Manga Mania Gets Its Big Museum Moment

0:01So manga has very long tentacles back to Japanese history. So some people say it starts in the 12th century with these hand scrolls, fantastic frolicking animals. You know, Bandinagon is probably one of the more famous ones, you know, when we're getting into the 13th century.

0:21I'm Ben Davis, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

0:32Manga is surely one of the most beloved and influential types of culture in the world. And while there's long been a thriving international fandom around Japanese graphic novels, in the last five years in particular, there's been a huge surge of popular interest, with manga impossible to miss in bookshops and comic stores, and now in museums too. Specifically, I'm referring to the big exhibition Art of Manga at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, which is proving to be a real event. As the title suggests, the show looks at manga not just as a cultural phenomenon, but as visual art, digging into the history of the medium and celebrating its dynamic, graphic, and storytelling style.

1:14Specifically, Art of Manga focuses on 10 Japanese creators selected to show the breadth of what manga has been and can be. What is the connection of manga to Japanese art history? What does a museum have to add to the story of manga? And what can the popularity of manga in turn teach art museums? The show's curator, Nicole Coolidge-Roumeniere, agreed to talk to us about all of this. Nicole, thank you for joining me to talk about the art of manga. Well, thank you for having me. So I'm very excited to talk to you about this show. But before we do, I want to talk a little bit about you, because I feel like you're a character in this show.

1:55Because I think people might wonder, how does one become a curator who specializes in manga? And it's really true because actually my specialty is, in a way, decorative arts, traditional Japanese arts, and all of that. But my passion has always been manga. And it's just something that I've loved. And I learned Japanese through manga. And whenever I've had the chance, I've displayed manga. I mean, any of my positions I've been in, I was very lucky at the British Museum to be able to display manga in all sorts of different ways. And so, yes, it's become manga. But when I was very young, I went with my mother.

2:27We lived for a summer in France. What was I, eight or something like that? And I fell in love with Tantin and Asterix and all of the bandesinais and that kind of form. And I got - The comic form, yeah. The graphic novel form. Graphic novel form. And I got hooked. And coming back, I did American comics, American graphic novels, which I love. I still love. But when I went to Japan, started going to Japan in my teens and early 20s, that was it. And didn't you actually do a manga connected to the British Museum, something like that? Thank you. Thank you for recognizing that. That was really fantastic.

3:02The then director, Neil McGregor, I think maybe he knew that the Louvre were doing things with manga. I was teaching in Japan at the time, but affiliated with the British Museum. And he said, can I find a manga artist to create a manga of the British Museum. And it took me about a year, but I love Hoshino Yukinobu. I just think his drawings are extraordinary. And it took me a year to get access to him and to get him to agree. And he did. And when I came back working at the British Museum, we brought him and then I worked with him and Uchida Hiromi, and we worked to help him create Professor Munakata's British Museum adventures.

3:39It was fabulous. And that sort of begot this exhibition in 2019 at the British Museum of Manga Art, which was a pretty big deal, yeah? Yes, and there was one intermediary step. So that book came out in Japanese in 2010, and then in 2012 it came out in English through the British Museum Press. And then in 2015, I did an exhibition of three generations of manga artists, a small one at the British Museum Free. 100 ,000 people came. It had a great reputation. And the British Museum said, well, why don't you pitch a large one? I don't know if they really knew that they were going to do it. But I pitched it.

4:19And eventually it went to kind of one of those services that checked popular demand, whether this would be a popular exhibition or not, along with a number of other exhibitions they had. and it came in as number one. Although there was still a lot of trepidation about it, they kindly said, yeah, go for it. And they gave us the biggest space and we did it relatively quickly, but it was a really fabulous historical look at manga. And it was a very British museum of manga, meaning that it was about the social ramifications, production. It wasn't about the art. It was more about what is manga, why manga.

