Word: mangas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Browse through any bookstore's graphic novel section and it will look like a tsunami has passed through, blasting the shelves with reams of indistinguishable Japanese manga. Like a red tide, most of it stinks. But some interesting manga flotsam has also washed ashore, strangely, by way of France, Spain and England. Since 2003 a Spanish publisher, Ponent Mon, in collaboration with a U.K. outfit named Fanfare, has published five books in the U.S. as part of a line they call nouvelle manga. They mean to start a new genre and the latest two, "Doing Time" by Kazuichi Hanawa...
...Nouvelle Manga has its champion in Frederic Boilet, a French artist living in Japan. Being French he naturally had to write a "Nouvelle Manga Manifesto." In it he explains how Japan came to see the French style of comix, called bandes dessinees or "clear line," as too graphically focused, while the French saw Japanese Manga as little more than near-endless volumes about robots and monsters. In spite of this disconnect, Boilet writes, both cultures share a mutual fascination with slice of life stories, as evidenced by the popularity of French cinema in Japan. (The name nouvelle manga deliberately echoes...
Fanfare/Ponent Mon's two latest releases are by Japanese artists, but couldn't be further from the kind of manga most people get exposed to. Jiro Taniguchi's "The Walking Man" ($17; 155 pages) perfectly embodies the precepts of nouvelle manga, taking the low-key activities of everyday life and depicting them in the highly detailed drawing style more commonly associated with European comix. Each of the book's 18 chapters depicts a nameless salaryman on a different stroll through the city and countryside. The first chapter sets the formula for ones following. The man pops out to take...
...Doing Time" ($20; 240 pages) by Kazuichi Hanawa, also focuses on environmental details, but inside instead of out. As Fanfare/Ponent Mon's most interesting nouvelle manga book, it stands out mostly through the originality of its subject: an autobiography of the author's three years spent in the Japanese prison system. A manga artist who ran afoul of Japan's strict gun laws, Hanawa began serving time in 1995. Far from being a self-righteous polemic about injustice or the cruelty of incarceration, "Doing Time" instead seems to delight in recounting the details of life behind bars...
...find any works here by Katsushika Hokusai or Ando Hiroshige, two giants of Japanese landscape prints. Less defensibly, you also won't find much about the enormous impact ukiyo-e had on Western artists, especially France's own Impressionists, or even on present-day Japanese comic-strip art forms manga and anim?. And a more adventuresome exhibition might even have added some footage from ukiyo-e-inspired films like Kenji Mizoguchi's masterful 1947 biopic Utamaro and his Five Women. But that's quibbling. Better simply to enjoy the bounty of color and line, to relish the beauty of women...