I’ve tried really hard, but I can’t find a lot of manga I like. A lot of it is extremely derivitive, or just weird for weird’s sake, or inaccessible to the casual/new fan, etc. And that reading backwards shit is just right out the window. It’s confusing, annoying, and the height of pointless fanboy wank all at once.
That being said, the stuff I like, I love. I’m a huge fan of Lone Wolf and Cub, and an even bigger fan of almost everything I’ve read of Osamu Tezuka. Buddha is one of the best series of books I’ve ever read, comics or otherwise. I feel similarly about Phoenix, but it’s a bit harder to find and I’m still working my way through the volumes. I recently finished Apollo’s Song, which, while not as good as some of his other stuff, did not disappoint at all.
His art is 100% flawless, IMO. Perfect character designs, no matter how simple, on top of beautiful backdrops. His storytelling is intelligent, accessible, and has that elusive complex-simplicity factor that the Japanese are known for. It also has just enough humor to keep you smiling as you read.
For the record, I’m not obsessed with everything the man did. There’s some I haven’t read, and some that didn’t blow me away. Adolf and Blackjack failed to hold my attention for very long (1 book each), and I found Astro Boy to be pedestrian (not sure it was meant to be anything more so that’s not really a knock against it.)
He is truly the Walt Disney of Japan, but dare I say better than Disney in some respects. He didn’t tame his work for children, or temper it for adults. I get a strong sense from his work that I don’t get from a lot of writers - which is that he put exactly what he wanted to put on the page.
It mostly comes down to taste, of course, but, to my mind, yes. Frankly, IMO, Tezuka, on the whole, is really only a good creator, when taken as a whole. He did great work, he did bad work, and he did a whole lot of good work.
And that last? When I say ‘a lot’ I mean ‘insane amounts’ - 400 volumes of stuff, in many different genres, over ~40 years (not including his animation work). If you can’t find something great in that much work, the artist is wholly incompetent. If you can’t find crap, the artist is inhuman. Tezuka was neither.
He’s respected not as the Best That’s Ever Been, but as the First Great, and the Definer of Genres.
The greats that have come after him - just a few off the top of my head: Go Nagai, Hayao Miyazaki (granted, known more for his animation work than his manga), Leiji Matsumoto - have been as good, or better, although their work is generally much less voluminous and varied in genre and theme. (Nagai and Miyazaki come close on that latter, especially Miyazaki’s animation work.)
Nobody can deny how much they and most other manga-ka owe to Tezuka. But his influence doesn’t lessen the skill and artistry of those who came later. Tezuka himself stood on the shoulders of giants, and would never have denied it.
I just have to say that though you might find it confusing and annoying, it’s not pointless fanboyism. Cartoonists construct their pages with things like direction in mind, and reversing pages for Western audiences totally obliterates carefully-constructed compositions and narratives. It’s not just something people are doing to pretend they’re Japanese; it’s one of the most important things you can possibly preserve in sequential art.
As far as your question…
I think this is kind of like asking if there are any American comics that compare to the work of Jack Kirby or Will Eisner. On one hand, yes, there’s a ton of similar stuff. On the other hand, no, nobody compares to them.
I have a hard time seeing how this can be argued, honestly. Every time I’ve seen an image flipped it has looked strange to me, and that’s before the questions about intentionally messing up an artist’s work.
But this gives me a good idea to segue into my recommendation in this thread!
Books of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s work have recently been reprinted, and I think they’re honestly fantastic. As far as your concern with reading right to left, the books have actually been reconstructed panel by panel so that the story can read left-to-right without needing to flip any images. They’re wonderful books, and some of the best storytelling in manga I can think of. I won’t pretend to be a manga buff for as much as I enjoy it, but Tatsumi’s stories just feel so literary and chilling. I don’t think it would be very fair to compare his work to Osamu Tezuka’s, but he’s truly great.
Not at all, if you think everyone in Japan is left handed, and have breakfast at 4AM.
Or don’t mind having the art retouched by different artists (to at least fix clocks, signage, T-Shirt slogans, computer displays, etc).
Or don’t care that the artist put EXACTLY what they want on the page, which includes where elements are in relation to each other.
rikc - Dark Horse did the same to Hiroaki Samura’s Blade of the Immortal - at Samura’s request, because he didn’t want his art altered by flopping it, and it started publication in 1996, well before the companies got the hint.
By the way, I don’t want to turn this into a big debate, but are you aware that comic book art is reduced several times its original size before going to print? I think that does a lot more to its integrity than mirror-imaging it. I don’t think you could tell the difference unless you saw the original. I’ve made some comic strips of my own and done a lot of tooling around in Photoshop, and I’ve mirror-imaged a ton of stuff. It doesn’t make a difference as long as you do the whole image.
On Preview:
Well, they’re already in there to change the lettering and sound effects . . .
They do this anyway, to change them to English. I don’t think an artist poor enough to let his changes be noticed would get the job in the first place.
Ok, that one I can understand/appreciate. Still, give it to me the way I’ve read every book my entire life and make a note in the introduction in the incredibly rare case that this comes up.
Are American books that printed in Japan printed our way or theirs?
I had a long reply written up, but lost it in a power flicker, so for now, I’ll just address this point.
There are 3 parts to the answer to this…
For the most part, they don’t. There is a VERY small market for translated American comics in Japan - Japan’s home grown comics industry is nowhere near as anaemic and dominated by a single genre as the American, so they really don’t need to look elsewhere.
To the extent that they are, I can’t say firsthand how they’re handled, but a rather frustrating Google search indicates that Japanese translations of American comics, in fact, are unflopped. And have been since the 70s. Jive American Comics, the only modern translator I can find, uses the same cover art as the American editions (where such exists), but that doesn’t mean too much.
Even if they weren’t, that would just mean that the Japanese publishers were ignoring the artist’s intent and didn’t care about the art’s integrity, not that American translators were giving into fanboy wank.
I’m very familiar with how comics are produced, yes. That’s not the same thing. Cartoonists create their pages keeping in mind that their artwork will be reduced in size. There are all kinds of techniques that are used specifically because they’ll look better once the page is a bit smaller.
Simply flipping the pages totally destroys the artist’s intended effect. It would be like watching a movie where every single frame had been reversed.
Sorry for writing a long post about that. Someone can open another thread about mirror-imaging if they are interested enough. I just want to talk about Tezuka.
I haven’t read much manga (though I am slowly changing that as my finances allow), but the one of Tezuka’s that I read was truly a standout work. A little darkly glittering gem by the name of MW, I was blown away by the fact that Tezuka didn’t shy away from anything in his writing.
I’m assuming that Tezuka was his family name. My basis for this assertion s that it’s always written “Osamu Tezuka” on the English language versions, and us Westerners are known for writing things in firstname - lastname format.
On a side note, I think it’s funny that people complain about the reversing of manga to suit Western readers, but nobody thinks anything of the fact that we say Japanese names backwards. If my assumption is correct, it should be Tezuka Osamu!