a rambly tangent through my experiences of Anime and Manga

This is a rewrite of the manga/anime post I discuss below. It's not as rambly as the original. Also, it's less obvious I'm on a pill comedown, which is a shame, because I feel the disjointed and surreal feeling of a comedown adds something to my writing. Mainly bizarreness.

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I discovered manga and anime at the age of 10. After coming down with a serious case of boredom whilst watching my dad play cricket (Yes! Cricket! Like baseball, only even more dull) I begged some money off of my mother to go buy a magazine or a comic. When I walked into the gloomy newsagents it was there... Manga Mania Issue #2. It wasn't like other comics. It was printed in black and white on newspaper-like paper and there seemed like there was a bazillion pages. Inside I would discover for the first time the work of Katsuhiro Otomo and Shirow Masamune, via Akira and Appleseed respectively, and my view of comics changed forever. See, I was never really into superhero comics, thought they were kinda lame, and to be honest the traditional american comic style pissed me off. I found the artwork muggy, the stories stilted, and the action unclear. Of course, everything is different now. I think the american comic industry might of been going through a bit of a slump at the time, but don't quote me on that.

But this stuff... My god... The stories were OUT THERE! The way the panels practically jumped off the page! The facial expressions! Those eyes...

Manga blew my mind. Akira is a fucking OPUS, a tour-de-force, collected into 6 chunky trade-paperbacks, and Appleseed was just... amazing. A complex mixture of hard science, geo-politics, utopian societies and a bad-ass guerilla babe with an android for a boyfriend.

I would see anime for the first time later that year (1992? something like that) when BBC2 would broadcast Akira subtitled during the graveyard slot. If the comics blew my mind then seeing akira decimated it. Man... What a fucking trip!

When akira was released in the UK by Island World Communications it found a niche. It garnered a cult following. World Island Communications saw this and realised that it was sitting on a cash-cow, so they started an anime-splinter company called Manga Entertainment and got milking. They followed up Akira with Fists of the north star which was, well, badly written, badly animated, and badly dubbed, but violent as all hell, which appealed to the cultish niche Akira had found - you know, the young-insecure-hetrosexual-male demographic. Then they released the twisted by strangely deep tenticle-orgy that is Urotsukidoji, which their niche lapped up, but which also caused a moral panic (** 'BAN THIS FILTH!' sed those tabloid bastions of morality the daily mail **). Basically, Manga Entertainment are responsible for both introducting Anime to a larger audience in the UK and tarnishing it's reputation for a real long time. If I was gonna get on my high-horse I'd say they were nothing but short-sighted, money-grabbing capitalists who spotted a sub-cultural phenomenon, pushed it into the spotlight, and raped it for all it was worth. They are also responsible for the common misconception in the UK that manga is anime.

But without them I wouldn't of seen Akira. Funny, eh?

I was reading an article in an old comic-industry magazine from 1994 recently (by this guy, ain't the web wonderful?) which talked about how Anime was introduced to the UK, some of which is detailed above. It also acted as kinda research for this post. One of the things the author discusses is how he longs for the day when Anime is shown on TV on a regular basis, and not just in the Manga Entertainment/SciFi channel cultish kinda way, but just like soap operas and game shows are. You know, accepted.

Well, I think we're getting there.

You can see a recent remake of Osamu Tezuka's (who is like the godfather of manga, or manga-no-kami (god of manga), if your feeling paticularly reverential) Astroboy on children's television, and I caught the end of the anime version (directed by Katsuhiro Otomo) of Tezuka's manga rewrite of Fritz Lang's Metropolis on sky movies this morning. Studio Ghibli's (studio of creative genius Hayao Miyazaki) delightful (but I prefer Kiki's delivery service) 'Sprited Away' got a mainstream cinema release by Disney (who are obviously grasping around for a way to keep their animation studio profitable despite vast corporate dogmatism and being blown out of the water by Pixar) recently, and because of that thousands of children in the western world have been introduced to the wonder and beauty of this rich and diverse artform (Studio Ghibli, if you didn't know, make the most amazing children's animated films you will EVER SEE, guaranteed!). Anime in the UK is no longer restricted to the ultraviolent and bloody as hell, the gore-hound insecure-hetro-male demographic. It has been legitimised in the public eye, thanks largely to Pokemon and it's toy-selling ilk. It's waaay no longer solely a closet geek thing.

One more thing before I go.

Manga is comics, get it? Anime is animation, see? The literal translation of manga is 'irresponsible pictures' not 'irresponsible moving pictures'. Calling Anime Manga is just as absurd and ignorant as calling a film a book. If you went up to someone from japan and started raving about 'manga movies' they would think you were a fucking retard. Actually, they'd probably be terribly polite about it and point out your mistake, but if I was them I'd think you were a fucking retard.