics when they started being drawn by, you know, women back in the 70s. (oh those wacky Japanese, what will they think of next?) But actually, I'm a little tired of bandying about Japanese terms that I myself am still a bit vague on, so I'm changing gears.
Let's talk about cartoons.
In the beginning, the first imports of Japanese visual culture to the States weren't manga, but cartoons. Oh I'm sure there is an apocryphal story out there of an American GI stationed in Okinawa or elsewhere in Japan who got hooked on their comic books even though he couldn't (initially) read the language; if there is, no one has posted his story to the 'net, yet. (or her story; it could just as easily have been an Army or Navy nurse from the 50s). But the first seeds of American fandom were planted in the 60s and because of TV, not print.
Tetsuwan Atom was a manga title started in 1951 by our friend Osamu Tezuka (what, him again?) and it had pretty long legs; Wikipedia lists it at 23 volumes and with an overall run from 1952 to 1968, and with that kind of longevity I'm guessing it was pretty popular. In 1962 when Tezuma decided to start an animation company to produce shows for the new and growing television market, falling back on an established property like Tetsuwan Atom was likely a no-brainer. It featured a kid robot fighting evil, and I'm sure a lot of the manga read like an old movie serial or episodic TV show already.
Tetsuwan Atom, "Mighty Atom," premeired on Japanese TV in January of 1963 and had a good run: 193 episodes over 4 years.
Not that Tezuma and his company, Mushi Production, were operating in a vacuum and suddenly invented TV cartoons on their own. Mushi Production was formed to compete with Toei Animation, which had already made a half dozen animated films, and had their own show (Ookami Shonen Ken, "Ken, the Wolf Boy") which also premiered in 1963. And Disney, both the man and the company, had been on the air for 9 years at that point, and his show (Originally "Disneyland" and later known as "Walt Disney Presents") used recycled theatrical shorts as a staple for decades. Hanna-Barbera had been chugging along for five years already, with 8 shows to its credit including the flagships Flintstones and Yogi Bear.
Tetsuwan Atom gets a little special recognition in that it was Japanese, one of the very first shows of it's kind (what we now call anime) and also the first export. Amazingly, the first English-dubbed episodes aired on American TV just 9 months after the Japanese debut. The show was now known as "Astro Boy", since DC comics already had a character called "Mighty Atom", and 104 of the 193 original episodes were bought up by NBC for translation into English. It had a great run for a few years, though as a black-and-white series it suffered as more and more households switched over to colour.
Since it was offered in syndication, I guess it is a hit-or-miss proposition as to whether or not you (or your dad... or grandpa) saw Astro Boy on local TV. But a few folks did. And quite a few have been fans ever since.
As a kids cartoon, let's say the oldest kid who would have fallen in love with the show during it's first airing was 7 or 8. This first-grader of 1963 would have then been 10 when he saw Kimba, the White Lion and Gigantor ('65), and aged 12 for the first run of Speed Racer ('67). He might have been a senior in college, or maybe a grad student studying Japanese, during the first runs of Battle of the Planets and Star Blazers. During the 80s he watched Robotech, because even with it's flaws it was still a good story (through the Macross plotline) and he probably traded fansubs of Harlock and other shows on video tape with a small but rabid circle of other fans. If he could then just tough out a few lean years, a lot of badly dubbed dialog on video tapes, and the emergence of Pokemon as a phenomenon, his persistence and faith would be duly rewarded.
Being a fan today, with cable networks and DVDs and the growing demand/supply chain reaction, is easy. Back then, it was work.
There are many many younger kids, because almost all of these shows had long life in syndication, but our oldest Otaku was born in 1955, and today he is 52 years old. We salute you Tetsuwan Otaku! You were the first of us.
##
Further reading and references:
An article from Fred Ladd, the American Director of "Astro Boy"
wiki: Astro Boy
wiki: Anime in the United States of American
imdb: Astroboy
Also, Fred Patten's excellent book, Watching Anime, Reading Manga
Astro Boy (all 104 English Episodes) is available on DVD from The Right Stuf in two, count 'em, two box sets.
##
As anyone who was alive during the time knows -- or who has researched the issue (I was alive, but I was also, through no fault of my own, a kid) -- after a 10-year drought, new anime finally returned to American TV screens in 1978 with Battle of the Planets. That Americanisation of an otherwise fine series has it's own meagre charms... but we're not going to dwell on it. No, just a couple of years later we have something worth talking about. But 1980 isn't the touchstone for this column, either.
Dateline New York, Lunacon, 1983.
