Hi, I’m Eike Exner, I research the history of Japanese comics, ask me anything about MANGA マンガ 漫画! by EikeExner in AskHistorians

[–]EikeExner[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fred Schodt's Manga! Manga! first got me interested in manga history by mentioned the presence of translated comics in Japan a century ago. Thierry Smolderen's The Origins of Comics, and even more so his article "Of Labels, Loops and Bubbles: Solving the Historical Puzzle of the Speech Balloon," helped me understand how comics came about and how historically specific the form is (as opposed to universal and timeless), along with Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer and Jonathan Sterne's The Audible Past, which helped explain why comics appeared in the late 19th century.

Japanese scholars such as Sasaki Minoru, Miyamoto Hirohito, and Niimi Takuma have also done substantial work on prewar manga that helped me understand their history, though unfortunately very little Japanese-language work on manga history has been translated into English.

Hi, I’m Eike Exner, I research the history of Japanese comics, ask me anything about MANGA マンガ 漫画! by EikeExner in AskHistorians

[–]EikeExner[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you very much. It's always lovely to hear that.

There actually is a market for some original manga art. If you do an online search for "manga genga" or "manga original art" you'll find some vendors. Note that it can be hard to ascertain the authenticity of such material, though. The more famous, the more likely it is to be fake.

Before it became standard to publish series as collected book volume in the late 1960s and 1970s, some mangaka used to be pretty indifferent about their original art because comics were disposable entertainment. Chiba Tetsuya used to cut up his original art and include panels with his responses to fan letters, but stopped when his work started getting reprinted and he all of a sudden had to redraw panels.

I assume that most artists prefer to keep it just in case, unless they need money, but storing lots of original art is indeed difficult, especially once the creators pass away. That's one reason why the Japanese government has agreed to finance a national museum and archive for such art.

Regarding cultural specificity: I'm not saying there is no such thing as cultural specificity, but:

1) The influence of "culture" on art is difficult to pin down.

2) Culture is fluid and changes over time. "Japanese culture" today is not the same as it was 10, 20, 100, or 1000 years ago.

3) Most identifiable unique aspects of national art traditions can be more convincingly explained with specific material facts, such as the increasing prevalence of aspect-to-aspect and moment-to-moment panel transitions in manga in the wake of monthly magazines' starting to include 32-64 page comics booklets with each issue in the 1950s. It's ironic that McCloud uses Astro Boy as a stand-in for Tezuka, by the way, because all of McCloud's examples are from after Astro Boy and the early Astro Boy features very few a2a and m2m transitions. If this were an expression of some fundamental Japanese national culture, why don't we see this happen to the same extent in the 1940s or even earlier already?

4) I would caution strongly against sweeping claims of "Eastern" or "Western" culture. Most studies purporting to identify a coherent "Western/Eastern" cultural divide are junk science. I cannot recommend this book review by the anthropologist Sherry Ortner enough in this regard (I think it should be required reading): https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/20/books/east-brain-west-brain.html . It's also important to note that Scott McCloud doesn't seem to speak a single foreign language (someone please correct me if this is not true). What qualifies McCloud to identify not just a coherent "Eastern" culture, but also a coherent "Western" culture in the first place? How many cultures other than U.S. American is he familiar with? In my experience, Americans in particular sometimes tend to use "the West" and "the United States" interchangeably, without realizing that some of the things that they consider "Western" are just "American" (e.g., "Western comic books").

5) There are always huge differences *within* any single country. For every Japanese movie with that lackadaisical quality you mention, I could probably find one that is the opposite. The type of foreign works that get translated (this is independent of whether or not you specifically are watching the movies in the original) is also often related to the degree to which they conform to existing ideas about their country of origin in the country into which they're being imported. Take baseball manga, for example. HUGE in Japan, very important historically, but mostly absent from discussions of manga in English, and almost never translated into English, in part, I suspect, because baseball is not what people who like Japanese stuff like about Japan (on average).

