Word: franciscos
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...translated as "The Four Immigrants Manga" (Stone Bridge Press; 152 pages; $15), arrives as nothing short of a history-making revelation: America's (and the world's) first graphic novel. In spite of the Japanese title, author and main characters, "Four Immigrants" is completely American. First published in San Francisco (locus of the underground comix explosion 35 years later), Kiyama's book focuses on that fundamentally American experience - the life of the immigrant. Told with naturalism, humor and a sharp social conscience, it reads as a remarkable primary historical document with surprising resonances to modern times...
Yoshitaka Kiyama (1885 - 1951) arrived in San Francisco in 1904 to study art at what was then known as the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art, later to become the San Francisco Art Institute. Over the course of 20 years Kiyama studied traditional western art, becoming a painter of some note. He also took to cartooning, undoubtedly inspired by American newspaper comics, which were reaching the peak of their golden era at the time. In a style seemingly inspired by the likes of George McManus' "Bringing Up Father" and Harold Gray's "Little Orphan Annie," Kiyama created 52 episodes...
...Touching on all the major events of San Francisco's, and America's, early Twentieth Century history, "Four Immigrants" has remarkable power as a personal account of events that shaped this country. Surprisingly, it also works as a prescient foreshadowing of issues that continue to be relevant at the start of the 21st century. As you might expect, the very first panel shows the four guys on the deck of a ship looking toward the shore of the new land. "Here we are lads, U.S.A., land of opportunity," says Charlie. Such optimism gets a very quick reality check...
Many of the episodes focus on America's largely forgotten treatment of its Japanese immigrants through a series of execrable laws. (Japanese immigrants were not allowed citizenship until 1952.) One episode focuses on the San Francisco initiative to ban all Asians from public school. Years later, in 1994, California's proposition 187 (later found unconstitutional) banned illegal immigrants from receiving publicly funded services such as schooling. In another semi-comic retelling of an actual incident, Charlie and Frank, working on a farm outside the city, get herded out of town by angry, armed white locals. Another fascinating sequence involves Charlie...
...Again and again Kiyama brings history alive with his personal accounts of major events rendered in a highly readable cartoon form. The First World War, the Influenza pandemic of 1918, and especially the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, are all covered through the unique lens of the Japanese immigrant. The earthquake arc has a particular richness. It shakes Frank and Charlie out of their beds and leaves them homeless. They wander the devastated streets, hearing screams from those buried alive. Shuffling through ankle-high ash as a result of the firestorms that destroyed more of the city than the earthquake...