##
the Ages of Fan III -- '80, '83, Flying Battleships, the original BFG, and the first outposts of fandom.
Though the decade-long drought was a dark time indeed for your average anime fan, there were probably only two or three actual anime fans in that era. The kids and teens who were watching the shows in syndication only saw them as cartoons, and either didn't know or didn't put any weight on the shows' Japanese origins.
Consumers of visual culture, the type we refer to collectively as fandom and forming one of the core stereotypes of the geek, nerd, and dork phyla, had other things to chew on during this time period. Star Trek, from '66 to '69 and continuing for many years after in syndication, and Star Wars, in '77 and '80.
Also during this period, science fiction conventions -- up to this point dusty literary affairs, I would imagine -- began to change to accommodate the new TV and movie fans, and the new interests of old fans.
Many long-running (and still running) conventions can trace their origin to either this period, or right after. (One notable exception is the WorldCon which dates to the 30s, actually -- and I'm sure others will no doubt be name-checked in the comments on this column by their respective adherents.) This era is when conventions became the beast now known to fans everywhere, and taken as a given of the culture. Whether one is a trekker who performs Hamlet in the original Klingon, or a padawan who lists Jedi as his religion on census forms, the con is the place one goes to brag about such accomplishments. The most concise definition of a modern multi-genre, multi-focus, multi-day fan convention is "con" (often supplemented by the recommendation to "just go to one, you'll see").
Since 1991, several anime-only (or primarily anime) conventions are also held each year, but that is roughly a decade past the scope of this instalment of the column, and a point we'll likely get to next week.
No, it is at these general-purpose sci-fi cons that our story strides boldly forward, and the next generation of proto-otaku begin to come into their own -- not as part of the main schedule of events, but rather in dark rooms apart from the overall convention. The first anime-screening rooms were just the hotel rooms of convention guests who happened to be fans, and who had VHS tapes of the shows.
But what were they watching?
The unexpected and unparalleled success of the original Star Wars changed the rules for science fiction, particularly sci-fi shows and movies, and sent everyone in Hollywood scurrying to find something else to meet the new demand for space opera. How handy it was that science fiction is one of the staples of Japanese animation.
The first to make the jump, post Star Wars, was re-written and adapted to fit a space setting, and re-titled "Battle of the Planets." I have no idea why. There was plenty of space stuff just kind of lying around -- They could even have gone the giant robot route, and maybe beaten Harmony Gold or World Events to the "false dawn" of the early 80s anime boom.
But these are easy points to pick out, in hindsight. And it really is a matter of slowly building on past success; even with the spikes in popularity, the overall curve trends pretty flat and may even level off some day.
So after the adaptation of Kagaku ninja tai Gatchaman into "Battle of the Planets", and the success had there, next up was Uchu Senkan Yamato, translated, with a few changes, as Star Blazers. What makes Yamato special?
There is Leiji Matsumoto, whose style is instantly recognisable even for the people who write off Japanese anime as "all looking the same". There was an epic story, left largely intact this time by the translation-and-adaptation grinder, with a lot of the darker "adult" material still in evidence. This wasn't just a cartoon for kids. And rather than being an episodic or monster-of-the-week recycler, Star Blazers told a longer, complete storyline, about the efforts of the Yamato/Argo to save the planet earth. In its first run it aired from 1980 to '82.
This was the bait that drew the ordinary sci-fi fan into the realm of Japanese anime. This was a show worth re-watching. And this is the first recorded instance of anime at a con. Casual, non-sanctioned anime rooms had been around for quite some time, but since I don't have a stack of programs from all the conventions for the decade or so prior to '83 and instead rely on printed sources, I can't authoritatively cite the "first" anime events; but we do have this:
Lunacon, New York, March 1983: Michael Pinto, Brian Cirulnick, and Robert Fenelon set up a "Star Blazers Room," kicking off an unbroken tradition of having anime viewing rooms at Lunacon that now dates back 24 years.
(ref. Fred Patten, Watching Anime, Reading Manga, in this case pulling from a chapter he wrote for the Complete Anime Guide, in 1997.)
There are other fans in other places who had been doing much the same thing, and perhaps for longer. ...I just don't have sources.
Later, anime-only conventions (like say, Anime Expo, starting in '91 or '92, depending on how one wants to parse it) would appear on the scene. And the original sci-fi fan cons are also still going, and growing. In fact, I got one of my first exposures to "real" anime (Sol Bianca in Japanese, subbed, among others I can't quite remember) in '88 as a young teen at the 2nd Dragon Con. Dad just dropped us off, not knowing...
