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UK: Laurence King- 1st edition, 2004
USA: Collins Design - 1st edition, 2004
Brazil: Conrad Editora - 1st edition 2006
Finland: Otava - 1st edition, 2005, 2nd edition 2006
France: Editions du Rocher - 1st edition 2005, 2nd edition 2006
Germany: Egmont - 1st edition 2006
Italy: Logos - 1st edition 2006
Spain: OnlyBook - 1st edition 2006
Taiwan: Monkey Cultural - 1st edition 2006

Japan's output of manga is massive, accounting for a staggering forty percent of everything published each year in the country. Outside Japan, there has been a global boom in sales, with the manga aesthetic spreading from comics into all areas of Western youth culture through film, computer games, advertising, and design. Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics presents an accessible, entertaining, and highly-illustrated introduction to the development and diversity of Japanese comics from 1945 to the present. Featuring striking graphics and extracts from a wide range of manga, the book covers such themes as the specific attributes of manga in contrast to American and European comics; the life and career of Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy and originator of story manga; boys' comics from the 1960s to the present; the genres and genders of girls' and women's comics; the darker, more realistic themes of gekiga - violent samurai, disturbing horror and apocalyptic science fiction; issues of censorship and protest; and manga's role as a major Japanese export and global influence.

Japan's output of manga (cartoon) publications is famous. Nearly forty percent of everything annually published in the country is some form of manga. Increasingly, too, the West is becoming aware of the phenomenon as it influences their local youth culture through computer games, advertising, film and design.

Paul Gravett's book presents a popularly written, fully illustrated history of the development of Japanese manga from 1945 to the present. In it he features extracts from various manga genres, full-page excerpts and gives special attention to such historically important figures as Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy.

In the text he pays particular attention to boys' comics from the 60s onward, to gender interest in girls' and women's comics, to the whole range of dystopic and apocalyptic manga, and to the role that censorship plays, or doesn't, in manga publication.

Obviously, manga are culturally important. As Gravett says in his introduction: "Manga are getting everywhere. This is not some passing craze or flavor of the month, manga is the fastest growing category of book sold in America. So far what we are seeing in English is only the tiniest toenail clipping of the big, scary Godzilla that is manga."

A thorough and entertaining exploration of the history of manga and its emergence as a global pop-culture phenomenon, this weighty and colourful tome from Paul Gravett is a great tool for manga readers and creators alike.

I just finished reading your Manga: 60 Years Of Japanese Comics book. Just wanted to say thanks for producing such a great book. I work at a comic book/pop-culture store in Worcester, Massachusetts, in the US. I am the go-to guy at the store for imported Japanese items, and often for manga and anime recommendations.  (I am an amateur Japanophile.) Despite my love for these genres, I am really not that well versed in either. Your book has helped me to round out some of  my knowledge and give me some great new avenues to investigate. Thanks again.

A great book dedicated to Manga! Covering over sixty years of Japanimation, it contains articles, rare manga strips and pictures detailing themes, emotions and characters of Manga and its effect on the Western world. This is a must-have for die-hard fans everywhere.
(Rated: 4 out of 5 stars)

Manga, what's that? Translated into French only a year after its appearance in Britain, this beautiful book by Paul Gravett should prevent fans of Franco-Belgian comics, as well as publishers, booksellers and librarians disoriented by the irruption in France of Japanese comics on a huge scale, for coming across as idiots about them in the future. Numerous magazines have already devoted special features on manga. Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics is neither the first nor the last book dedicated to a genre which makes up the prime force expanding this sector today. But this highly illustrated panorama, written by a British journalist and historian recognised as one of the best specialists on comics, stands out for its instructive qualities.

Paul Gravett places manga within Japanese pictorial traditions as well as in relation to Western comics, analysing their techniques and underlining their importance in contemporary publishing and daily life in Japan. Above all, after having shown the key role immediately after the Second World War of the founding father of manga, Osamu Tezuka, often called 'the Japanese Hergé', he presents the creative waves, publishing trends, and different categories of authors, famous or underground, supported by their artwork.

