By Shaenon K. Garrity
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All the Comics in the World
By Shaenon K. Garrity
Recently I've had some discussions about teaching classes in manga and its place in the comics medium, and my first thought, of course, is of all the awesome manga I could force my students to read. On reflection, though, it's hard to narrow the list down. Even if one sticks to the manga available in official English translation, there's a huge body of work out there, representing a dizzying array of subjects, genres and styles. It's not like the old days when people had maybe heard of
Lone Wolf and Cub.
This tentative, already overlong list is a survey of the manga that define manga: not necessarily the best manga of all time, although they're all excellent, but the titles that best illustrate the development of manga from the 1950s onward. Even by that metric, the list is far from complete (No gag strips! Hardly any modern alternative manga!), but if you read these you'll start to get an idea of what manga is all about.
Ten Defining Manga
1. Dororo and Phoenix, by Osamu Tezuka
Okay, I opened with a tie. Sue me. So much of the God of Manga's work is available in English, thanks largely to the good people at Vertical, that it's impossible to pick just one title. The breezy three-volume
Dororo, about a medieval Japanese warrior fighting to retrieve parts of his body that were stolen at birth by demons (it's not Tezuka if the plot isn't at least a little bit deranged) is Tezuka the children's storyteller at his best, while the epic
Phoenix, bouncing back and forth through history, is probably the best of his adult-oriented work. Both series, coincidentally, were unfinished at the time of Tezuka's death. If you only read one volume of Tezuka, not a course of action I recommend, make it
Phoenix Volume 4, "Karma."
Other defining old-school shonen (boys') manga: Tezuka's
Black Jack, Shotaro Ishinomori's
Cyborg 009.
2. Andromeda Stories, by Keiko Takemiya
I almost gave this slot to Moto Hagio's
A,A', my all-time favorite manga, but I might as well admit that it's been out of print for so long it's effectively unavailable in English. At least until Fantagraphics releases Hagio's
A Drunken Dream this fall, the boundary-pushing, gender-bending, sci-fi-loving side of shojo (girls') manga will be represented by Keiko Takemiya's glorious space opera. Takemiya is one of the key members of the "Year 24 Group," a loose collection of women cartoonists who revolutionized manga in the 1970s. She and Hagio were friends, and together they created many of the essential elements of modern shojo manga, including, yes, the Boys' Love genre that's overtaken the industry like kudzu.
Other defining old-school shojo manga: the short-story collection
Four Shojo Stories (if you can find it), Yasuko Aoike's
From Eroica with Love.
3. Swan, by Kyoko Ariyoshi
Another Year 24 shojo classic and just a hands-down solid manga,
Swan is a combination romantic potboiler and grueling sports manga set in the world of ballet. If you weren't aware that ballet involved torturous training to rival the most over-the-top
Shonen Jump sports manga, you were never a prepubescent girl and never had your unformed young mind warped by the disturbing Powell and Pressburger movie
The Red Shoes, and also you haven't read
Swan. Correct this oversight as soon as you can, because the English edition was published by CMX, which just went under, and copies won't be cluttering the bargain bins of comic-book stores forever. Intense plot aside, it's one of the most beautiful comics ever drawn, with ornate collage layouts that would make Mucha weep.
Other defining shojo manga: Fuyumi Soryo's
Mars, Yumi Tamura's
Basara.
4. The Drifting Classroom, by Kazuo Umezu
When I visited Tokyo last year, the locals kept telling me about the times they'd spotted Kazuo Umezu, instantly recognizable in his "Where's Waldo?"-style striped shirt and frizzy perm, in public. "Kazz" is famous as the godfather of horror manga and one of the strangest people in Japan, which, as manga teaches us, is saying a lot. (He also created the popular gag comic
Makoto-chan.)
The Drifting Classroom, a grim yet batshit saga of survival in which an ordinary elementary school is inexplicably teleported to a monster-haunted wasteland, is his masterpiece. If you have any doubt that Japan is one fucked-up country, consider: this gruesome, relentlessly bleak horror comic ran in the mainstream children's magazine
Shonen Sunday, now best known as the place
Inu-Yasha comes from. Umezu's stiff art style only makes the whole thing creepier.
Other defining illustrations of how brilliantly, gloriously fucked-up Japan is: Go Nagai's
Devilman (if you can find it), Katsuhiro Otomo's
Akira.