The date I'm selecting for this era's fan is 1965. Our fan boy (or girl) born in '65 would have seen Speed Racer at some point in their youth, been 12 or 13 years old when Battle of the Planets graced our TV sets, and at age 15 would have first started watching Star Blazers. Unlike the initial wave of anime imports, or the butchering done to Science Ninja Team Gatchaman (damn I love that translation of the title), Star Blazers would have been an engaging storyline for our teen -- or for anyone who happened to tune in -- and would have captured their imagination. I choose '65, because for the 1983 Lunacon they would have been 18, and as stupid college kids & road-tripping fools (and sci-fi fans) no doubt went several cons.
Now 42 years old, I'd being willing to bet these Uchu Senkan Otaku are still fans of the genre, still going to cons (or running them) and are also busy raising the next generation of fandom. Somebody has been bringing all the damn kids to these things...
##
Further readings and references:
Fred Patton's book Watching Anime, Reading Manga, without which I wouldn't be writing this column, or perhaps anything else for this blog for that matter.
-- The Lunacon ref. and the use of the phrase "False Dawn" for the 80s anime boomlet are both pulled directly from Fred.
wiki: Anime in the United States
wiki: Star Blazers
wiki: Battle of the Planets
wiki: science fiction conventions
##
I was thinking of a different, more involved intro but honestly, what else do I need to say:
Robotech!
(no, no... imagine the voice-over guy saying it, with the Minucci/Ober score starting to swell in the background.)
Dateline 4 March 1985, on a TV station near you...
##
the Ages of Fan IV -- '85: toys, shows, Robotech, cons, and the new fan culture
So we'll begin this week with an extended aside: occasionally in reviews and in other off-hand commentary, I've referred to one anime or another as a "recycler," a term which I have just now added to our glossary. This refers mostly to the re-use of animation sequences, but also to the re-use of plots. How many times can a giant monster attack Tokyo? (this is actually a zen koan.)
One of the earliest recyclers any of us in America will be familiar with is Voltron. Watch the lions assemble, here comes the force sword, and the monster of the week goes down in a blaze of vaguely non-violent carnage. Voltron has been a staple of the otaku and proto-otaku diet for decades now (before we even knew...) since the original U.S. airing in 1984. Voltron and other sentai ("task force") shows -- like say Power Rangers, not that I'm admitting that Power Rangers has anything to contribute to the current discussion past the obvious parallel I just cited -- owe an obvious debt to
Gatchaman (aka "Battle of the Planets"), right down to the fact that there are five members on the team. Gatchaman and Voltron may have become such a part of the fan landscape that you don't realize--or didn't even know--that kids TV series right up to today are still riffing on these old shows.
The two rivals, the princess, the big guy, the pee-wee/sidekick -- these are anime archetypes now, but at one point it was all brand new... Voltron, even with it's faults, is part of the anime canon; like Speed Racer or Astroboy before it. This was the first introduction to Japanese visual culture for many young American fans. If you aren't six years old, though, Voltron (Hyakuju-ou GoLion, in the Japanese original) lacks a certain something. Voltron is certainly important, but we need to wait until the following year (1985) to find the next milestone for our otaku timeline.
##
Maybe you've heard of Robotech, or it's lesser-known-but-better alter-ego, Macross. I say "maybe" as in "maybe you're an indigenous warm blooded sentient mammal or visiting alien species who has been on the planet for at least 10 years."
The success of Robotech has nothing to do with the merits of the original series, Macross. It's not like there's some sort of freak-genius adaptation that made the American show an instant icon in sci-fi television either. In many ways, Macross/Robotech is just a rip-off of the earlier Gundam series, and the original English dub, while inspired in it's own way, did nothing to alleviate the faults of the original -- they were merely masked because no one watching it had ever seen Gundam, let alone would have known enough Japanese to begin nitpicking the adaptation. Heck, at the moment I can't find the half-remembered sources, but I could swear that even the creators of Macross half-intended it as a Gundam rip-off, occasionally playing up points in the new series for comedic effect. I mean, the battleship transforms into a giant robot; is anyone taking this seriously?
Oh, we all took it all too seriously.