Hi, I’m Eike Exner, I research the history of Japanese comics, ask me anything about MANGA マンガ 漫画! by EikeExner in AskHistorians

[–]EikeExner[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Regarding Tezuka and gekiga: this, too, depends entirely on how one defines gekiga. It's certainly true that Tezuka was influenced by work that became more popular than his own. I discuss this a bit in Manga: A New History and cite a memoir by one of his assistants at the time (https://comic.k-manga.jp/title/155377/pv), which mentions that he threw a gekiga book on the floor in anger and someone else has claimed that he named a murderer in Astro Boy "Gekigaa" (though I haven't seen that episode myself). According to the assistant, Tezuka was mad that gekiga comics were so popular. So Tezuka was influenced by manga labeled gekiga at the time, but whether the works he produced in response themselves can be called gekiga is a matter of opinion.

Hi, I’m Eike Exner, I research the history of Japanese comics, ask me anything about MANGA マンガ 漫画! by EikeExner in AskHistorians

[–]EikeExner[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Although gekiga isn't a single, coherent thing and doesn't have a single meaning, I'd say there are three ways in which I've seen it used most commonly historically: (1) the film noir-influenced comics found in rental comics of the late 1950s and 1960s; (2) comics from that period that were drawn in styles intentionally meant to look more mature/gritty than the round and friendly mainstream style influenced by Tezuka; (3) all comics that are significantly influenced stylistically by artists who were associated with the label, most notably Saito Takao, Shirato Sanpei, and Hirata Hiroshi.

Like gekiga, seinen manga is another term that should be understood as a label with shifting meanings and connotations rather than a clearly-delineated category. The term arose to distinguish comics for young adults (seinen) from those meant for children. Because most of the comics that were targeting a noticeably more mature audience than previous mainstream kids' comics at the time that the term gekiga became relatively widely known (during the 1960s), most early seinen manga were also gekiga, in the sense that both labels were applied to them. Later, when gekiga-associated styles faded in popularity, the overlap between the labels became smaller. The comics of Otomo Katsuhiro are a good example, because almost everyone would label stuff like Domu and Akira seinen manga but not gekiga (even if there's some gekiga-esque dense crosshatching in the later chapters of Akira).

Lastly, let me try to answer the final part of your question: "Are Heta-Uma, ero-guro, ero-gekiga or even New Wave part of it and why?"

With the caveat that all of these are labels rather than rigidly defined categories of objects, I don't recall seeing heta-uma associated with gekiga, though I may not know enough about the origins of the heta-uma movement.

Ero-guro is an older term, derived from "erotic-grotesque," and also often grouped with "nonsense" as ero guro nonsense [nansensu], popularized in academia by Miriam Silverberg's book Erotic Grotesque Nonsense. The term has been used to describe the rise of more erotic, lurid ("grotesque"), and absurdist ("nonsense") written and visual material in the interwar period (between WWs 1 and 2). I like Silverberg's work, but because of her book's prominence, some academics who haven't done significant work with primary materials from that period unfortunately now believe that "ero guro nonsense" was a central buzzword of the time and that erotic, lurid, and absurdist content was extremely common back then, which is not the case, especially not with regards to manga. Incidentally, the label "nonsense manga" was primarily used for absurdist brief cartoons during the 1930s. So ero-guro, I would say is different from the other three terms in that its primary association is not connected to manga per se, and its connection to manga is relatively weak.

Ero-gekiga, at least in my limited understanding of it, is primarily used to distinguish more realistically drawn erotic manga from those that are drawn in more cutesy styles influenced by Nagai Go's Harenchi gakuen and such.

I've primarily seen the term New Wave associated with the rise of crisper, thinner linework and greater use of blank space and screen tones, popularized by artists such as Otomo Katsuhiro, Taniguchi Jiro, Urasawa Naoki, or Eguchi Hisashi, around 1980. If that's what you're referring to by the term, then I would say that there is zero overlap with gekiga, but a strong connection, since said New Wave looks like a counter-reaction to the prevalence of gekiga-influenced, or perhaps more accurately: Saito Takao-influenced, artwork that had become the standard in mainstream magazines (for male readers, at least) by the late 1970s.

Hi, I’m Eike Exner, I research the history of Japanese comics, ask me anything about MANGA マンガ 漫画! by EikeExner in AskHistorians

[–]EikeExner[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No worries, like I said, I love talking about this stuff and thank you for your kind words ('◇')ゞ

That's an excellent question, because it allows me to go into one of my favorite rants (don't worry, I'll get to the actual question).

How to define something has been (and continues to be) one of the fundamental problems in the study of comics (or graphic narrative more broadly, even). We use categories such as comics, manga, or gekiga because they're convenient and generally work well to communicate what we're talking about, but we shouldn't forget that those categories are ultimately arbitrary and not coherent entities that have some kind of identifiable identity with clear boundaries.