4:55The culture and history of manga. Yes. Did that show help beget this show in San Francisco? Definitely. And just to mention with that show, it broke all sorts of records for the British Museum. I think that they were a little worried about it, but I think the worry evaporated. And what happened, and this is why it's coming to San Francisco, is that they saw a new demographic coming to the museum. So you get a whole range of particularly younger people, but all sorts from all different cultures, all different backgrounds. A large percent of the visitors had never been to the British Museum before.

5:26So that was a big surprise for the museum, something kind of wonderful. And it got the notice of Tom Campbell, who is the director here. And so he came out and visited it while I was there. And I took him through and he said, well, can we have this exhibition in San Francisco? And that exhibition, it was such a slog to put it together. And, you know, for all sorts of numbers of reasons, plus it had a lot of historical artworks that aren't manga, but gave the kind of history of manga. that would have been hard to recreate. But I told him that if he really wanted it, I could make something special for the museum.

6:02This manga exhibition is a result of that. So obviously for some people, the idea of a show about manga art is going to be an attraction like no other. For other people, it's going to be, I think, a totally alien object. So before we go any further, I just want you to define manga. Is it just Japanese comics and graphic novels? Is there something more specific than that stylistically that you're exploring with this show? It's a graphic narrative form that tells stories through lines. So it's not just comics. You know, in comics and bandesine and graphic novels, they're evolving and they're in a way becoming mangified.

6:42What manga is is more than that. It's a visual form that can be humorous, can also not be humorous, but it's telling content through images. So it's not relying on the text as much as the narrative flow. So why this is important is because our communications are going away. Just look at Instagram away from text. Look at your podcast. What's happening is that information is being moved in a different form. And the thing about images, which you know probably more than I do, is that images come to a different part of your brain than text. And in general, it's received differently. And what manga does is it relays information through the composition, but also not just the panel composition, the page composition and the flow, but also through a series of grammar.

7:34There's a manga visual grammar. And so people can read manga incredibly quickly, much more so than reading any text, and absorb that information in a different way. And so what you're finding in Japan, for example, are companies creating manga of their company history that the government school children are reading history in manga. Manga is becoming just the cultural communication, a form of visual cultural communication that is developed in Japan but is now spreading throughout. And even Marvel is working with Kodansha to create mangified versions of Batman and the Joker and things like that.

8:14So we're seeing it bleeding out. Sure. I mean, I think even the Vatican didn't launch its own little, I guess, anime or manga-inspired avatar. So really hard to deny the influence. Something I learned from the catalog is that the term manga means pictures run riot. Is that correct? Yes, exactly. And that specific translation was from Tim Clark, who was a curator at the British Museum, who's really a wordsmith. And we were working together and he said, well, why don't you call it Pictures Run Riot? Which is true. He's a specialist on Hokusai. And Hokusai used that term. Right, right. So Hokusai created his Hokusai manga, which he did draw it, it is his work, but it was created by his daughter and other people putting his drawings together and then reissued and reissued and reissued, but it was a huge hit.

8:59It's knockout narrative, it is these kind of random sketches that evolved into what we know as manga today. Right, yes. That's one of the ways that the catalog makes the case for manga as an art, which is tracing it back to the history of Japanese ukiyo-yi woodblock prints. People probably know the Hokusai, the Great Wave, if they know one Japanese work of art. And I thought that was very interesting, actually, that the first use of the term manga is part of that history as related to Hokusai. What's really interesting is that manga has a visceral relationship, kind of a visual relationship with ukiyo-e, but more importantly, manga has a structural relationship.

9:43Yes. So the size of the prints, the way the process is done, the editors, the publishing houses, it is all taken from the Edo period, ukiyo-e, and transferred to... Yeah, yeah. Very different, but there's like continuities in terms of the mass culture of visual storytelling from that period. I was even thinking, you know, this is a bit of an aside, but I was thinking because I recently saw a Hokusai show in Seattle and even some of the stuff that people find a little, I don't know, racy or seedy about manga, you know, the supernatural images or even some of the sexy images. You know, there's the very famous Hokusai image, the dream of the fisherman's wife of a woman making love with an octopus.

