Comics and the Origins of Manga

2022 Eisner Award Winner for Best Academic/Scholarly Work
Japanese comics, commonly known as manga, are a global sensation. Critics, scholars, and everyday readers have often viewed this artform through an Orientalist framework, treating manga as the exotic antithesis to American and European comics. In reality, the history of manga is deeply intertwined with Japan's avid importation of Western technology and popular culture in the early twentieth century.
 
Comics and the Origins of Manga reveals how popular U.S. comics characters like Jiggs and Maggie, the Katzenjammer Kids, Felix the Cat, and Popeye achieved immense fame in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. Modern comics had earlier developed in the United States in response to new technologies like motion pictures and sound recording, which revolutionized visual storytelling by prompting the invention of devices like speed lines and speech balloons. As audiovisual entertainment like movies and record players spread through Japan, comics followed suit. Their immediate popularity quickly encouraged Japanese editors and cartoonists to enthusiastically embrace the foreign medium and make it their own, paving the way for manga as we know it today.
 
By challenging the conventional wisdom that manga evolved from centuries of prior Japanese art and explaining why manga and other comics around the world share the same origin story, Comics and the Origins of Manga offers a new understanding of this increasingly influential artform.

EIKE EXNER is an independent scholar who has taught at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and Josai International University in Tokyo. His research has appeared in the International Journal of Comic Art, ImageTexT, and The Comics World, and he has received the John A. Lent Award in Comics Studies.

Acknowledgments
A Note on Images
Foreword
Introduction
Prologue: The Historical Origins and Changing Meaning of "Manga" up to 1923
Chapter One: "Popular in Society at Large:" the First Talking Manga
Chapter Two: "Listen Vunce!" The Audiovisual Revolution in Graphic Narrative
Chapter Three: When Krazy Kat Spoke Japanese: Japan's Massive Importation of Foreign Audiovisual Comics         
Chapter Four: From As- Yutaka to Tezuka Osamu: How Manga Made in Japan Adopted the Form of Audiovisual Comics
Epilogue: The Myth of Manga as a "Traditional Mode of Expression"
Brief Chronology
List of Foreign Comics in Japan 1908-1945 
List of Illustrations
Bibliography
Index