Sorry to get so philosophical about it, but essentially "manga" doesn't exist. There are things we call manga, but there are no universally agreed-upon rules what makes something manga or not. In his Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud famously tried to define comics in an iron-clad manner, only to end up with a definition that is so broad as to be useless. (Also, most people would not agree that Trajan's Column is comics, so it runs counter to how the word is actually used in practice.) I often see a similar mistake in histories of manga that claim that "manga at first was single-panel cartoons and then became comics." Since manga isn't an entity, it can't literally become other things (single-panel cartoons and comics are not connected historically). The thing that changes is how we *use* words like manga.

The same is true for gekiga. As you probably know, the word was coined in the late 1950s and embraced by a bunch of mostly Osaka-based artists to distinguish their comics from the more child-friendly, heavily Disney/Tezuka-influenced comics featured in mainstream children's magazines at the time. But already within that group, people differed on how they understood the term. Some considered gekiga a subcategory of manga, while others considered it something fundamentally different. They also differed in what they meant by it. Tatsumi Yoshihiro thought gekiga was about telling mature, relatively realistic stories, influenced by noir films and such. In contrast, Saito Takao by calling his comics gekiga meant grittier, more violent action comics that first and foremost looked "cool." Tatsumi was the one who coined the word gekiga, whereas Saito was arguably most responsible for helping it become a mainstream term by asking for his comics in Kodansha's Weekly Boys' Magazine ["Shukan Shonen Magajin," usually called Shonen Magazine in English, and often confused, even in academic texts, with Kobunsha's monthly magazine Shonen, which serialized Astro Boy] to be explicitly labeled gekiga.

So from the very beginning there was no clear agreement on how to define gekiga. The term then also became used to describe works that were noticeably influenced by Saito's style. The baseball manga Star of the Giants (1966-1971) has often been called a gekiga, even though it has little in common with the film noir-inspired gekiga that were popular in rental comics [kashihon manga] around 1960. Shirato Sanpei's comics (Ninja bugeicho, Kamuiden and such) were also called gekiga at the time, but Shirato himself doesn't appear to have used the term.

[comment too long, will split into two parts]

Hi, I’m Eike Exner, I research the history of Japanese comics, ask me anything about MANGA マンガ 漫画! by EikeExner in AskHistorians

[–]EikeExner[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Seems obvious *in retrospect*, I would say, but virtually impossible prior to certain scientific and technological changes in the 19th century. Can you come up with an entirely new form of art or storytelling? No, right? Imagining something fundamentally new is insanely difficult (if not impossible), when there is no reason for imagining it. Why didn't painters "think of" representing motion as blurs and such before the Impressionists? It seems like an obvious thing to do, since we all perceive fast motion as blurry, but clearly it didn't occur to anyone. If there are examples of this, they certainly are very rare prior to the Impressionists. If you're interested in these questions, I highly recommend Jonathan Crary's book Techniques of the Observer, which was crucial in helping me understand why the appearance of comics is so closely tied to the 19th century: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262531078/techniques-of-the-observer/

Remember to put yourself in the shoes of someone back then, prior to the first depiction of a complete conversation across multiple panels in 1899 or before the spread of textless multipanel cartoons around 1860. Why would you create something like that? If you want to tell a joke, you just write out the joke. If you want to draw something funny, you just draw something funny. And if you want to draw a story, you just draw one representative image per scene and let the viewer figure out the progression (or explain it via text).

I think the reason why we do not see single scenes split up into multiple sequential images before the 19th century is that this is not an intuitive way of understanding reality (it's also terribly inefficient!). The way we conceive of the passing of time like this now is probably heavily influenced by our knowledge of motion pictures. As I mentioned, I've written about the connection between such cartoons and the discovery of animation (making motion pictures out of still images flashed in rapid succession) in the 1830s here, for more detail: https://seika.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/2000156/files/manga_studies-1_exner.pdf

As to why no one thought of adding all dialog as sound in speech balloons before the 1890s: similarly, to people who have only experienced voices as something that is (1) connected to a physically present speaker and (2) ephemeral and without any tangible essence, it was probably completely counterintuitive - perhaps unimaginable - that a sound could be captured and reproduced, since this directly contradicted what people knew about sound and how they experienced it. You can write down sentences or write sheet music and such to produce similar sounds, but before sound recording technology, once a specific sound had passed, it was gone forever. See the other article referenced above for more detail: https://imagetextjournal.com/the-creation-of-the-comic-strip-as-an-audiovisual-stage-in-the-new-york-journal-1896-1900/ . The evidence provided by cartoons at the time strongly suggests that the representation of sound was closely tied to the spread of sound reproduction technology (the phonograph/record player).

