Found -- Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater
Came out this past September; not surprisingly I completely missed it.
It only appears on my radar because of my charts; it’s one more reason to exhaustively research online graphic novel sales, and one more reward for the work. (this one lodged somewhere in the 900’s on Amazon — on their graphic novel chart so that’s the nine-hundred-and-nth book in a very small niche — might be so far down now that if I looked again today, I’d miss it entirely.)
but this is exactly what my ‘found’ category is for:
Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater
Eric P. Nash, with an introduction by Fred Schodt, Abrams ComicsArts, isbn 9780810953031
from the publisher:
Before giant robots, space ships, and masked super heroes filled the pages of Japanese comic books—known as manga—such characters were regularly seen on the streets of Japan in kamishibai stories. Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater tells the history of this fascinating and nearly vanished Japanese art form that paved the way for modern-day comic books, and is the missing link in the development of modern manga.During the height of kamishibai in the 1930s, storytellers would travel to villages and set up their butais (miniature wooden prosceniums), through which illustrated boards were shown. The storytellers acted as entertainers and reporters, narrating tales that ranged from action-packed westerns, period pieces, traditional folk tales, and melodramas, to nightly news reporting on World War II. More than just explaining the pictures, a good storyteller would act out the parts of each character with different voices and facial expressions. Through extensive research and interviews, author Eric P. Nash pieces together the remarkable history of this art and its creators. With rare images reproduced for the first time from Japanese archives, including full-length kamishibai stories, combined with expert writing, this book is an essential guide to the origins of manga.
There are samples on the Abrams site, like this one:
Someone remind me to just check Abrams ComicArts once a month.
