A demonic half-dog, half-man in a Japanese Heian-era outfit called a suikan watches from one corner of a wall. Elsewhere a young pirate boy grins so broadly that the bottom half of his face is enveloped in a perfect semicircle of teeth. Images like these are consumed by millions of people worldwide in comic books and graphic novels. But these particular ones were on the walls of San Francisco’s de Young Museum as part of “The Art of Manga,” the first North American museum exhibition dedicated entirely to the form.
The exhibit arrives at a moment when manga has finally come to be regarded as a prominent part of mainstream culture, even outside of its native Japan. One of the top-grossing movies in America in September was the anime film “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle,” based on a popular manga series. Many of the anime series that have become international streaming hits are based on manga titles. It is a phenomenon right now, but it’s even more than that. When Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, the curator of the de Young exhibit, sees manga, she sees where storytelling forms are leading. “I think that’s the future,” she told me during an advance preview of the exhibit.
It might very well be. Manga has proved to be an influential force across culture as not just art and literature, but also as a mirror to contemporary trends and politics. It’s a kind of art that has stood the test of time and is only increasing its cultural relevance.
The term “manga” — its translation is “pictures run riot” — first appeared in Japan in the late-18th century, but what people have defined as manga has changed across the centuries. The simplest definition would be that they are Japanese comics, a combination of text and image, that employ a specific visual vocabulary — a “transdiegetic” vocabulary, as Eike Exner calls it in his recent book “Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics.”
Despite its long history, only in the last few decades has it started to be seen as a form with cultural history and value. Studies show that reading is trending lower in our age of social media, artificial intelligence and relentless digital distractions, but the popularity of manga has been growing across the globe, appealing to readers of different ages and backgrounds.
The “Art of Manga” exhibit prominently features several artists who represent a variety of different styles and subject matter that show how manga crosses countless genres. The most popular titles are often longform narrative stories like “Naruto,” “Bleach,” “One Piece” and “Demon Slayer.” These are epic tales of underdog protagonists questing, adventuring, traveling this world or to other worlds, gaining new abilities along the way. There are gradually ascending boss battles and myriad side characters. There’s often cool outfits, power-ups and odd, gravity-defying hair. While the covers of these comics are in vivid color, the inner pages are in black-and-white, written in Japanese (or in translation), and read right to left and top to bottom.
Even a manga novice would be able to identify the components of its extended vocabulary: exaggerated expressions, motion lines, pain stars, phonetic humor in the text. They all work together to help readers understand the action in more ways than through just words alone.
“Akira” and “Astro Boy” are manga that helped shape the broader genres of sci-fi and cyberpunk across literature, TV and film. Some of the most memorable images of grotesque, visceral terrors come from the horror manga of Junji Ito, including “Uzumaki” and “Tomie.”
But manga can just as flawlessly depict the charms and hiccups of everyday life. Jiro Taniguichi’s highly detailed “The Solitary Gourmet,” which appears in the exhibit, follows a traveling salesman as he searches for new restaurants and cuisine, and features real Japanese foods and locales. Many of these popular manga series have been adapted into beloved TV shows, expanding those franchises’ already extensive fan bases.
One of the most memorable images in the exhibit is a drawing of a boxer hunched over, eyes closed, and smiling in a corner of a ring. The paper itself is torn and taped over — a far cry from a pristine canvas — and yet the illustration still seems to command the room. Rousmaniere calls it perhaps the most important page in manga history.
The page is from Tetsuya Chiba’s popular work “Ashita no Joe: Fighting for Tomorrow,” a sports manga about a poor, young orphan named Joe Yabuki who finds purpose through boxing. It had great resonance with the working class in postwar Japan. In fact, the radical group the Japanese Red Army even adopted the slogan “We are Tomorrow’s Joe,” referring to the manga, during a 1970 plane hijacking.
This wasn’t the first or last time manga fans interpreted their favorite works through the lens of politics. Just as Joe Yabuki became a symbol of resilience across Japan, similarly today the pirate flag from Eiichiro Oda’s “One Piece,” the best-selling manga in history, has been taken up by Gen Z protesters across Asia, in Indonesia, Nepal and the Philippines.
And several manga artists have been instrumental in bringing L.G.B.T.Q. visibility to mainstream Japan through their work. The award-winning series “My Brother’s Husband,” by renowned erotic manga artist Gengoroh Tagame, also featured in the exhibit, became a significant text in a culture where queer sexuality was not often discussed and certainly not very visible within the media. The story addressed homophobia, bigotry and grief, and was adapted into a live-action TV drama in 2018.
But beyond the history, storytelling and cultural weight of manga, there’s the actual artistry — the very reason pages of manga illustrations have found their way onto the walls of a museum like the de Young.
“This deserves to be in any art museum,” Rousmaniere said of the wild illustrations and paintings of Hirohiko Araki, best known for his popular long-running shonen series “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.”
Heavily inspired by the sculptures of Michelangelo, Araki’s manga is remarkably geometric, his characters’ faces and bodies recalling the chiseled detail work and silhouettes of Italian sculptures. They’re larger than life and pulsing with drama, and even in the black-and-white pages of the comics, each of his characters wields an arresting stare that seems to pierce the fourth wall and attack the reader.
And it’s not just the characters’ static poses, but also the way Araki moves them through space — or, rather, how he moves the space around them — that gives his work that extra spark of imagination. In one image from the exhibit, a character climbs out from a zipper that has opened a rift in space, as though the solid walls around him were just as easily manipulated as fabric. “Dali would be very happy to see these,” Rousmaniere said, admiring Araki’s panels. “It’s playing with space, perception, movement.”
Manga in general is an art style that takes advantage of the limits of the frame, using the tension between the images and the blank spaces around them and pushing perspective to create a dynamic, immersive feel. In one “One Piece” panel from “Art of Manga,” the skilled swordsman-pirate Roronoa Zoro crouches in the forefront of the image, having just drawn his weapons. The illustration’s perspective is from the ground up, so Zoro towers overhead while his opponent falls to his knees in the background, seen from the gap between Zoro’s legs. The white page around Zoro and his opponent contains occasional splatters of blood, so there’s a sense of violence, evidence of the act, while the image focuses on the calm, steady exterior of the victor.
“One Piece” is one of the more prominently featured series in the exhibit; one room breaks down the manga production process, using the series as an example. The walls of the room are plastered with every page of “One Piece” just past the 100th issue, to show the evolution of the pirate story. And yet “One Piece” also serves as an example of manga’s reach beyond the page; the anime adaptation of the series premiered in 1999, has run for over 1,100 episodes and is still ongoing. In 2023, Netflix released a well-received live-action adaptation of “One Piece,” the second season of which is due next year. And across the globe the series has also inspired animated films, card games, video games, live stage shows and immersive experiences. The world of “One Piece” continues to expand nearly three decades after Oda first began publishing the black-and-white tale of the Straw Hat Pirates in print.
As more manga characters can be found everywhere from 4D movie theater screens to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, this exhibition is a welcome reminder that it’s still an art form with humble roots. Images and speech bubbles, boldfaced exclamations: Manga has always been art that one can borrow or buy and take with them. And the “Art of Manga” shows just how much these comics have always had to offer — and will continue to offer fans in the future.
Maya Phillips is an arts and culture critic for The Times.
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