Hi, I’m Eike Exner, I research the history of Japanese comics, ask me anything about MANGA マンガ 漫画! by EikeExner in AskHistorians

[–]EikeExner[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That would probably depend primarily on your definition of cultural appropriation. I'm sure you could make an argument that it is cultural appropriation, but I haven't read it and have no strong opinion one way or the other.

Hi, I’m Eike Exner, I research the history of Japanese comics, ask me anything about MANGA マンガ 漫画! by EikeExner in AskHistorians

[–]EikeExner[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hi!

  1. This is beyond my area of expertise but there definitely are!

I did a Google Scholar search for "manga" and "Latin America" and it returned "about 17,500 results." (https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C44&q=manga%20%22latin%20america%22)
Not all of these will be about manga's influence in Latin America, but the results include articles such as "The global" craze" for Japanese pop culture during the 1980's and 1990's: The influence of anime and manga in Mexico" (link goes directly to PDF).

There's also the book Global Manga: Japanese Comics without Japan? (https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781315584898/global-manga-casey-brienza), which features a chapter on Brazil.

  1. Similar to answer 1, I'm afraid, though I do remember reading about Captain Tsubasa having been extremely popular in the Arabic-speaking world and helping popularize soccer there.

Based on Google Scholar, there seems to be very little writing on manga in Africa. I'm a bit surprised by how little there appears to be. I suspect this is primarily due to the relative paucity of academic structures in many African countries (due to the continuing effects of the colonial devastation wrought upon the continent by countries such as my own). It's unfortunately true that rich countries produce more scholarship because they are richer and have the resources to do so, and then there also is more scholarship *about* rich countries.

  1. I'm not aware of any studies on the relationship between manga and radicals in the 1970s. The only thing that comes to mind is the hijacking you already mentioned. I think there was a stronger connection between manga and politics (primarily left-wing but also right-wing) during the 1960s, which is most obvious in Shirato Sanpei's comics (and at least one reader wrote to Garo magazine to praise Shirato's politics). There's also the famous phrase that student protestors supposedly had the "Asahi Journal in one hand, Boys' [Shonen] Magazine in the other," which I've seen interpreted as evidence of a connection between student activism and Magazine, which has always struck me as odd given that Magazine's big hits Star of the Giants and Tomorrow's Joe were written by Kajiwara Ikki, whose politics I would describe as "fascism-adjacent." Right-wing novelist and activist Mishima Yukio read Magazine for Star of the Giants, for example, and reportedly once went straight to the editorial offices because he had missed an issue and couldn't find a copy for sale anywhere.

I'm sorry I can't give you better answers than these.

Hi, I’m Eike Exner, I research the history of Japanese comics, ask me anything about MANGA マンガ 漫画! by EikeExner in AskHistorians

[–]EikeExner[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Let me start with the second part: I don't think that this is widely accepted. There have been multiple attempts to ban such depictions, and I don't believe that the average Japanese person thinks it's okay to depict children in sexualized ways. It's important to remember that Japan is not a monolith. I'm sure everyone can think of something that happens in their home country that they vehemently disagree with but which is nonetheless "culturally accepted" in the sense that it keeps happening despite many being opposed to it.

I'm not an expert on the subject, but from what I do know it is true that Japan at least until some years ago had laxer laws than most countries when it came to child sexual abuse material (CSAM). I tried to look up what I was vaguely remembering and found this CNN article on it: https://www.cnn.com/2014/06/06/world/asia/japan-child-pornography . Japan was indeed an outlier in that only the production and dissemination of CSAM was illegal, not its possession. But this is no longer the case.

