5by8, #2: Watching Anime, Reading Manga
originally written for and posted on Comicsnob.com [Dec ’06 – May ’08]
(I snagged this week’s title from a book by Fred Patton. It’s a good book, for what it is; sometimes it comes across as a bit dry, particularly when he is covering, say, the origin and progress of the Japan-o-phile fan press in the 70s. Outside of the title, that book has nothing to do with today’s column)
I’m not sure how most fans get introduced to manga. I get the feeling most are introduced to the format by friends, or they happen to see manga paperbacks shelved next to graphic novels in the bookstore, or they accidentally wander into the manga section at their local comic store. In my own case, I was hooked on the TV stuff long before I sought out the printed media.
I’m an 80s vintage fan (gateway drug: Robotech) as opposed to recent Cartoon Network inductees, or those brave pioneers of the 60s & 70s who had to make due with Speed Racer and Astro Boy. The handy aspect of my own unintentional timing is that my resurgent interest in anime coincided with a rise in both my disposable income and the unprecedented increase in the availability of anime (and manga) here in the States.
I was working the back room at a local outlet of one of the large chain bookstores when I was really struck by the appeal of manga. At that point, three years ago, I had just reacquainted myself with anime (by way of Cowboy Bebop and a brand new Netflix subscription) so you could say I was primed for what was to follow:
One day at work, I opened up a box, and there to hand was Vol. 1 of Planetes. I didn’t buy it right away. (in fact, I didn’t buy it for two years) But my thought, that day three years ago, was “Cool. Manga.”
Heck, I may not even have been pronouncing it correctly back then. But that was the first itch I couldn’t scratch; the bug had bitten me.
My first manga purchase came 18 months or so later, and it was because of an anime: I had just finished watching Comic Party on DVD, and enjoyed the characters, and the premise. And I vaguely remembered seeing the manga at work, so the next day I looked it up.
One thing about Comic Party (the manga): The main character gets brained by a friend of his with a nail-studded baseball bat on page 4 of volume one. So even just browsing the book in the store, I hit that page and started laughing. And I bought it.
That was the top of a long slippery slope. I’ve bought a lot of manga since. (thanks be to several gods for my much-treasured employee discount) Roughly half of those have some sort of anime tie-in, though the deeper into the medium I find myself, the less I’ll buy something just because of an anime. More often now, I’ll buy something based on the artist, or the cover art. Or on a whim, really.
Not all anime is based on manga, but quite a bit of it is. And on the flip-side, some manga are based on anime: Cowboy Bebop was an extremely popular anime series before it ever made the jump to print, and it spawned not one but two manga series.
At the risk of sounding biased–oh, OK, I’ll admit it, I’m biased–there is a visual culture in Japan that doesn’t have a ready counterpart here in America. Over there, a popular comic series will be turned into a televised cartoon, usually within just a year or two of it’s initial release, done with all seriousness and with all due care (and while it’s still popular). Here in the States, production companies are more likely to take a long-established property that may or may not still be relevant, and turn it into a Hollywood star-studded schlock-fest that may or may not be watchable, depending on the studio and the director.
Best case scenario: Burton’s Batman. Worst case scenario: Schumacher’s Batman & Robin.
As counterpoint, and more relevant to the current discussion, I’d like to pull in Batman – The Animated Series from Bruce Timm & Paul Dini. These episodes are not only better by far than at least two-thirds of the Batman films, they also managed to be better for a half-hour each week for over four years.
This is par for the course in Japan (I say in a gross generalization): anime adaptations of manga will be more like Timm/Dini-style Bats than just about anything else. I’m not saying it’s all golden. It’s just that they do things right a hell of a lot more often than Hollywood can manage.
And the joy in watching good cartoons often translates into a joy in reading the same in printed form. If nothing else, it’s nice that the two formats feed into each other. I don’t know if the film versions of Fantastic Four and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen happened to do anything for their respective print properties.
I watch anime. I read manga. It’s all part of the same obsession. From my perspective, it can occasionally be hard to separate the two. If, in future reviews, I happen to mention the anime version of a particular property, I hope you will forgive me. It’s not that I feel that print comics are somehow lacking, I’m just bringing up another important aspect of the same expression, another part of the overall visual culture.
Actually, I find I prefer the print versions–I’ll re-read a manga much more readily than I re-watch DVDs. Which works out really well for this site…
