From the Field: Why Is Manga So Interesting?

Abstract

abstract:Natsume Fusanosuke is one of the founding critics of manga who pioneered a style of formal analysis of manga in the 1990s. Natsume's first important foray into his "theory of manga expression" (manga hyōgen-ron) was seen in the collaborative work Manga no yomikata [How to Read Manga] in 1995. He later streamlined those ideas in a twelve-episode series Manga wa naze omoshiroi no ka: sono hyōgen to bunpō [Why Is Manga So Interesting?: Its Expression and Grammar] for NHK television in 1996. The expanded book (1997) published later consists of focused essays, each on an individual element of manga, such as line, character creation, and panel layouts. In the present translated essays, the first two chapters of Part One, Natsume explores the exploding manga market in the 1990s and then posits one of the foundational elements of his manga expression theory, the line. Like Scott McCloud, as a cartoonist Natsume often used comics images to explain comics theory. Here, he shows how his copies of manga images reveal subtle shifts in how the character and scene can be felt by the reader, often through the magic of different pen or stylus types. The translation and introduction make available in English for the first time a part of a key text in the history of manga studies in Japan.