Robotech had a head start: the model kits were already available. In fact, before it was used as a show title "Robotech" was a blanket brandname used by Revell for a number of model kits derived from several unrelated Japanese properties, including Macross. This may be a contributing factor to the latter aggregation that now defines Robotech: Carl Macek and Harmony Gold had a show they knew would be a winner, but the trick was they only had 36 episodes. To make the property more palatable to to U.S. syndication customers, who were looking for enough eps to do weekday daily broadcasts (a minimum of 65 eps; that's one each daily weekdays, for 13 weeks) some drastic measure seemed to be called for. This is how two unrelated series (Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada) were tagged on to the end of Macross. It helped (and no doubt made the licensing a bit easier) that all three series were produced by the same anime studio, Tatsunoko Productions, so there were some vague compatibilities in both style and production values. Further continuity was manufactured by a over-arcing gloss provided via creative translation, some narrative voice-overs not present in the original, and a new music track to provide further continuity across the three story arcs. All this, to get us to the 85 episode epic known to American audiences as Robotech.
There was the TV show, and there were models and toys. There were trading cards and role playing games. Later, there were books and comics (not manga, but American style comics; reprints collected into trade paperback are still available from Wildstorm).
And the show itself must have run through all 85 episodes several times over, because a number of my younger friends (as in, up to 12 years younger) also harbour fond memories of this show.
##
Robotech and Voltron inspired an explosion of anime fandom, briefly, in the mid 80s. Bolstered by the fans of previous generations (say, those raised on Astro Boy or Star Blazers) and enjoying a false sense of importance that ephemeral fans can bring to any property, the Robotech geeks went forth and staked ground they thought would be "Robotech" for decades to come.
It was of course premature. It is great to have demand for anime, but it would be another decade before the ability to supply shows to sate that demand would be in place. There was Robotech... and that was it.
But for a while things looked fantastic. All the different Robotech things had a multiplying effect, and while the timing was still just a bit early, some of the newly founded institutions had real sticking power; the long, slow decline of Robotech made it the vehicle for fandom through the long drought until the mid 90s.
And at least two Robotech institutions are still in operation today. In October of 1986, there was the first convention devoted just to Robotech, in Anaheim; it would run in one form or another for the next 20 years -- and Harmony Gold still carries on in slightly modified (perhaps expanded would be the way to phrase it) form with The Robotech Convention Tour, which likely has a stop this year at some con near you. In early 1988 a fanzine named "Protoculture Addicts" published it's first issue, and though repurposed as a general anime magazine, is still found on your local newsstand.
##
Let's say you were born in 1973. You would have been 7 when Star Blazers first aired, perhaps a little older if you caught the show in later syndication. As a 10 or 11 year old, you would have watched Voltron, and still been able to enjoy it -- though Robotech, a slightly more challenging show, would have hit you a year or two later at exactly the same time that you first thought you were leaving childhood behind.
After the next long drought, in '93 when you were at college, MTV started re-running Speed Racer (after midnight, but you'd stay up for every episode). Maybe you saw Sailor Moon, starting in '95, or got hooked on Dragon Ball in '96 (or depending on your preferences, maybe even both).
At this point, on the cusp of the new "kids" anime boom, when Pokemon started showing up on broadcast TV, you'd be around 25 years old and wondering if this kids stuff is all the anime that American TV had to offer, cable or otherwise. But if you look for it, at this point, in 1998, there would be all sorts of new series just now becoming available on the new DVD format. If you'd managed to cash in, even in small part, on the dot-com boom and now had both a little disposable income and fond memories for the cartoons of your youth -- well then, this new market niche would have an immediate appeal. Some skill at internet searches would no doubt lead you to this whole new world of licensed anime, and eventually to manga too. From this point, compounded over the following eight years, it's hard to say just where one might end up...
Hi, my name is Matt, and I'm an otaku.
I'm 33 years old, and I am Macross Otaku; there are many of us, and I'm not even the oldest member of this group. Someone out there was printing magazines, and organizing conventions. But as merely a fan I would like to think I'm indicative of the type: one of many teens who saw Robotech and became hooked.
From this point forward, being an otaku is no longer a odd hobby of just a few. We step into our own (though still small) spotlight to take our place as part of overall fandom. That is to say, it's still a marginal hobby, but we're now well known to fellow fans, and as the numbers continue to grow, the general public has also become aware.
In past posts I've referred to Robotech as my gateway drug; just good enough to get me hooked, but not quite enough to keep me satisfied. It engendered a lingering hunger.
further readings and references:
Fred Patton's book Watching Anime, Reading Manga, an excellent resource on early fandom.
wiki: Anime in the United States
wiki: Robotech
- Super Dimension Fortress Macross
- Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross
- Genesis Climber Mospeada
Wiki: Voltron
wiki: Mecha
##
It's not ironic, necessarily; we all tend to overuse that word, "ironic". But it is interesting to note that before anime and manga became the consuming passion of a few, it had to explode across several media to become a fad known to many: Pokémon.