5. The Push Man, by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Gekiga, adult-oriented alternative manga pioneered in the countercultural 1970s, are only just beginning to appear in English translation. Any of Tatsumi's three short-story collections—
The Push Man,
Abandon the Old in Tokyo, and
Good-Bye—provides a solid introduction to the genre. Tatsumi's stories of moon-faced little men surviving in oppressive urban jungles are half Will Eisner, half Robert Crumb, with the combined misanthropy and misogyny of both. If you're not excited by the prospect of reading three volumes of this gloomy material, you weren't a manga nerd in the early '90s, when True Believers pored over worn copies of the hard-to-find, clumsily translated Catalan edition of
Good-Bye and dreamed of reading more.
Other defining underground manga: Susumu Katsumata's
Red Snow, Junko Mizuno's
Pure Trance.
6. Oishinbo, by Tetsu Kariya and Akira Hanasaki
Another genre of manga underrepresented in English translation is the vast selection of titles for white-collar adults, often designed as perfect reading for a subway commute. Nowadays, casual manga readers in Japan are increasingly turning away from serial stories and toward four-panel gag strips (or ditching manga entirely for the distractions of smart phones and PSPs). But
Oishinbo (The Gourmet), ongoing since 1983, is one of the enduring manga for non-nerdy adult readers. Following the episodic quest of food writer Shirō Yamaoka to create "the ultimate menu," it teaches readers everything they need to know to be dedicated foodies. The recurring lesson: Japanese cuisine is better than every other cuisine, and traditional Japanese cuisine is best of all. If you want to know which wine will give you the mildest hangover and when matsutake mushrooms are in season, this is the manga to pack in your briefcase.
Other defining subway manga: Takao Saito's
Golgo 13.
7. Dr. Slump, by Akira Toriyama
Akira Toriyama's
Dragon Ball might be
the exemplary manga. By far the most popular manga of all time in Japan, it drove the entire manga industry in the 1990s, jacking sales of
Shonen Jump magazine up to six million copies a week. But
Dr. Slump, Toriyama's previous series, is way more fun to read, so I'm putting that one on the list. A goony adventure-comedy about a lecherous mad inventor and his super-strong little robot girl, it crackles with Toriyama's sheer love of drawing. He packs the pages with all his favorite stuff: cartoon animals, cartoon kids, sexy-cute women, weird vehicles,
Star Wars technology, poop. Why aren't all comics this entertaining? What is wrong with comics?
Other defining shonen manga: Eiichiro Oda's
One Piece, Rumiko Takahashi's
Urusei Yatsura.
8. Maison Ikkoku, by Rumiko Takahashi
Takahashi invented harem manga with
Urusei Yatsura and turned a generation of American preteens into
bishonen furry fans with
Inuyasha, but
Maison Ikkoku is her masterpiece: a gentle romantic comedy about a hapless would-be college student and his perennially thwarted relationship with his beautiful, lonely landlady. Ostensibly a love story,
Maison Ikkoku is really about growing up, becoming independent, and doing what it takes to be ready for a mature relationship. It's also a nice glimpse into ordinary Japanese life in the 1980s, puffy sweatshirts, tight jeans and all. Technically a seinin (young men's) manga, it's more mature than Takahashi's shonen work, albeit without much of the T&A that seinin readers usually expect from their romantic comedies.
Other defining seinin manga: Takehiko Inoue's
Vagabond, Hayao Miyazaki's
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (which is really uncategorizable, but oh well).
9. Antique Bakery, by Fumi Yoshinaga
Fumi Yoshinaga is one of the biggest rising stars of manga, and this is the title that made her career: a four-volume dramedy about a small patisserie and its staff of four hot, troubled men. Yoshinaga came out of the
yaoi scene, and her work incorporates elements of the genre—the handsome men, the homoerotic tease—into something new and remarkable. Her ambitious current series,
Ooku, set in an alternate feudal Japan run by women, is shaping into a masterpiece.
Other defining josei manga: Ai Yazawa's
Nana, Moyoco Anno's
Happy Mania.
10. A Drifting Life, by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
I didn't expect to have two Tatsumi titles on this list, but the venerable creator's backbreaking, thinly fictionalized autobiography fills many of the gaps in my limited survey of manga history. Tatsumi's stand-in starts his career by sending cartoons on postcards to kiddie magazines, poses as a housewife to win a manga contest judged by the creator of the beloved newspaper strip
Sazae-San, corresponds with the great pre-Tezuka graphic novelist Noboru Ōshiro, and meets Tezuka while the master is still a med student living with his parents. As an adult pro, he draws pulp manga and later helps found the
gekiga movement. Following the manga industry from the postwar period through the end of the
gekiga era,
A Drifting Life is the story of where manga came from and where it's going.
Other defining autobiographical manga: Keiji Nakazawa's
Barefoot Gen.
Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2010