Sometimes the manga pages are presented in their initial versions in Japanese. Often they are translated but... in English, as the publisher unfortunately has not replaced the English versions of the original editions with their existing French versions, mostly from Glénat, Tonkam, Vertige Graphic, Kana, Asuka, Pika, J'ai lu, Casterman/Sakka, Delcourt, Soleil and even Albin Michel, among others. At least these translations are mentioned in the captions. Perhaps they will do more in a future edition?

This solidly researched introduction to manga belongs on the reading list of any student interested in Japanese popular culture. With 360 intelligently chosen illustrations, there is a real sense of allowing the strips to speak for themselves: the book's main strength is its range of material, from girls' comics to salaryman funnies. Thus, there is an implicit, and very welcome, challenge to the stereotypical view held in the West that manga are merely about sex and violence (tits and tentacles) fodder for Beavis & Butthead-like teens.

The ten chapters range from historical narratives (e.g. From pay libraries to newsstands) to more focused themes (Through a woman's eyes), while the illustrational content also includes helpful extras such as a time-line and pie charts to indicate the genres sold. This care and attention is matched by the writing style, which is accessible and politically astute - albeit within limits. It helps that Gravett has had a long career as a freelance journalist on papers such as The Guardian and on specialist comics publications.

In terms of where to begin, Gravett equates the "struggle to develop manga from slight entertainments principally aimed at children into narratives of every type for readers of all ages" (p. 24) with the career of just one man: Osamu Tezuka. This "Father of Japanese comics", Gravett tells us, represented "Walt Disney, Hergé, Will Eisner and Jack Kirby all rolled into one" and essentially set a template for manga, with hits such as New Treasure Island (1947), Astro Boy (1951) and Buddha (1972) selling in their millions. Tezuka's work is recognizably what we think of as 'manga' today, whereas Gravett could have taken the decision to start his history with the ukiyo-e prints of the seventeenth century, or even with monastic scrolls from the twelfth century. This is the line taken by many studies of manga, but would have been a mistake for two reasons: first, it makes an association between comics and so-called 'high art', which Gravett is shrewd enough to realize is a totally spurious one; second, by extension, it connects manga with forms which have an arguably very different aesthetic. Recently, for example, academics such as Jaqueline Berndt have argued persuasively for a fresh take on the definition of manga, with the corollary that tracing their origins back several centuries falls into the same trap as claiming that the roots of Western comics stretch to the Bayeux Tapestry or Trajan's Column.

The best chapter features the wilder shores of post-1960s' underground comics publishing, with underrated creators such as Yoshiharu Tsuge and Suehiro Maruo getting their due. Their comics represent a personal, non-commercial, approach - stories about working in factories, psychedelic experiences, etc. - and the images chosen display a vibrant alternative to the Tezuka-derived 'big-eye' style on show in much of the rest of the book. Although there are comparisons with the underground and alternative comics scene in the West, it is conceded that, "In Japan, the border between 'mainstream' and 'underground' tends to become rather blurred because of the size and range of available opportunities within manga publishing" (p. 132). This is undoubtedly true, though differing cultural norms also play a role. Whatever you call these comics, it is clear that an entire book could have been devoted to this single genre.

This raises the point that if the book has a drawback, then it is that it tries to do too much. Gravett points out in the cover blurb that manga "account for 40 per cent of everything published each year in Japan". So the subtitle of the book, Sixty Years of Japanese Comics is a slightly worrying portent of overambition. Of course there has had to be a severe selection process, and the cherry-picked examples are entertaining enough, but there are still too many of them, with the result that the accompanying text is often squeezed to the point of superficiality.

