Natsume Fusanosuke on Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics

ABSTRACT:Although Understanding Comics had a huge impact on how people in North America and Europe looked at comics, little has been written about what impact it had in Japan on Manga Studies (or Mangagaku). Natsume Fusanosuke, a doyen of Manga Studies in Japan from the early 1990s, was one of the first to see and to review Scott McCloud's book when it was published in Japanese translation in 1998 as Mangagaku. Natsume later went on to write the afterword to the second, updated translation of the book in 2020. We present its early review and his last word on what the future held for Understanding Comics, what it meant in the past thirty years, and what it might mean in Japan in the future for the field. Upon first seeing Understanding Comics in English in 1995, Natsume cried out "We are not alone!" to fellow manga scholar Takekuma Kentarō. We can see from these two essays—separated by over three decades—what McCloud's visitation to Japan contributed to the comics studies community there over time. Moreover, Natsume puts into greater context how this book's impact and focus compares with that of his own research group and their own rival formalist comics-studies books, such as How to Read Manga (Manga no yomikata, 1995), certainly one of the best comparator texts in Japanese to read alongside McCloud's work.