The Mike Toole Show

Manga in the USA

If you jump just one year prior to Viz's entry in 1987, you'll find a few odd little gems, as well. Way back when I wrote about Bandai Visual USA), I tend to outfits like LEED. I don't think their Golgo 13 release was a disaster, but after collaborating with Viz on a short series of colored Golgo 13 comics in the 90s, the publisher drew back from the American market. What did they hope to achieve? It's a mystery.

I was curious enough to look up the publisher, Leonard Rifas, on google. Happily, Mr Rifas was easily located and keen to talk about his comics label, Educomics, and his experiments in manga publishing from way back in the day. His interest in bringing the works of Keiji Nakazawa to American readers wasn't a strictly commercial one; he was (and is) a peace activist who envisioned comic books as a valuable tool to encourage learning and foster discussion. Rifas first encountered a few pages of Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen in a pamphlet ed out at a 1978 peace rally in Berkeley, California. The progenitors of that pamphlet, a group called Project Gen, were out to spread Keiji Nakazawa's true-to-life vision of the consequences of atomic war. Gen is a powerful parable. it is not sympathetic to Japan, depicting rows of average joes getting ready to literally fight to the death against American GIs with bamboo spears, but it is equally adamant that the US atomic bombings, despite averting this grisly outcome, were themselves atrocities. Barefoot Gen has never been a widespread success in the English speaking world, but to me, it's no surprise that it's still in print in English. It is too important to leave behind.

But what of Mr Rifas? He had published a variety of comics before being drawn to Project Gen and the possibility of bringing Nakazawa's potent anti-war tales to American readers; in 1977, he published Corporate Crime Comix, a recounting by artist R. Diggs of the suspicious death of Karen Silkwood, and found himself intrigued by the idea of telling true stories in comic form. Given that, along with the vital anti-nuke movement of the 70s and 80s, Barefoot Gen was a natural fit for his company. Interestingly, after winning the rights to Gen, he decided to make some alterations to render the manga more recognizeable to western audiences, a trend that would continue right up until the manga boom of the early 2000s. "I localized Gen of Hiroshima #1-2 for American readers by adding gray tones with zipatone (Letraset) screens," comments Mr Rifas. "For I Saw It!, I hired underground comix artist Rebecca "Becky" Wilson to design a color plan, which the people at World Color Press translated into color proofs. Again, that was to localize it for American readers who believed that "real" comic books were printed in CMYK." The result is striking, a piece of work that is simultaneously a colorful comic book and a piece of Japanese-to-the-bone manga.

When Viz and First Comics started regularly pumping manga out in 1987, they were hoping to spread a unique comic art form, but beyond that, their interests were largely commercial; they were in it to make money. What continues to intrigue me about these Educomics is that they weren't; they were, first and foremost, meant to educate the reader, a lofty goal indeed. But of course, any publisher would want their book to recoup costs, so the message could be spread further. How did Gen and I Saw It! do? Not that well; the direct comics market as we know it was still in its infancy then, so Mr Rifas sold his books both directly and through a loose network of independent stores and, hilariously, head shops. Hey man, that was where you went to get underground comix in the late 70s and early 80s! While the first printing of Gen of Hiroshima # 1 sold out, this just made it harder to shift copies of #2 - and despite receiving notable critical acclaim and, bizarrely, an angry rant from Virginia Congressman Thomas J. Bliley, who'd seen the comic and wrongly assumed it was made for schoolchildren, I Saw It! didn't sell enough to break even. Still, Mr Rifas muses: "Success can be defined in different ways. Nakazawa has fought, through creating his Hiroshima comics, to help eliminate the threat of any further use of nuclear weapons. I republished his work, not only because it was a groundbreaking example of the potential of comics to make a strong message, but also because I agreed with that goal. His work has become a canonical manga, but we were aiming higher than that." You can still order copies of I Saw It!, a fine companion to Last Gasp's edition of Barefoot Gen, from Mr Rifas. He's at [email protected].

We're not home yet! 1981 would give us two English-language volumes of Hajime Sorayama in 1980. Maybe you've heard of him? That's right, he's the sexy ladybot guy!

There's more. No no, I'm serious: there's more. An artist named Masaichi Mukaide spent a merry few years contributing to a couple of magazines, STAR*REACH and Imagine. Both publications were agreeably weird little fantasy/SF prose + comic magazines. I'm not really sure how or why Mukaide arrived, or why he stuck around, but I stumbled across one of the Imagine magazines years ago and his artwork is pretty great. By now, we're back to 1978, and the flow of manga in English is at an absolute trickle. Hey, Project Gen, the guys who exposed Leonard Rifas to Keiji Nakazawa's work? Well, that group did indeed succeed in publishing a book-length volume of Nakazawa's noted story - and they adapted and published another one! But then, after those two volumes, they got no farther. Nevertheless, that rare Barefoot Gen volume 1 book, released in 1978, remains the first squarebound manga ever published in English. How's that for the answer to a tough trivia question?

There's more, right? Oh come on, there's gotta be more! I couldn't find any more, though, but Leonard Rifas forwarded me some old correspondence that pointed to this jaw-dropping stuff:

It's a student journal. From 1968. Nineteen. Sixty. Eight. Granted, it's not entirely clear if the original manga is professional comics or amateur work, but it is professional retouched and lettered in English. The correspondence also hinted at a New York-based Nichiren Buddhist newsletter that reprinted old Frederik L. Schodt. Fred remarks, "The subject of early manga in English is... rather dear to my own heart. It's really hard to pin-point the ‘first’ of anything created, because just when you find something that you think is the ‘oldest,’ there is always something 'older.'" I can dig that - when I first had the idea for this column, I knew that there had been manga in Heavy Metal, but I couldn't have told you which stories, and I certainly didn't know about Educomics or Project Gen. Fred goes on: "Depending how you define manga, things get really complicated. In Japanese, single- cartoons, and also comic strips are all called "manga." If you include those, there are lots of translations of works that go back to the 1860s/70s/80s."

Fred actually touched on this in Manga! Manga!, a point that had eluded me completely when I started my research. And in that point, I think we have a fairly good answer to what might be the first manga in English. It's not quite Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama. That book, another Fred Schodt translation project, is still in print, and worth reading. No, I think we can go back and start here:

What you're looking at above is a cartoon from Tokyo Puck, a humor and society magazine by a gadfly who called himself Rakuten Kitazawa. Tokyo Puck had tons of cartoons like these, and an awful lot of them were presented not just in Japanese, but in English, and sometimes even in Chinese. I suppose you could say that Kitazawa was a jet-setter before there were jets! Anyway, single- political comics were old hat by the 1900s, but comics that told a sequential story were still a bit new - while folks like Winsor McKay were popularizing the format in the west, Rakuten Kitazawa was breaking that ground in Japan, contributing to newspaper comics pages and then drifting from magazine to magazine before starting the popular Tokyo Puck. He referred to his comics as "irresponsible pictures;" he wasn't the first to describe comics that way, but his persistent use of the term led to it being adopted by other magazines, and then by the public. In Japanese, they called it manga.

So with that: Happy New Year! Now it's your turn - what did I miss? What stupid mistake did I make this time? Do you think manga could've done better if it splashed down in the 80s like it did in the 00s? Tell us your viewpoint in the comments, and until then: Make Mine Manga! Excelsior! Wait a minute, who said that?