[The following special feature appears in Shards #9 and Blood of Ten Chiefs #18. Note that the 2 photographs (and corresponding captions) originally printed with this feature are not included in this archive. --MK]
Friday, October 28.
We talked about comics, is what. And more to the point we not only talked about, but also got politely grilled about, the differences between the United States and Japan with respect to comic books - how they are created and produced, how comic book artists are treated, who publishes comics and who reads them. It was an eye-opener.
I wonder how many manga fans here in the U.S. know what Japanese comics really look like. If all you've seen are reprints, produced in the same comic-book-sized format as their American counterparts, then you haven't seen a Japanese comic book. (In fact, I can't recall ever seeing a single example of what we're used to in this country anywhere over there.) If you want to envision a typical manga offering, take the phone directory to any decent-sized city, and cut it down to about 7 by 9 inches in size. Don't lose any of the pages, though! Now imagine all those pages - printed for the most part on the same cheap paper and with probably the lowest-end printing you can conceive (I am reminded of the mimeographed fanzines that used to flourish in comics fandom, years ago) - filled with dozens of stories that run the gamut from romance to horror to western to science fiction to childrens' stories to sports to business... Now imagine that this several-hundred page "brick" is on sale for the princely sum of about $4.00. By this point in my crash-course education into manga, I was starting to get a headache.
Of course, the reason Japanese comics are so inexpensive is that they're so plentiful. Let's say that, as an optimistic estimate, there are half a million comics fans in the U.S. With a national population of over 250,000.000 souls, that means that two-tenths of one percent of Americans read comic books. Japan has a population roughly half that of this country. Any ideas on how many of them read manga? Oh, estimates vary, but to say that some 80% of the population do so would not be out of line. You do the math. I did, and my headache got real big. No wonder manga artists are as revered as rock or movie stars!
However it happened, comic books in America got tagged as kiddie stuff early on and, in the 1950s, they got tarred as being bad for kids on top of it. Even now, four decades later, despite every critical stride made by comics books, they are still either totally ignored or barely tolerated by the overwhelming majority of folks in this country.
One of the stops on our working tour was Kodansha, Ltd., a major publisher of manga - you could say, on the scale of a Marvel Comics or a DC Comics. It was a beehive of activity, people and paper flying this way and that, a sense of productive tension in the air. "Here's where we put together the weekly manga for the teenagers," our guide directed us. Weekly?! "And over here is where we produce the magazines for young children. You can see by the little number in the corner what age the manga is for." Oh, right. Here are the books for 6 and 7-year-olds, and the fours... and the twos... and the zeroes?!? "You make comics for new- borns?" I asked. "Oh yes," came the reply, "The parents read to the children as soon as they're born."
(I hope that, over the years, my passion for reading has come through the bits I've written and spoken about. Getting this direct a comparison between how two different cultures view the role of the family with respect to reading was a shock. By now there wasn't enough aspirin in the world to help my skull.)
Later, Will and Annie, Brian and Stine, and Wendy and I sat down with representatives from several manga publishing houses. While the atmosphere of the meeting was very polite, it was clear that they wanted to know how to sell more books in the U.S. That our comic book audience is so small perplexed them, I think, as does our bizarre preoccupation with superhero comics, which is a minuscule part of the Japanese output. Being the only U.S. publisher in the crowd, I felt many pairs of eyes on me, looking for the explanations - and having nothing more than my own opinions and experiences to offer, I shed what light I could. I hope there was some light, and not just heat.
But oh, what I would give to have the kind of audience that they take for granted over there...
To be continued...
[NOTE: Actually, it turns out that this was the last chapter of "Gaijin" to be published; it was never continued from this point. --MK ]