Though before Pokémon there was Mario. Before Mario came the NES -- strike that, Mario came with the NES. And a whole generation of fans was inoculated with Japanese visual sensibilities before they even learned how to read. We're about to run roughshod over another decade-and-a-half of fan history, but we're starting in the 80's.
Dateline 1985. Pick any American suburb; the Japanese had landed.
##
The Ages of Fan V -- Games Are Culture Too, Pokémonetisation, Taking the High Middle Ground; and yes, the children are in fact the future.
In October of 1985, a smallish electronics company (originally founded in 1889 to print playing cards) released a home console system to play game cartridges. This wasn't a brand new thing, either for that company or for the market: Nintendo had done a number of arcade games, enjoying some success (Donkey Kong, anyone?) and the Atari 2600 had enough time before 1985 to pioneer the market (1977), peak (1982), and begin a long slow journey into oblivion. Actually, I'd also cite 1982 as the end of the 2600, because that was the year Atari released E.T., a game so bad that it gave me mental scars from which I am still recovering. The home console market crashed after that Christmas. (Atari is back as a brand, of course, though it is a tortuous path to follow from Pong to the new Atari.)
In 1985 Nintendo came on strong, faced down the competition, suffered setbacks in some segments in the years to follow but managed to corner the hand-held market, and barring something phenomenally stupid will be around for another 120 years as an entertainment company in one form or another. But it isn't the corporate history or the hardware that is of interest, at least for the purposes of this column: it's the characters.
Though one could perhaps cite Pitfall Harry as the first character who was more than an unnamed movable sprite, he was pre-dated by two years by that plucky Italian/Japanese plumber, Mario, who gets the nod as the first and longest lasting video game character. (He even has his own wikipedia entry.) Mario was born in 1981 (making him 25, or maybe 26, today) and while he fought in anonymity for a year or two under the nom de guerre "Jumpman", by 1983 and with the introduction of the Japanese Famicom, he was standing boldly in the spotlight -- with his brother Luigi, as always, relegated to the shadows. (Luigi's Shooting Spree coming soon to a console near you... oh... um. [*long intake of breath through teeth*] yeah, sorry. I guess it's still too soon to make jokes.)
While "Jumpman" and his nemesis Donkey Kong ruled the arcades, Harry did beat Mario to living rooms in America. It wasn't until 1985, as noted above, that Nintendo repackaged their Famicom for the US market as the NES. The NES sold a lot of units (as in, "a lot" of people live in the UK: 60 million in either case) and for many kids, Christmas of '85 (or '86, or '87-89, even) was their introduction to gaming and to both Mario and Japanese-style graphics. Even though they were just 8-bit sprites, there's no denying that Super Mario Bros. looked different from just about anything that had come before.
And so it begins. A quiet invasion, as it were. The kids play the games, get used to the characters, and by the time something from Japan shows up on their local TV station, they don't even think: they line up to buy.
Pokémon had a head start, obviously, since it was a popular Game Boy title in Japan before making the hop across the Pacific. A pair of modified Game Boy titles (Red and Blue) came out in the States in late September of '98, three weeks after the début of the new kids TV show -- not on cable but in (relatively) wide release as part of the Kids WB! block. So begins the new multi-channel strategy, and while it is successful Pokémon is merely the herald, not the mighty Galactus of anime itself.
Pokémon made a mint-- is still making a mint, I should say. But it is in many ways a self-contained phenomenon: A kid can be a fan of Pokémon but still not "get" anime, because to the kid (like his mom or dad back in the 60s or 70s) it's not a Japanese kids' show, it's just a kids' show. Pokémon is Japanese in the same way that Pizza is Italian: sure, eventually we all know where it came from, but the origin is incidental to our enjoyment of the product.
We can blame Lucas for some of this as well. (and boy oh boy do I like blaming George Lucas. Jar Jar my ass... and Han shot first, dammit! [mumble mumble] Howard the Duck was bad enough...) Despite his many flaws Georgie-boy either thought up or heartily agreed to some of the first mass licensing schemes, and because of him we not only have movies and sequels and prequels and regrettable TV specials, but also a full line of toys, games, and LucasArts (which was cool; but I am now boycotting the company as a whole because they dropped the Sam & Max sequel -- slack capably taken up by Telltale Games).