For this reason, the reader will not find out much about the wider context for these comics. There is little about production history (no comment on the notorious sweatshop conditions in many studios), and despite some astute analysis of the depiction of girls and women, scant interest in ideology. Thus, for example, concerns over the alleged promotion of neo-fascist politics in some manga (e.g. Silent Service) are ignored in favour of a more celebratory tone. This fannishness is evident in the fact that creators are often referred to as "visionaries", and that information offered on individual titles, while being punctiliously PC, is more or less descriptive (for the seminal Akira, we are told more about the different printings than anything else).

But who is to blame for this? Perhaps it is germane to ask how far any highly illustrated text published in the 2000s can be expected to be critical. Publishers typically insist upon written permissions from copyright holders to reproduce work, and this can entail some pretty binding strings. To take an example from the world of comics (though, of course, this situation applies to any book about visual culture): DC Comics in the USA will demand to see the text before granting permission, and then will (usually) charge a considerable fee. This means that if they do not like what an author has to say, that crucial picture of Superman, Wonder Woman or whoever will be denied. There are 'Fair Use' clauses in law allowing certain levels of reproduction for scholarly purposes, but because most publishers of illustrated books are nervous about what this covers, the norm is for a contract to put the legal responsibility on the author to secure clearances. End result: censorship.

Gravett's book is a lot more critical than most illustrated surveys, but for truly analytical work it is clear that one has to look towards the academic presses (where it is not uncommon to find studies of comics that absurdly contain no pictures whatsoever - e.g. Routledge's Many Lives Of The Batman). There is a growing literature about manga at this level, and Gravett lists in the bibliography such important Western academics as the aforementioned Berndt and Sharon Kinsella, as well as occasionally referencing statistical analyses such as Tim Perper and Martha Cornog's study of the sexual content of translated manga. When it comes to Japanese voices, critics such as Fusanosuke Natsume and Tomafusa Kure are namechecked, but it is obvious that Gravett's (entirely forgivable) lack of fluency in the language has been a barrier to exploring indigenous studies.

If it is tempting to conclude that the book is more of a bumper-sized fanzine than a scholarly tome, this is not fair. It goes much further than this, and offers readers the opportunity to look closely at a side to manga they may not previously have encountered. There has been a need for a good primer on the subject for many years (Frederik Schodt's Manga! Manga!, 1983, has done sterling service), and this informative, engaged and above all wide-ranging compendium fulfils that role admirably.

Paul Gravett (Journalist). Born in Essex UK, after graduating from Cambridge University, he became an editor of comic magazines and books. He is now a journalist dealing with a wide range of world comic cultures.

When Paul first discovered Japanese manga, he was 24 years old. In the Manga, the main character was a boy crazy about fishing. He was so impressed by the detailed illustration of human emotion. "I could not read Japanese so I was just looking at images. But still, I was trembling with deep emotion." Since then,  he has collected Japanese Manga and now has over 2000 titles. Nevertheless, he feels so sorry that many western people have a sort of the bias. For example, they believe that in Japanese Manga, characters have huge eyes and most stories are fantasy. In order to show the real trail of Japanese Manga cultural development, he spent two years to research and write the book Manga – 60 Years of Japanese Comics. Many critics appreciated his work so hopefully "it will break the ridiculous prejudice that Pokémon is the only valuable Manga to enjoy." He has never been to Japan, but it is not the problem. "I can learn everything about Japan through Manga."

Where the actions speak louder

In 1990, when I was invited to Tokyo to report on the Japan festival which would annually bring Japanese culture to London, I was presented with tea ceremonies, Noh plays, Zen gravel and sumo battles. My questions about manga provoked incomprehension and, frankly, a degree of alarm. What could be culturally interesting about Japanese comic books? Ten years later, as Paul Gravett reports in Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics, the new national art curriculum for junior high schools has finally included the study of manga as "one of Japan's traditional modes of expression".