10:28I was like, it's all in there within the sort of general Japanese artistic cultural milieu. It is. And you have to understand with Shunga in general Japanese kind of slightly racy images then, Shunga weren't thought of as offsetting or anything to be prudish about. But they were viewed probably more in private circumstances. You know, so there's a way of looking at things, you know, maybe not on the wall of your house, but privately looking at them. And Shunga, you have cheap Shunga, of course, but you have really expensive, beautiful Shunga. And in the same way with manga, manga, you have beautiful, fabulous, you know, fancy books.

11:07And then you have not so fancy books. There are racy manga and there's Shunga-esque manga. We're not displaying those. And indeed, what's interesting is, while there was a boom of it for a while, I think that it's with the internet way things are going, you see beautiful sexual depictions like Shunga, but you don't see the seedy things as much because that's gone on to other forms. Interesting enough, the people who are drawing the standard sexual manga, 50 % at least are women. We just need to revise what we think of as pornographic or not. Well, before we get to the internet era, which is a whole story in itself, I know, with this art form.

11:48But I do want to give people a sense of the modern origins of manga. Because it dates to the 19th century and Ukiwi and all that. But in terms of the specific forms you were talking about, the narrative forms, that is a more recent 20th century origin, right, that you touch on in the show. Exactly, exactly. And just to repeat myself, if you allow me to. So manga has very long tentacles back to Japanese history. So some people say it starts in the 12th century with these hand scrolls, fantastic frolicking animals. You know, Bandainagon is probably one of the more famous ones, you know, when we're getting into the 13th century.

12:23And these tales where you see manga-esque, you can see where the manga comes from or maybe anime comes from. So you have that. And then you have these picture books that are very much like manga Naraehon, 15th, 16th century, and then the ukiyo-e. So all of these things, you have things called yomi-hon or reading books that hokusai, everyone did, and they look like manga. And you start to get speech bubbles, you know, in fact. Really? Yeah, in the early 20th century. But if we're really looking at the modern form of manga, there's two ways of defining it. And one is in the late 19th, early 20th century, because manga is a hybrid.

13:00It's not just pure Japanese. it's actually what Japan does in a way best is taking all different types of inspirations, drawing it together, cooking it into something new. So while it's Japanese artistic histories and Japanese sensibilities, and one of those sensibilities, which is really important for manga, and I really want to emphasize that, is sound effects. So it's immersive. So you have onomatopoeia that are drawn into the images. It's not just the text. You actually feel. Like visual representations of sound. Exactly. So Japanese art, and it's really interesting, the word for art in Japan wasn't created until 1872 for the Vienna International Exposition.

13:43Before that, there are many different ways of terming art, normally about the medium, so painting or, you know, ceramic or whatever. But oftentimes you could almost use the term kazari, and kazari means to decorate, and so it's about kind of the act of decoration. So when you see paintings, prints of Japanese birds, birds and flowers, common theme, and even in manga, you'll see that one bird will have the mouth open, the other bird will have the mouth closed. And what that means is that one bird is chirping to the other. And it's in a sense, we're supposed to hear that chirping. It's an implied sound effect.

14:20So it's almost as if we're in that space. We're not just viewing it. We're feeling it. We're hearing it. We're sensing it. So that is incorporated into the whole kind of aesthetics. But what you get from 1860s onward is Yokohama and the birth of the Western influences, Chinese coming in. It's just internationalism. And at first, which was great for this form, is it was concentrated in these kind of ports that were open, and Yokohama was one of them. And because it was so small in a way, it was a boiling point for people all over the world. And you get artists coming there. You get printmakers.

14:59You have fantastic bigots. You have all of these French, English, American, these artists coming there, and they create newspapers. I don't know if you know Punch. The British humor satire magazine, yeah. Exactly. Charles Bergman created Japan Punch, and he had comics, kind of proto-manga there. And manga comes out from the printing presses and that culture that we see that was boiling, starting in Yokohama. Japanese love news, have always loved news. Historically, news travels very fast in Japan. And you get Japanese roving manga reporters going to Europe, going to America. They're drawing the scenes.