The rant aside, Lucas showed that if you have something popular, you license the heck out of it and laugh all the way to the bank. While Pokémon exerts greater creative control over its property than Lucas ever did (I can wait a minute while the sheer absurdity of that statement fully sinks in. . . . . . ) like Lucas, the Pokémon Company does employ a multi-channel strategy, and even as we speak are indoctrinating -- via TV shows, games, and manga -- a new generation of small fans who, in the parlance, "gotta catch 'em all!"
The Poké-freaks are not our demographic, though they are one of the populations from which otaku are drafted. (and I suppose, one could be a Pokémon-otaku without caring a gnat's whisker for anything else from Japan... theoretically). And the Nintendo-legions aren't otaku either. Gamers are gamers, otaku are otaku, and the overlap is a correlation, not causation. However, there was a period of 11 years between the NES and DBZ, and that decade-and-a-smidge was the vital time period when Japanese visual culture had a blank check to re-write the sensibilities of a whole generation of kids.
Just like earlier generations were primed by Astro Boy, Star Blazers, and Robotech.
There were multiple groups of many ages ready for the New Age that came about from broadband access, multiple licensees, web forums and fan sites, a plethora of internet shopping options, and (possibly illegal) downloads that are now in 2007, par for the course. Before the vast magnifying lens of the internet made all this possible, though, we had to cast our seed upon the wasteland -- cast it far, for the wasteland before '98 was vast -- and wait for small pockets to take root.
As much as I'd like to completely discount the effects of video gaming (and Pokémon) on the health and vibrancy of the industry today, we can't ignore the effect that these games have had on fandom (particularly Japanese-flavoured fandom) as a whole. They primed the pump; without Mario, I doubt we'd have the the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya or 200 or so similar anime available on DVD to the American market. Without Pokémon, we wouldn't have Pastel or Parasyte or any number of other manga that start with "P".
The whole mess had to become so much bigger -- diluted, in one way -- but also amplified by being encountered by so many new fans, before fans of Japanese visual culture could claim their new kingdom. Before we were fans, before we were otaku, many of us were just gamers or kids watching afternoon cartoons, and looking for something fun.
Yeah yeah, in keeping with the conceit that grew from the bad pun I chose for the title of this series: we'll pick the year 1992. In addition to being the year I graduated high school, the proto-otaku born in this year would have been 6 for the first blush of the Pokémon craze, would have been able to watch more anime on cable before turning 10 than I could manage for my first two decades (lucky bastards) and are just now turning 15. I'm sure I'll meet these young otaku at some convention, and while I'm wearing something sensible (in keeping with my adopted role as a pseudo-journalist) they will be cosplaying as Naruto, Rukia, Misa, and Winry.
"Japan" going mainstream is part of what makes otaku: not all kids become fans, and not all fans become otaku, but without recognition we're just extremely odd folks with a very odd hobby. Mario and Pikachu are now as much a part of the landscape as Mickey and Bugs -- anime & manga are new to some but still very much an accepted part of the overall culture. Otaku can't exist in a vacuum: oddly, the culture must be fairly well known before the people who obsess over it can be recognised and ostracised.
further reading and references:
wiki: the NES
wiki: itsa me, Mario
wiki: Pokemon, with or without the é
Lucas Sucks, also
Lucas sucks because Han Shot First, dammitt.
##
Hey, you guys remember when I used to write a column on manga? After a trip down three-and-a-half decades of memory lane and a whole load of anime, games, toys, movies, tv, and cheap shots at George Lucas -- let's get back to comics, shall we?
Researching the earliest days of manga proved to be a little difficult. (Wikipedia was no help in this case, so I couldn't use my usual lazy-blogger-shortcut.) Fortunately, I have the internet, search engines, a six pack of beer, a whole slew of half-remembered keywords, and the tenacity to track this stuff down.
My results aren't comprehensive -- there's a pretty thick book just begging to written on this topic -- but for the purposes of this instalment of 5by8, I can assemble some trivia and links and sketch a rough outline of the early history of manga in the United States. As near as I grok it, it's only been 19 years.
Dateline 1988: art house theatres, dusty comic shops, newsstands, and kid's afternoon TV (again).
##
The Ages of Fan VI: Can you believe it took me five columns to get back to manga?