Too right. It was Hokusai who coined the term "manga", or "playful sketches", to describe the caricatures he loved doing. And while he did not introduce narrative into these prints, the ukiyo-e prints and pictorial novels of the 17th to 19th centuries had done so with their tales of geishas and courtesans, as did certain monastic scrolls as far back as the 12th century. Some argue that the very nature of written Japanese — ideograms drawn as stylised pictures of the words they represent — facilitates acceptance of comic books, and Gravett adds a further practical note: in the West, using the Roman alphabet with its mere 26 characters, it was easier to print the words with moveable type and to make any illustration with a separate woodcut, with the result that illustrations were used more and more sparingly; whereas in Japan it was easier to cut the words on to the same wood block as any illustration.

However, this does not fully account for the extraordinary commercial success and creative flowering of manga in the second half of the 20th century. The books are now the dominant form of literature, for adults as much as children, accounting for 40 per cent of all books and magazines sold in Japan. There are sport comics and cookery comics, romance comics and sex comics, comics historical and hysterical, satirical and satyrical. The weekly anthology magazine Shonen Jump sells three million copies - down from its heyday of six million, but figures with which any British publisher would be delighted.

Some plausible theories are advanced. The high cost of city housing means that most workers live in suburban sprawls; typically they commute by train rather than by car, leaving time for reading. Cinemas are scarce, with only one per 68,000 citizens. Sometimes referred to as the poor man's cinema, manga generated three times as much profit as Japan's film industry during the 1990s. But the real answer is bedded earlier, in the postwar period.

Japan after 1945 was placed under American rule and long remained in thrall to American culture. US comics were widely disseminated, as was a backlog of previously unseen movies. But more than this, Gravett points to the influence of one man, Osamu Tezuka. He was "Walt Disney, Hergé, Will Eisner and Jack Kirby rolled into one, but even that comparison falls short". A lifelong fan of Disney and Chaplin movies who discovered adult American cinema after the war, he resolved to create comics that matched film for storytelling technique and thematic variety. His first work, New Treasure Island (1947), published when he was just 19, sold half a million copies.

During his long career, Tezuka created a slew of memorable comics and animations that in turn were re-exported to the West, greatly influencing artists there: Astro Boy, for instance; or, most famously, Kimba the White Lion, seen by many as the inspiration three decades later for Disney's The Lion King. Other works include his own very loose adaptation of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, a nine-volume life of Buddha, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and the haunting wartime drama Tell Adolf. The funny papers they ain't.

Tezuka set the pace; future generations of manga artists were more than equal to the challenge, creating, often with studios of more than 20 helpers, extraordinarily diverse sagas that could run to thousands of pages.

Gravett's solidly researched study is, mercifully, somewhat shorter, including in its 176 pages bountiful full-colour illustrations that do not shirk the erotic and horror sides of adult manga. One thing's for sure. If you were under the misapprehension that Pokémon represents the acme of Japanese comic culture, this book will swiftly disabuse you.

"Catch up, overtake" -- this is the title, already loaded with meaning, of the first chapter of this voluminous and magnificent book, which tries to explore what has spread around the Western world during the past few years. And it seems to be the special destiny of the reputed comics specialist Paul Gravett to tell the story of the rise of the Japanese comics. Because it's much easier for Gravett as an Englishman to get an overview of these pages than it is sometimes for his collegues in America and France who have to live with the overwhelming burden of the comics tradition in their home countries. A first browse already makes it clear that this book, very well written in a journalistic style and enjoyable to read, wants to take a different approach from the mostly scientific books which have been published about this subject in Germany so far.

So Gravett succeeds in filling a real gap. It becomes clear immediately that you can take the book's title literally, because for Gravett the history of manga begins only with the great Osamu Tezuka. So for him the story before is not worth more than 6 pages, which of course is much less than it deserves. But once you have accepted that this book is just about the so-called (modern) story manga, then it's a masterpiece which really covers all the important developments since 1945. Especially informative are the parts which demonstrate the artistic and economic circumstances in which comics are produced in Japan and how they match the daily (working) life of the readers for whom they are meant. That this never becomes at all tiring is also the result of an overwhelming number of manga examples, which propably have never before been seen in such a condensed way. Sometimes there are scenes of several pages, and the large format of the book gives a good excuse for several manga pages to be shown per page. Gravett has to be praised for the way that he, as the author, takes a step back and prefers to let the great variety of the manga works speak for themselves. 