15:37We have one artist named Kitazawa Rakuten, who's amazing from Saitama, the early 20th century. He went to Europe. He went all over. He went to artist studios. He sketched them. So really, these are news reports in the form of manga? Visual news reports in manga, yep. Wow. So what is the earliest thing in the show that you would call manga in the contemporary sense? Well, we're not showing a history of manga because we did that in the British Museum. And in a way, you can buy a book and see the history. See it all, yeah. What we want to do is look at the art. and what was always surprised me in the british museum was their prints and drawings in their study i mean it's fabulous you see leonardo da vinci's sketches and you see you know michelangelo sketches sketches the design and these fabulous designs and japanese manga artists do that like they are drawing constantly hokusai did his sketches and he threw them out the window his daughter would go and collect them but you know but he like he just didn't care he just threw them out the window, she'd run, oi, her name is, and she would sketch them, get them, and maybe sell them off or whatever.

16:41But we have a lot of Hokusai because of her collecting them. These manga artists, they're drawing every day. Their line quality is fabulous and beautiful. And you never actually see it because it's printed. And the printing processes even out the lines, they take away a little bit of that frisson of these designs. And so what we really wanted to do because of the museum itself. The museum is really a beautiful fine art museum. I mean, it's just gorgeous and they have high level shows. And so we wanted to really show manga as an art form. So we're looking at the drawings and the sketches and looking at that and then the final product, very little bit of the final product that's at the end, that's at the shop, but now that we're seeing that going through.

17:24And so we decided to start in the 1970s where manga starts to become for everybody. 1960s are our oldest works to the 1970s so we get kind of an explosion and this is what was happening throughout the world but with the student unrest with Vietnam you know really this youth culture it exploded and manga of course manga the key word for manga is zeitgeist manga captures the period zeitgeist whether that's in 1890 whether that's in 1970 whether that's in 2025, it is there. And so what we wanted to do is start in 1960s with that. And we have the most iconic manga image. I need to tell you about this.

18:08Oh, please. This is Tomorrow's Joe, and it's by Chiba Tetsuya. And Chiba Tetsuya is the kind of, I don't know, he's still living, he's in his later 80s, and he's been awarded by the Japanese government all of these recent major awards, which is a big deal because manga was not taken seriously by people in Japan. I was really surprised because he won the Order of Culture, but just in 2024, which seems to me like very late because it seems to me such a big part of Japanese culture. But yeah, it seems late to be given the stamp of seriousness. It's kind of shocking, but I'm happy they did it. He really is a star.

18:51But saying that, sometimes Japan might be slow to understand what they're doing brilliantly until they get confirmation from the outside world. Then they embrace it. So including Hokusai. So now everyone loves Hokusai. He's on stamps. He's whatever. But when I was doing my PhD in art history, you didn't do it on Ukiyo-e. It was on the fine arts department. That was not considered art, at least in Japan. It was considered art by everybody else. But the art historians were a bit slow. You know, and now Hokusai wave will go much more than, you know, a national treasure screen. So it's an inversion of values.

19:28But the manga is now belatedly being recognized and Chiba Sensei, who really is amazing, and he did this one manga, he did the drawings and the text was by Takamori Asao, but it's called Ashita no Joe, Fighting for Tomorrow. and it's basically Ashto no Joe means tomorrow's Joe. And what it is, is this poor disenfranchised boy, orphan, rough and tumble. And when he's young, he's stealing food just to stay alive. He gets beaten up. He learns, he does bantam boxing. And of course, he's got a bit of attitude. So he gets thrown into reform school and he has to do more boxing to be able to stay alive.

