COMICS AROUND THE WORLD / DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MANGA AND COMICS

Comics are nowadays considered a “universal language” due to the fact that, in time, British and American comics have influenced different parts of the globe such as Europe and Japan. They are accepted as an art form on the same level with novels, movies and television.

            As previously mentioned,  in France comics were christened "Bds'', or "bandes dessinées'', a term for "drawn strips''; Spanish comics, or "tebeos'' take their name from TBO, one of the founding picture papers; the Italians call them "fumetti'', literally "little smokes'', after their visualization of speech balloons.

The biggest and most important Continental European  comics character was  the 1920’s Belgian character  Tintin.  It was created in 1929, by Georges Rémi. It started to go on sale in Britain from 1958, reprinted by Methuen and then shelved in bookshops and public libraries. Tintin was always assumed to be a juvenile audience. Today, albums still sell in the order of three million per year, and appear in thirty-six different languages. As Roger Sabin states in Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels:

Hergé, [the pseudonim of Rémi], who died in 1990, is now recognized as having had an impact on European comics and as being one of the most important creators in the history of the medium. (218)

The enormous impact of Tintin established a template that other titles would follow: “Asterix the Gaul” was the creations of the artist Albert Uderzo and the writer René Goscinny.

These comics were first published in 1959  in  a magazine called Pilote; later they were collected into albums,  translated into different languages and sold internationally in bookshops.

Due to the continuous and increasing interest in the field a comics culture was established and so  universities set up courses on comics, new fields of research began to appear such as comic studies (discussed later in the paper)  and governments began funding huge comics museums and study centers, such as the 8 million-pound CNBDI in France. Even President Mitterand  was known to be an avid fan of the genre.

This boom in mature comics eventually  influenced the development of comics across the English Channel and then across the Atlantic Ocean. However a rigurous sellection was made when speaking about money. Only the best or most “sellable”' work was translated.

On the British and American markets, science fiction was the genre that attracted most of the readers, due to its affinity with the English language comics tradition. Metal Hurlant was the most appreciated Continental European magazine which had most of the stories published and translated for the anglophone teritories. After Hergé, Jean Giraud (whose pseudonim was Mobius) was the most important science fiction author, whose comics sold best in the British Isles and the U.S.

Other  important creators were  Enki Bilal, a Yugoslavian living in Paris, with his  Gods in Caos and The Woman Trap, the French Philippe Druillet with his Lone Sloane stories, the German Matthias Schultheiss and the British  Don Lawrence

There were several genres published among which the most important were the historical dramas created by the Belgian Hermann The Towers of Bois Maury, the Italian Hugo Pratt with Corto Maltese albums and  Frenchman Jacques Tardi with The War of the Trenches. Other genres were humorous from the  Belgian, Benoit Sokal with Shaggy Dog Story, Spanish Peter Pank, by Max and Italian  Squeak the Mouse, by Mattioli.  Thrillers such as Enki Bilal`s and  Pierre Christian`s , The Hunting Party and The Ranks of the Black Order,  or Jacques Tardi`s Nestor Burma and Adele and the Beast series, or  Sinner, by Jose Munoz and Carlos Sampayo were highly appreciated.

Sex albums were marketed as "Eurotica'', the most popular creators were both Italian: Milo Manara with his albums Butterscotch, and Click!, and Guido Crepax`s Emmanuelle and The Story of O. Frenchman Georges Pichard also created an album  named Candide at Sea in 1977 (later known as Illustrated Kama Sutra)

Japanese comics (or "manga'') were developed later than those in Britain and America. In Japan, the manga industry was at first concentrated on what it considered to be its only audience: children.  In the 1950s, manga could be rented from pay-libraries for a few yen, and this made them a staple of post-war children's reading. However, in time, manga developed so much that it did not attracted only children but adults as well. So, new themes had to be created. Below there are enlisted the major types of manga as Tamra Orr, in his book, The Manga Artist shows:

Boys' comics ("shonen'') include subject matter such as action battle, sports, science fiction and fantasy, while girls' titles ("shoji'') focuses more on romance, comedy and drama stories. Besides those there are also other types of manga such as: Kodomo Manga (for little kids), seijin manga (for male adults) dealing with business, crime, political drama, history and military adventures, redikomi manga (for female adults) dealing with work, family and romance, doujinshi manga written by amateurs  or yonkoma manga traditional four panel comic stripes like those found in the newspapers. (9)

In a short period of time a great industry was developed  and, by the mid-1990s it was estimated that between thirty and forty per cent of all Japanese publishing was devoted to manga, with sales in the region of a staggering two billion per year.

Due to the different conventions between manga and comics,  translations from Japanese received great attention. Some of the most important manga publications are Get of Hiroshima by Keiji Nakazawa (Edu-comics, 1980), Lone Wolf and Cub by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima (First, 1987) and Goodbye by Yoshihiro Tatsumi (Catalan 1987). 

At one point, manga was seen complicated for the Western audience. However, due to the popularity of anime shows, Japanese publishers began thinking of ways to export manga. They began producing manga and anime which heavily relied each other, becoming largely intertwined. Like manga, anime was at first aimed solely at children. Eventually, teenagers and adults became interested, and the market expanded. Among the animes that were exported in the West, the most notable are Astro Boy Marine Boy,  Transformers, and Akira. In the end, the two genres became so popular that they were sold next to each other in comic shops.

Other genres prospered as well. Golgo 13 by Takao Saito, a thriller about a contemporary assassin who travels the world in search of his prey, was very popular. Also, Crying Freeman by Kazuo Koike and Ryoichi Ikegami, another story about an assassin, who rises to become the head of the Chinese mafia, was well-received by the public.

Humour too, made an impact. Rumiko Takahashi ("the manga princess“ as her fans called her) created  Urusei Yatsura, the story of a young boy who falls in love with the leader of an alien invasion. Even educational comics were translated, such as Japan Inc (University of California Press, 1989) by Ishinomori Shotaro, which attempted to teach economics.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MANGA AND COMICS

Manga                                                                  Comics

Printed in black and white, except for the                     Printed in full color

occasional color story at the beginning

Weekly magazine printed on recycled paper                Printed on high cost paper for

                                                                                      covers and interiors

First published weekly or monthly,                               Published as stand-alone issues        

before being compiled into thick book form

Released on a weekly basis                                       Publishers try to release their titles

                                                                                   on a  regular monthly basis

Purchased at newsstands, bookstores,                       Purchased at certain book stores                                                                                                    

candy shops, gift shops, train stations                       or comic book shops; very difficult to

                                                                                   order from  catalogues

Emphasis placed on line                                            Emphasis placed on form

Different placement of the storytelling and

panel placement

Impressionistic backgrounds with sequences            Contains sequences where the panel shows                                                                                      

where the panel shows details of the setting              details of the characters

rather than the characters.

Panels and pages read from right to left .                  Panels read from left to right

WRITTEN BY RUXANDRA MANEA

EDITED BY ANTONIA GIRMACEA AND MADALINA BORCAU