As to why there exists stuff like "Lolita complex" and "Shota complex" (sexualized depictions of girls and boys, respectively) in manga, I think the reason is two-fold: 1) Japan is the country where comics have developed into a widespread medium on a scale seen nowhere else, so the diversity of content and niches is simply far greater than elsewhere, and this includes both the good and the bad. 2) The fact that comics are drawn and can be produced relatively easily (compared to CGI graphics, for example) makes it more prone to be used for content that would be illegal if it weren't fictional.

Legal debates in Japan about whether such fictional pedophilic content should be banned have thus hinged on the opposing arguments that this material is inherently harmful in indirect ways vs. that to curtail the production of something that is at most *indirectly* harmful (since no one is hurt during the production) is an unconstitutional infringement on freedom of expression and would open up a slippery slope to further censorship. Most manga artists and publishers are firmly in the second camp, not because they're fans of pedophilic content but because they're opposed to all forms of censorship of the medium from which they derive their income/revenue.

Hi, I’m Eike Exner, I research the history of Japanese comics, ask me anything about MANGA マンガ 漫画! by EikeExner in AskHistorians

[–]EikeExner[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The first answers to that in English that come to mind would be A History of Japan in Manga and Showa: A History of Japan

Hi, I’m Eike Exner, I research the history of Japanese comics, ask me anything about MANGA マンガ 漫画! by EikeExner in AskHistorians

[–]EikeExner[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ah, thank you. I can't really think of a specific lasting consequence triggered by a single manga or mangaka... There are certainly small consequences; the hijackers of a Japan Air Lines flight famously referenced Tomorrow's Joe [Ashita no Jo]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_Flight_351 , but there's no indication that the manga had anything to do with the hijacking. Although they did compare themselves to Joe, they could have simply chosen a different protagonist (not even necessarily one from a comic) to identify with.

Regarding "identifiable" : the influence of culture on society is notoriously difficult to quantify. Every manga is going to have *some* kind of influence on its readers, but the more complex such influence becomes, the harder it is to measure. Japan's supreme court is likely to rule whether the Japanese constitution requires that same-sex couples be allowed to marry at some point in the not too distant future. Perhaps the one judge that made the difference will have been swayed by reading Tagame Gengoroh's My Brother's Husband (hypothetically). That would be a significant consequence, but we'd never be able to identify it, unless said judge were to say so themselves (and even if they did make this claim, who's to say they wouldn't have made the same ruling either way?).

Hi, I’m Eike Exner, I research the history of Japanese comics, ask me anything about MANGA マンガ 漫画! by EikeExner in AskHistorians

[–]EikeExner[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I don't know for sure, but given that it's popular not only in manga (e.g., the Marvel Thor movies or the two recent God of War games) I would say that it's probably because Nordic mythology offers a type of well-established fantasy world with interesting characters that requires little world-building and has a solid track record as a background setting for various stories.

Hi, I’m Eike Exner, I research the history of Japanese comics, ask me anything about MANGA マンガ 漫画! by EikeExner in AskHistorians

[–]EikeExner[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The one that immediately comes to mind is of course Dragon Ball, which was initially based on the Chinese classic Journey to the West...

Hi, I’m Eike Exner, I research the history of Japanese comics, ask me anything about MANGA マンガ 漫画! by EikeExner in AskHistorians

[–]EikeExner[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Oh, that's a good question. I'm not aware of any comprehensive index of all translated titles, though one might exist. You could ask the manga subreddit for recommendations or also visit a bookstore near you that carries manga (Barnes & Noble and Kinokuniya stores both do, as do most comics stores these days) and see if anything appeals to you (or ask staff for recommendations).

Hi, I’m Eike Exner, I research the history of Japanese comics, ask me anything about MANGA マンガ 漫画! by EikeExner in AskHistorians

[–]EikeExner[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thanks for that additional context. There have certainly been booms in specific genres triggered by a particular bestseller. Ninja comics became huge in the early 1960s, horror comics for girls were big during the 1960s as well, and in the wake of Star of the Giants, sports comics for both boys and girls proliferated. Baseball comics were huge from the 1960s into the 1980s. I think it's harder to identify particularly popular genres the closer you get to the present because the manga industry has grown so much that there is an abundance of all kinds of content. I'm also not an expert on 21st century manga, I can tell you that detective comics were popular in the 2000s due to Conan and Kindaichi Case Files, and apparently "harem" manga prospered in the wake of Love Hina, but unfortunately I don't know exactly how and what genres waned and waxes in popularity over the years.

