One Thousand Years of Manga [Hardcover]

I am not in any way a manga fan, nor knowledgeable about Japanese art, so let that be a caveat. However, I did grow up on Tintin and Asterix, watched a bit of anime as a teen, and still love American and European graphic storytelling. So when this beautiful coffee-table book came across my path, I eagerly spent a few days working my way through it.

Written by a French art historian, the book is really geared toward those with an interest in Japanese art history. The bulk of its pages are dedicated to tracing the history of Japanese narrative art in its role as the ancestor of modern-day manga. The book is thus divided into six main sections: "The Magic of the Scroll" (covering roughly the 12th to mid-19th century), "The Birth of the Japanese Print" (covering roughly the 1850s-1890s), "The Dawn of a New Type of Caricature" (covering roughly the 1870s-1890s, with emphasis on the influence of modernization and contact with the West), "The Rise of the Comic Strip" (covering 1900-1940s, with emphasis on publications), an entire section on Tezuka Osamu covers the "God" of modern manga, which segues into a final section "Modern Manga." This is followed by some interviews and profiles of contemporary manga masters, as well as a timeline and glossary.

Although there is a decent amount of text, the book's main selling point are the beautiful reproductions. Several of the Japanese works and artists will be familiar to those with even a mere passing acquaintance with Japanese art, such as , Hokusai's iconic Great Wave print. What are far more fascinating are the utterly bizarre pieces like Hirokage's "Great Battle of the Vegetables and Marine Animals" (1858), which features an army of well-armed pumpkin and carrot-headed warriors joined in battle with fish-headed soldiers led by an octopus-headed creature blasting some kind of death-ray from its mouth. Another great one is a book illustration from the 1870s showing a group of 15 mice armed with spears and bows capturing and trussing a cat. (The same artist, Kyosai, has several other weird ones, including a depiction of frogs capturing a snake, a spectacular battle scene of two armies of armed frogs clashing across a triptych., and a farting contest.)

When appropriate, examples of Western art (such as the Bayeux Tapestry or Degas' Two Dancers at Rest) are shown in comparison with relevant Japanese works. Similarly, sometimes, modern manga panels are shown next to a classical work in an attempt to highlight similarities. The production values are what one would expect from a fine museum catalog or high-end coffee table book, with vivid colors popping off the heavy pages. The lone exception are about twenty images taken from the Matsumoto Leiji Collection, which, due to some flaw in digitization or production, are quite rough and pixelated. And although the overall design is quite crisp and clean, the text doesn't always sync up well with the illustrations, resulting in a good deal of flipping back and forth. And the translation, while generally good, has its awkward turns of phrase.

The book is an impressive effort to more or less legitimize manga and rescue it from Western stereotypes of it as either lowbrow kiddie fare or sex and violence-laden picture books for weirdos. As a result, the modern manga section highlights educational, biographical, and historical manga, along with the more mainstream popular fare, eschewing any representations of the more graphic material. So, while it's a nice overview of the history of the form, it's hardly a comprehensive one. On the whole, well worth checking out by anyone with an interest in Japanese visual culture -- past or present.