Actually, we can check in five years earlier than 1988 for the first radar blip: Frederick Schodt wrote a book called Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics, first published in 1983. At the time, there was only the barest trickle of manga available in the States, and nothing was translated yet. And in Fred's own words, "Certainly, it has never sold that many copies, but it has developed something of a cult following among manga aficionados." Not surprisingly, since it included 90+ full pages of translated excerpts from manga to prove his points. (you know, nothing big, just Phoenix, Barefoot Gen, and Rose of Versailles.) Fred really was a man ahead of his time. Other later books from Fred, "Dreamland Japan" and "America and the Four Japans," aren't required reading but quite interesting as well, and he gets full credit as the guy who first brought manga -- or at least, the concept of manga translated to English -- to the states.
Manga theory is fine and all, but it was another five years before we would see theory put into practice. Anyone heard of a film called "Akira"?
Akira, 1988
From what I understand, in it's first US run Akira only played in small art-house theatres and did decent but not outstanding box office. Despite that, it would become a staple of convention screenings, and later DVD rentals and sales. If only for its impact on American fans, Akira has to be considered a classic, and a milestone.
But it's a pretty good flick, too. As good as it is though, the manga is better.
Someone must have recognised that the manga was good stuff, because an imprint of Marvel, Epic Comics took on the Akira comic (which was still an on-going series in Japan at the time; Akira didn't conclude there until 1990) and released a version for the American audience. To look more like US comics, the art was flipped to read left-to-right, and for some reason was also colourised. The Epic run of Akira ended in '95; thankfully the comic is now available in trades from Dark Horse (restored to the glorious black & white).
The success (however modest) of Akira comics combined with the growing popularity of anime adaptations on American TV sets then prompted the next growth in the industry.
Animerica and Viz: 1993
The first real inroads (logically) followed the path that proved so successful in Japan: Magazines. Animerica put out a lot of manga (in monthly instalments) and had the market pretty much to itself for 4 or 5 years. Later spin-offs include Pulp, aimed at an older market and something I think would be successful even today if Viz would revive the line, and a little something called Shonen Jump -- the kid brother that grew and grew and now is the face of Viz Media (along with twin sister Shojo Beat) while Animerica, the pioneer, is relegated to occasional appearances as a free give-away at conventions and certain bookstores. There was also the Animerica Extra (now defunct) which transitioned to shoujo comics late in it's life and whose mission is carried on by Shojo Beat.
Good stuff all around. And yet... even with a whole stack of manga over at Viz, things didn't quite blow up into a major new comics market. Don't get me wrong, Viz was doing well and certainly was a nice side line for Japanese parent companies Shueisha and Shogakukan. And one could certainly argue that with basic cable picking up on anime in the 90s, it might have been only a matter of time before the market as we now know it developed -- but Viz doesn't get the credit. More often than not, a late-comer and copy cat gets all the accolades for inventing the US manga market
"and the girls will show us the way". Mixx, 1997, and the re-badged Mixx: Tokyopop, 2002.
Instituted primarily as a vehicle for the recently acquired Sailor Moon license, and with a few other titles added (also-shoujo Magic Knight Reyearth, and shounen Parasyte and Ice Blade -- hence the Mixx) the new MixxZine débuted in 1997. At this point Viz and other early licensees (like Dark Horse) had the market pretty much to themselves. Still, there are several metric tonnes of manga coming out of Japan each and every year, so the market was wide open.
So enter Mixx Media. The standards eastablished by MixxZine (and sister publication Smile, when the decision was made to split the shounen and shoujo titles) along with the quality of the first compilations of their licensed titles did nothing to ingratiate the new company to the fan base. Complaints about typos, mistranslations, delays, and paper quality would dog Mixx through most of its early days.
An aside on translation: Since Japanese reads right-to-left, it can be a bit difficult to adapt into English. Early efforts did the logical thing, flip the art to print a mirror image instead, which corrects some problems but introduces others. -- Everyone is suddenly left-handed, and t-shirt logos or signs in English suddenly read backwards -- not to mention all the original Japanese sound-effects that are now unintelligible in either Japanese or English. It takes a fair amount of touch-up art to fix the soundFX and other art issues, on top of the cost of translators and letterers just to cover the basics of adaptation.
Someone at what-is-now-Tokyopop had a genius idea: take shortcuts.
While counter-intuitive at first, it is an obvious step: instead of paying an artist to flip the book ($$$$), teach the kids to read backwards ($free). Amazingly, we all bought it wholesale. They also left the Japanese hiragana soundFX on the page, only occasionally with an English subtitle to explain it -- often letting context do the job. Simultaneously, they announced that no longer would they publish single-issue floppies, but instead would exclusively release paperback-novel-sized collections (the rough equivalent, or often exact transliteration, of the original Japanese tankoban). The shortcuts let Tokyopop drop the price by about 30%, giving them a competitive and psychological advantage: now that the manga compilations were only $9.99, they had passed a magic threshold in the consumers mind, "Well, this looks different, and hey it's less than $10!"