20:09And he becomes a boxer and he finds someone who believes in him. So it's his struggle to stay alive, but it's all the world of boxing, and it's the late 60s to early 70s, and it's this insight into Japan. And it was used, incredibly, it was used in the student rebellions in Japan. Every single Japanese national will know that manga. And the iconic scene is in Japanese manga and in most stories, in long-running stories, and in all of Japanese culture, it's not about winning. It's how you do it. It's the process. So a lot of manga, it's not the story even. You get involved in the characters. These characters become your pals.

20:48You live through them. You visit places with them. It's like almost your window to the outside world. And so we go through and see Joe's loves, Joe's getting beaten up, Joe's fights with different nationals and what happens. And then he has this one rival. And in the end, if it was an American comic or Marvel, I imagine he would win. But he doesn't. He loses. And the last scene of the manga is him slumped in his chair after he loses. And is he dead? He might be dead, but he's got a smile on his face. So he is happy with himself. It's okay, but he doesn't win. Is that the famous image that you're talking about?

21:26Yes. And it's amazing. Oh, fantastic. Yeah. It's a boxer slumped in the corner. With a smile. With a smile on his face. Yeah. Yeah. And if you look at this picture, and if they look at the image, you'll see the whiteout, you'll see the rip. This has been a much loved, much used image. And what's important is you're never supposed to see it. You will never see this image. You will see a printed version of it that's tidied up. The lines will be all made solid. You won't get Chiba's sensei's light touch and the feeling of frisson, the exciting feeling that you get when you look at this. Print is great, and that's how it's meant to be.

22:05It's the end product for this. This is not the end product, but it's fabulous. It's this rare glimpse into the whole process that we're getting.

22:27What are the challenges of showing this kind of art in a museum? because these are narrative projects that come out of things that are on huge commercial print runs, but they come out of an artistic practice and that's not always seen. So how are you thinking about this, of like the project of showing this kind of art and the kinds of things you want to spotlight about it as art? We have 10 major artists. We actually have a few more, but 10 artists that we're showing and eight that we're doing deep dives into, They're all fabulous artists, and these artists are all of incredibly high level for their drawing skills.

23:05So we chose them in part for that, but also their stories and for a number of different reasons. But some sell more than others. You know, if we're talking about one piece, you know, of course. The most famous, maybe one of the most famous published things ever. Exactly. Almost as much as Harry Potter. But there's this one Yamashita Kazemi. I mean, who has heard in America of Yamashita Kazemi? Well, her work has only been translated recently by Kodansha Online and then by Yen Press that's just coming out now, although she's done it for many, many years. I'm going to show you this spread. You know, in Western, you know, you go from page to page.

23:41In Japan, it's the spread that's important. So this is a spread. It's called a mihiraki. So the right and the left make one composition. Ah, I see. So spread, you mean like the whole composition. This is the image here for those listening is a very dynamic image that's cut up along sort of light diagonals so that you get the sense of zooming in and out of an image as your eyes goes from right to left across the page. Exactly. You see this poor little girl being a little bit frightened, being picked up by her kimono by a large bird. And then because it's the kimono, it drops. The baby is falling through the air.

24:25You see the baby's reflected in the bird's eye. And then the bird is reflected in the baby's eye. And the child is falling through the air. And you assume that the child is going to be killed. Spoiler word, it's not. But you're reading it from right to left. You read from the baby's eye. Then you go all the way down and you see the baby dropping. So it's this dynamic movement. And so you don't read down and across. You read diagonally. You mentioned, you know, seeing the page with the whiteout and the corrections on it. Are you showing only the original drawings in the show? Yes. But saying that, some artists draw digitally.

25:06So we are showing those drawings and we asked the artists which ones we should show and how. And so we worked with the artists. All of our artists draw analog, except for one. Some draw analog and digital. So we have a combination. But whenever possible, we try to get the analog because what's going to happen is that almost all artists are going towards digital. So our timing is really good. This is an important moment in time. And the drawings are very fragile. You can't have them out very long. And in general, they never show them. So I want to get back to your original question, but I just want to show you one more image.