Although it would have been nice if the manga examples had been translated into German and not been printed in the Japanese or -- even more often -- in an English version, especially as many of the examples have been published in German. The reason for this  obviously was that the publisher wanted to save translation costs. No problem of course with reading German manga artists like Christina Plaka, as theirs works are printed in German also in the English edition. They can be found in the chapter about the spread of manga around the whole globe and the slow evolution of "world comics", which merge elements of technique and style from America and also especially Europe with the art of manga. This last chapter shows once more how extensive and broad Paul Gravett's book is.

Paul Gravett has recently written a superb book about manga, called Manga: 60 Years Of Japanese Comics. Paul is an excellent writer, knowledgable and accessible, and the book is gorgeously illustrated. I recommend it unreservedly.

Journalist and lecturer Gravett offers an informative and entertaining history of Japanese comics and comics culture. He identifies themes in early manga, offers brief biographies of prominent creators, talks about how the market expanded to included girls' interests, and discusses the manga phenomenon, which started in Japan, but has grown to international proportions. This easy-to-read history is abundantly illustrated. If American readers recognize old film cartoons in these pictures, that may be because the early manga masters studied American cartoons while learning to ply their trade.

It's been six long years since Frederik L. Schodt updated his seminal 1983 study Manga! Manga! World Of Japanese Comic Books. Since then manga's unstoppable rampage across the West has become inescapable. So it's appropriate that someone took stock of this comic 'sub-genre' and updated and re-examined what has become the world's most prevalent comic art form. Paul Gravett manages not only to cover the history of manga, but in doing so explores the social and cultural evolution of Japan from it's post-war reinvention to its modern-day literary imperialism. Gravett's book excels not only in discussing such, but also by displaying hundreds of examples of artwork in glorious detail. Everything is here from the crassly commercial Dragon Ball Z and Yu-Gi-Oh! to the grotesque Grand Guignol artwork of Hideshi Hino. It even made this jaded cynic get excited about Nipponese comics once more. No mean feat. Authoritatively written and exquisitely designed, this book demands space on your shelf.

An excellent new book in the tradition of Dreamland Japan and Manga! Manga! from respected writer Paul Gravett. Covering the gamut of Japanese comics from their inception after World War II and through the turbulent student uprising period, the manga boom, the manga bust, and the vast array of creative and mature manga available today. An excellent overview of the medium.

There's a reason why this magazine exists, and that's to provide info on the world of Japanese and Asian pop culture for those of us in the West who are not fortunate enough to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the phenomenon. One of the key components of this culture is manga – Japanese comic books. Tapping into this rising zeitgeist, Laurence King has cannily commissioned noted authority (and Neo writer) Paul Gravett to provide a book dedicated to the history of manga. With a pedigree in the publication of art books, it's no surprise that the format Laurence King has chosen for its ambitious Manga: Sixty Years Of Japanese Comicsis a weighty, lavishly illustrated coffee table-style paperback. Through ten chapters, Gravett somehow manages to encapsulate the slippery eel that is manga, covering the artform's origins in post-Hiroshima Japan, the country's wholesale acceptance of the medium to the same degree as TV and film, and manga's seemingly infinite diversity by catering for all sexes and tastes.

All the major manga series and creators are touched upon to varying degrees in the book (although Osamu Tezuka, the 'Walt Disney' of manga, is granted the singular honour of having an entire chapter dedicated to his work), and there are plenty of real gems of information to be discovered within its oversized pages. Somehow, Gravett even finds the space to discuss manga's effect on other mediums, including the promotion campaign for the 2002 World Cup, as well its influence on creators in the West.