The Authentic Manga bit was amazingly successful. In fact, the fans responded to it so well that they were now willing to forgive Tokyopop for the typos, mistranslations, and other quality issues that had yet to be fixed. As other publishers saw both the cost benefits and the increase in sales, unflipped, less modified manga became the norm at nearly all US manga publishers.
With books instead of magazines -- and with the transition to bookstores as well, as opposed to relying on the direct market -- the modern US Manga industry was born.
And it's only been five years since then... Amazing.
While fans have of course been around much longer (which is what I've been writing about for more than a month) it is only relatively recently that we've been given the opportunity to spend large amounts of money on manga. At $10 a pop, an otaku could easily spend $10,000 on manga this year and they wouldn't even be able to keep up with all the new releases. Thousands of books are out and at least a thousand new ones come out each and every year -- and while the industry will undergo the usual ups and downs of business cycles, that does nothing to affect the backlist, and the occasional downturn is only temporary and self-correcting. As long as they publish comics in Japan, and with the now-proven business models, someone is going to bring manga to the America market and they should be able to make a little coin while they do it.
Ah yes, but enough big picture crap. What was the state of manga circa 2002? Let's look at the new (as in '02 vintage) Tokyopop:
- Manga: Real Bout High School, Mars, Dragon Knights, Cowboy Bebop, Chobits, Love Hina, Initial D, Paradise Kiss, Angelic Layer, Peach Girl, Cardcaptor Sakura, Wish, Kare Kano
- Manhwa: Island, Ragnarok, Priest
To me, that looks like a 50-50 split, shounen-to-shoujo. Add on Sailor Moon and Magic Knight Rayearth from the Mixx and the girls seem to have an advantage. So even if some writers like to talk about the new shoujo boom, girls' comics are nothing new -- If you look at the origins of the trade paperback manga market then the women have always been ahead of the curve. While the boys have monopolized most of the press to date, this industry has been quietly built on properties like Sailor Moon and other shoujo titles. No wonder they still comprise 60% of manga customers. No wonder even manga-ka like Oh!great, not the shining example of gender equality in comics, is introducing a few bishounen sensibilities in his latest series.
Has it only been five years? Even looking at the first examples of translated manga ('88-95) I don't feel like I'm behind the curve at all. I am in fact the exact age I need to be.
This isn't our last instalment of the "Ages of Fan" but at this point the gimmick breaks down and I can't cap it off with the usual trite conclusion: it's not a single generation of fans, or even an easily identifiable market. Folks of all ages buy manga, and we're interested in many different types of manga. The best trend that I can see are the kids who have never known a world without it. While they don't buy anything yet -- at least the sponges who clog the aisles at my store while they mooch for hours on end don't buy anything -- it shows that there is still a healthy interest, and as the new fans grow into their disposable income later, their annoying habits will translate into future sales for the genre. That doesn't make their current behaviour less annoying, however. Damn kids... "Ya gonna buy that, slick?"
##
Further Readings and References:
- Frederik L. Schodt's own comments on his 1983 book Manga! Manga!
- Once again: Matt Thorn, who's been doing my manga schtick for longer, and with more academic rigor. (this makes me the other other other (other?) Matt now blogging about comics, methinks.)
- wiki: Tokyopop
- An unofficial history of Tokyopop from Tangerine Dreams. (This site is great, how did it slip under my radar for so long? [*adds link to weekly web trawl*]) Michelle @ Tangerine Dreams also gives us a pointer to the staggeringly comprehensive Unofficial History of MixxZine, in the archives of AnimeFringe.
- wiki: Viz Media LLC
- wiki: Shonen Jump and Shojo Beat
- the Animerica Index, by way of The Internet Archive. (this index is no longer available from Viz's site, but nothing dies on the internet. A nod goes out to ANN for the pointer to the archived index)
- A brief history of manga, as posted to the Manganews forum
- An interview with Dark Horse's Michael Gombos at Dark, But Shining
- A word or two about manga from Dark Horse's Carl Horn
- wiki: Sailor Moon (the English Adaptations)
- wiki: Sailor Moon
- Comics Journal Special Edition 2005
- wiki: Akira (film)
- the fansite Akira2019 on the Epic Comics version of Akira
Page created: May 7th 2007 06:45 PM