when Japanese comics become an art

It is one of the best-known Japanese prints: The great wave of Kanagawa, by the painter Hokusai (1760-1849), whose foaming crest, like a thousand hooked claws, threatens the poor rowers bent in their skiffs. It’s impossible not to think of this Japanese icon when we want to talk about the manga wave that has swept through France over the past thirty years.

Today, these small volumes of black and white comics represent more than one in ten books sold in France. But for the majority of our fellow citizens, they constitute a little-known continent. Vulgar and outrageous drawings, violent universes, endless stories… these works are accused of all evils which – to heighten their complexity – can be read backwards! This widens the gap between manga readers and those who understand nothing about it. Today, The Pilgrim highlights two possible meeting grounds.

Manga, an art

“Our ambition is to show, through the dialogue between contemporary manga and works of art or ancient objects, that successful series and their characters have deep roots in Japanese history and culture,” explains Didier Pasamonik, co-curator of the “Manga. Quite an art! » visible at the Guimet museum, in Paris. We can thus admire a wooden sculpture from the Edo period (17th-19th centuries) representing a nine-tailed fox (above) similar to the one worn in his body by the famous ninja apprentice Naruto (one of the best-selling series in France). Or an authentic “dragon ball” – named after another famous saga – which was offered by the shogun (military leader of Japan) to Napoleon III. We will also be surprised to discover that manga has never been impervious to Western culture, quite the contrary. We can even consider that the first mangaka (manga author) was French.

An intergenerational visit

Georges F. Bigot, who lived in Japan for around fifteen years at the end of the 19th century, founded the satirical magazine there Tôbaé, in which he sketched, with humor and respect, the society of the archipelago in the process of opening up to modernity. After the Second World War, Osamu Tezuka, nicknamed “the god of manga”, never missed an opportunity to pay tribute to Walt Disney who had profoundly influenced him. “It’s in Bambi that he drew on these large, disproportionate eyes which have become emblematic of Japanese comics,” explains Didier Pasamonik.

Through these examples and so many others, “Manga. Quite an art!” therefore succeeds in its challenge of offering a common field of exploration to fans of Japanese comics and lovers of art and history who have never read them. The opportunity for a great intergenerational visit.

Barefoot people

Le Tripode publishes the 10 volumes of a manga that has not been found for a long time in France and which nevertheless constitutes an essential milestone in the history of comics. This series recounts the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and the hard years of reconstruction that followed the capitulation of Japan, through the eyes of young Gen, the author’s alter ego, himself a survivor of the nuclear disaster.

It is therefore a true historical testimony, tragic, chilling, but of incomparable force, on a central event of the 20th century from the point of view of the victims. If you only had to read one manga – and you had your heart set – this could be it.