The amount of illustrations on offer is enough to make you dizzy. From full page Japanese manga covers, through to reproductions of translated and original comic strip works, Manga proves to be an excellent 'first stop' resource tool. Gravett's ability to take the book's remit and break it down into a format that is equally accessible to novice and diehard fans alike cannot be understated. It is a remarkable achievement, making this book an essential purchase for any mangaphile's library. Highly recommended.

He starts quite sensibly with Osamu Tezuka, the universally acknowledged 'God of Manga.' Beyond being an accomplished storyteller and artist, Tezuka was a passionate advocate of comics as a legitimate art form with limitless potential. He was inspired by the American films that flooded Japan after the end of World War II and wanted to translate their kinetic energy and the range of emotions they evoked to comics storytelling. Over the course of his career, he worked on hundreds of comics and produced dozens of animated films. From humanistic science fiction like Astro Boy to adaptations of classics like Crime and Punishment to a biography of Buddha, Tezuka's prolific accomplishments were limited only by time. (He died at 60, still working despite a battle with stomach cancer.) As Gravett writes, 'His influence in Japan could be seen as equivalent to that of Walt Disney, Hergé, Will Eisner and Jack Kirby rolled into one.' Tezuka's innovations and passion for comics serve as a perfect launching point to explore manga's evolution over time. He was an inspirational figure, and Gravett spends the rest of the book exploring the ways Tezuka's dreams for Japanese comics are being realized.

Gravett delves into manga from a wide variety of angles. He goes into its expanding range of subject matter, the driving influence of boys' comics, the diverse audiences it serves, and its growing popularity outside of Japan. He talks about independent and underground creators; manga as escape, instruction, and eroticism; and manga's place in Japan's daily life (and economy.)

My favourite chapter is Through A Woman's Eyes, where Gravett traces the role of women as a creative force and women and girls as a loyal audience. It's difficult to resist comparing women's influence in Japanese comics with their still-evolving place with American publishers, particularly when Gravett rattles off a fact like this: 'Shojo manga publications currently employ an estimated 400 women mangaka, among them some of the industry's most successful creators. Girls are no longer their only audience; stories by women are reaching across age differences and the gender gap.'

Gravett packs the book with history, perspective, and detail, and he has a splendid way with an illustrative anecdote. As sound as the scholarship is, though, Manga isn't a bit stuffy. Gravett's style is conversational and engaging, and the pages fly by.

I would be completely remiss if I didn't note the staggering range of eye candy the book boasts. There are plates from literally hundreds of comics of virtually every style and genre. Anyone finding themselves in an argument over whether all manga looks alike could benefit from a copy of this in their library. Of course, you'll probably want one there anyways, just to gape at all the pretty pictures.

Even if you aren't a manga fan, Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics is a fascinating look at an art form that seems to keep going from strength to strength (with the occasional correction along the way). And for manga fans, it's an accessible, essential overview that will only enhance their appreciation of the comics they love.

This disarray and this distrust among publishers explains an initial delay in secondary literature on manga. This delay is starting to be compensated for now that we see the sort of things appearing that would make comics historians feel they were dreaming: for example, manuals teaching adolescents how to draw shojo manga put out by the very Catholic Editions Fleurus, who, you may recall, published BD (some of them remarkable) only in order to fight back against "bad comics", ie non-confessional ones. It's clearly the sector on general introductions to Japanese comics that is the most coveted, and here the better are side-by-side with the worse, or simply the most hasty. Les Mondes Manga (EPA, 2005) by Martin Delpierre and Jérôme Schmidt, the latter already the author of a disastrous Génération manga from Librio in 2004, is little more than a big book of images. A sort of brief article, not bad for all that, by Fabien Tillon, becomes a little book, entitled simply Les Mangas in the collection Les Petits Illustrés (Nouveau Monde editions, 2005).

