Recently, writer and translator Frederik L. Schodt was inducted into the Manga Publishing Hall of Fame at this year’s American Manga Awards. His contributions as a translator are numerous and legendary—Astro Boy, Ghost in the Shell, Rose of Versaillesto name a few—but his book Manga! Manga!, which introduced the English-speaking world to manga in the early 1980s, may be more influential. A review of Manga! Manga! in The Journal of Asian Studies may help illustrate the state of things in 1984:
Did you know that in 1980 more than 1 billion comic books were sold in Japan (out of a total of 4.3 billion books and magazines published)? Or that during January 1981 Shōnen Jump sold over 3 million copies each week (about equal to the circulation of Newsweek in the United States)? Or that Japan now uses more paper for comic books than for toilet paper?No? Well, none of the above facts should surprise anyone who has visited a neighborhood bookstore in Japan recently.
The author takes it for granted that the reader knows nothing about Japanese “comic books” and hasn't visited a bookstore in Japan—but of course Fred Schodt had. It was pioneers like Fred that conditioned the explosion of the subculture from the 1990s forward.
However, I would contend that manga and anime are no longer a subculture in America but full-blown elements of our pop culture. In 2020, a year where many were loath to go to the movies (or simply unable), the top-grossing film globally was an anime film: Demon Slayer. It’s surprising that something so entwined with a particular national culture has become an international phenomenon; what other forms of media can that be said for? It’s worth reflecting on how we got here, in particular how manga made its way to the United States.
By the 1980s, as Schodt writes in Dreamland Japan, the follow-up to Manga! Manga!, “the only real ‘story manga’ available in English and distributed in the United States was Barefoot Gen.” Gen’s story follows the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath. True to the thrust of the manga, the effort to publish the novel outside of Japan was taken up as self-consciously anti-nuclear and antiwar, rather than commercial. The translation ended after two volumes, hardly a success.
Katsuhiro Otomo’s famed series Akira also made its way to the US in the 1980s. It had everything going for it including publication under an imprint of Marvel, Epic Comics, and coincident release of the film adaptation in the US. Clearly Akira’s stature speaks to the enduring success of the American import, but its first publication ran into delays as American publishers and Otomo debated how to translate the format as well as the language. What resulted was a comic in the standard American comic trim size (roughly 6.5 x 10”), in color (unlike the original), with pages reading left to right. The reversed reading direction also necessitated the mirroring of the pages, thus resulting—somewhat comically—in entirely left-handed characters. This conundrum of fidelity to the original or assimilation to American comic norms would be a major sticking point in the early period.
While manga in Japan might be enjoyed across the demographic spectrum, comics in the US have been firmly marketed toward young men. This has led to the traditional bifurcation in their distribution, where comic books are found in specialty retailers away from general trade books. This was always a stumbling block to the broader appeal of manga in the US. In the early 1990s Viz Comics, an institution in the English-language manga market, circumvented this by adopting the term “graphic novel” to surreptitiously get manga on the shelves of major bookstores.
It was another publisher, Tokyopop, that would transform Japanese “graphic novels” into the form that we know today. In 2002 Tokyopop began introducing their readers to “100% authentic manga”—that is, if you opened their comics (now in a smaller tankobon-esque trim size) on the left cover, you’d be greeted with a warning that you’d begun at the wrong end of the book. This format, closer to the Japanese original, has become the standard across English-language publishers with few exceptions. This eliminated many of the tricky question of localization while also cutting the cost to produce and print.
Since the 2000s manga has enjoyed steady growth in the American market and even overtook non-manga comics in total market share in 2021. In 1983 Manga! Manga!introduced Americans to a little-known foreign literature, boldly announcing it by its native title. Stone Bridge’s publisher, Peter Goodman, was Fred Schodt’s editor on Manga! Manga!. He recalls that the daring title was anything but given:
Kodansha was very reluctant to do a book that revealed the popularity of comics-style books in Japan, knowing that comics in the West were either for kids or for counterculture types. And it took a while for them to agree to put the word ‘manga’ in the title, since no one knew what the word meant. We doubled it as ‘manga manga’ to emphasize its difference and to make it more memorable.
It would take some time for Americans to become comfortable calling it that, but by 2015 former President Barack Obama would thank Japan for “manga and anime” on the occasion of a visit from then Prime Minister Abe. The contemporary consumer of manga in translation is a sophisticated reader, comfortably navigating between two cultures and several decades of publishing tradition. This wouldn’t have been possible without these pioneering efforts.
Check out the many Stone Bridge titles by Frederik L. Schodt, including Dreamland Japan and his latest book My Heart Sutra.