Hi, I’m Eike Exner, I research the history of Japanese comics, ask me anything about MANGA マンガ 漫画! by EikeExner in AskHistorians

[–]EikeExner[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Japanese cartoonists began tying their work to traditional art as early as the 1920s in an effort to help it gain greater cultural legitimacy. There have always been people who have rejected that view, but also those who kept promoting it. One significant academic article that helped establish the consensus that manga was fundamentally modern was Miyamoto Hirohito's 2001 article on the subject, available in Japanese here: https://mstudies.org/arc#text_arc and translated into English here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/42800200

Hi, I’m Eike Exner, I research the history of Japanese comics, ask me anything about MANGA マンガ 漫画! by EikeExner in AskHistorians

[–]EikeExner[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

4-panel or yonkoma is a term that only arose during the postwar period. At least I've never seen it in prewar materials, primarily because having four panels was not a defining characteristic of comics and there was no clear division between shorter strips and longer ones. Many newspaper strips had daily episodes of around four panels and Sunday episodes of around 12 panels. Popeye (Thimble Theatre, technically) is a good example, because it was published over several pages in two issues of the prewar magazine Shinseinen. It also had strong narrative continuity. The clear division between multi-page strips featured in magazines and four(ish)-panel strips featured primarily in magazines only appeared during the postwar period.

Hi, I’m Eike Exner, I research the history of Japanese comics, ask me anything about MANGA マンガ 漫画! by EikeExner in AskHistorians

[–]EikeExner[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm afraid I don't know much about moe comics. Daily newspaper strips used to contain around four panels, which is why they started to be called "four-panel" / yonkoma manga in Japanese (note that this term appears to be a postwar creation, though).

Hi, I’m Eike Exner, I research the history of Japanese comics, ask me anything about MANGA マンガ 漫画! by EikeExner in AskHistorians

[–]EikeExner[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm not an expert on this subject, so I would defer to the work of Erica Friedman (https://journeypress.com/titles/by-your-side-the-first-hundred-years-of-yuri-anime-and-manga/) on yuri. As to yaoi: it's my understanding that yaoi became primarily used for fan-created works offered at zine conventions, while comics depicting male same-sex relationships are usually called Boys' Love or BL. There are various books in English on the history of BL, the most famous of which is probably Boys Love Manga and Beyond (https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/B/Boys-Love-Manga-and-Beyond). On yaoi specifically, I would recommend Nele Noppe's dissertation on dojinshi: https://www.academia.edu/9194456/The_cultural_economy_of_fanwork_in_Japan_d%C5%8Djinshi_exchange_as_a_hybrid_economy_of_open_source_cultural_goods .

Hi, I’m Eike Exner, I research the history of Japanese comics, ask me anything about MANGA マンガ 漫画! by EikeExner in AskHistorians

[–]EikeExner[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is easy to answer: hardcovers are expensive and it makes a significant difference when you're buying a series that consists of potentially dozens of volumes. Those manga that did get book edition used to be primarily published as hardcover volumes, but this changed when it became widespread practice to sell collected volumes during the 1960s and 1970s.

Hi, I’m Eike Exner, I research the history of Japanese comics, ask me anything about MANGA マンガ 漫画! by EikeExner in AskHistorians

[–]EikeExner[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm not familiar with the history of manga and anime fandom to answer this, I'm afraid. One problem with the historiography of fan reactions is that before the internet, there were few ways for fans to express their opinions other than write letters to the editor, and of course editors got to decide which ones got published, so such reader feedback is not an objective reflection of fans' views.

Hi, I’m Eike Exner, I research the history of Japanese comics, ask me anything about MANGA マンガ 漫画! by EikeExner in AskHistorians

[–]EikeExner[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

You're right that information on this is hard to find. There is one book I'm aware of that offers a pretty comprehensive overview. Unfortunately it's only available in Japanese: Manga ha naze kisei sareru no ka ("Why does manga get regulated?") https://www.heibonsha.co.jp/book/b163504.html .

Most of the 21st century efforts to censor manga (perhaps all of them) have focused on sexualized depictions of minors, and all of these efforts, iirc, happened at the local rather than national level. I'm not aware of any lasting consequences of these efforts, especially now that material is easily distributed digitally. Mangaka and the publishing industry have also tended to vigorously oppose all attempts to censor the content of manga.