They are typically written and illustrated by a single person, known as mangaka. They are usually printed in black and white and read right-to-left. And they are incredibly popular, in Japan and beyond.
The World of Japanese Comics, published his book in the 1980s, “almost no one in the United States knew what manga was,” he tells the New York Times’ Shivani Vora. Manga’s popularity is booming in the United States. Now, the illustrated medium and its most well-known mangaka are the centerpiece of a new exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.
U.S. audiences almost never get a chance to see original drawings for Japanese manga, let alone such an extensive selection,” Joan Cummins, a curator at the museum, says in a statement. Using astonishing drafting skills, these artists create whole worlds that are alternately relatable or completely fantastic.” A post shared by Brooklyn Museum (@brooklynmuseum) The 10-room exhibition, which includes more than 600 original illustrations, begins with a first-floor introduction to manga. Visitors become acquainted with the medium’s structure, history and two influential mangaka.
Those are Fujio Akatsuka, the “King of Gag Manga,” who helped push the medium into absurd, comedic realms, and Tetsuya Chiba, a storytelling master who explored themes of war and peace, economic insecurity, sports and social divisions, laying the groundwork for other mangaka to do the same. In the exhibition’s primary space, eight major mangaka, leaders of the meduim in the 20th and 21st centuries, take center stage. There are four men and four women whose manga represent different styles, traditions and publishers.
Unlike their books, many of the pieces on view were never meant for public display, a behind-the-scenes view of how the mangaka work. Several artworks on display have been loaned out of Japan for the first time ever. Among these are an unfinished, pencil-drawn self-portrait by mangaka Jiro Taniguchi and an illustration of the iconic final scene of Chiba’s Ashita no Joe, which features the protagonist boxer slumped in the corner of a ring, having just lost his title, with a slight smile on his face.
Twelve life-sized paintings by Hirohiko Araki, creator of the manga JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, which has been serialized for nearly 40 years, ground the exhibition’s center hall. In 2022, an artist bound together every page of Eiichiro Oda’s serialized manga One Piece, which has appeared every week since 1997. At 21,450 pages, it was the longest book in the world.
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