In this context, we must salute the translation of the work by Paul Gravett, Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics (Laurence King Publishing/Harper Design International, 2004) from editions du Rocher, and if the BD amateur unsure of manga wishes to buy only one work on the subject, this is the one we would advise. Gravett is an intelligent author and positions his enterprise within the English-language literature on the subject. So he knows that his reader knows of the work by Frederic Schodt, Manga, Manga (Kodansha, 1983), the first introduction in the West to what had been translated only in a very marginal way. Consequently, Gravett picks up the ancient history of manga (via the toba-e, kibyoshi or Japan Punch) only to clarify his intention. Similarly, he presumes that the founding position of Tezuka is known to the reader and so highlights the no less important developments of gekiga and the production of manga for lending libraries (kashibonya) published in Osaka.

With an historian's lucidity matched with an aesthete's judgement, Gravett proceeds to isolate the key authors, both in the past and in the current scene. Among the classical authors, Tezuka, Tatsumi, Tsuge, Shirato and Umzeu are translated in the West. But Gravett also knows how to recognise the merits of Mizuko or of Chiba. Knowing that the secondary literature on comics generally hovers between cursory, misinformed survey and obsessonal compilation, this faculty of discernment in a reference work, presented as an introduction to a studied area, deserves to be praised.  Equally among his assets Gravett draws on an encyclopedic knowledge of international comics and a clear understanding of how a comic is produced. Therefore, the fact that Tezuka uses a cast (the same characters return from one series to another, in different roles) is placed in relation to some of his predecessors (for example, Ed Whelan, author of Minute Movies). This is then clarified by a technical reason: this re-use partly explains Tezuka's prolific output, since he would use characters over and over whom he knew inside out.

Gravett avoids falling into a reductive position which would make manga the strict inheritor of the Japanese iconic tradition (a position that the Japanese themselves do not escape from, including in their educational publications). Manga is described as the product of an industrial society and this society functions by definition on the fashion for global exchanges. It is really the cross-fertilisation between comics and American animation, on the one hand, and Japanese tradition, on the other, that explains the physionomy of modern manga. As well as his astonishing productivity, what makes Tezuka preeminent is that he is the man through whom this cultural reception passed. But Gravett is conscious that a second manga, "non-Tezukian", is possible, and makes space for the minimalist Shigeru Sugiura, cited (page 135) as an alternative to the Tezuka system. Manga has swept the world and this in turn is only a new avatar of this globalisation, leading to new cross-fertilsations, very skilfully illustrated un this work, and will finally permit, according to Gravett, the emergence of a world comics literature. Here we can measure how far the usual debates in intellectual circles about the globalisation of cultural goods can be reductionist; multiculturalism is only validated, in these debates, when it concerns the promotion of Third World cultures, and when the question of the globalisation of post-industrial societries' cultural productions is brought down in a polemical way to a denouncement of North American cultural hegemony.

When he comes to modern manga, Gravett speaks about a literature that is largely translated today (in English and in French) and his book works in this regard both as an anthology -  more conscientious and methodical than, for example, the Japanese work published by Taschen in 2004 (Manga Design by Masanao Amano) - and as a reading guide for a cultivated person who does not know about manga but wants to plunge into them. This applies as much to series aimed at a broad public as to avant-garde authors.

An effort has been made by editions du Rocher to adapt the work for a French public. If the manga pages illustrating the book have been kept in English, the translations of those titles are given when needed and a notice of the French edition has been added. On the negative side, it is regretable that the translator doesn ot always underdstand what he is translating, leading to some misprints and imprecise terms. He has also undertaken assorted interventions into the text, sometimes in bad taste (so Eroica, a masculine hero from a shojo manga based on male homosexuality, becomes a camp female blonde). It is high time that publishers understand that illustrated literature is a technical domain and you cannot simply assign the translation of an historical or theoretical work on the subject to no matter who, no more than you would give the translation of a work of philosophy or chemistry to a non-philosopher or non-chemist.

From the breathtaking Studio Ghibli films (Spirited Away, 2001) to that dizzy cross between Charlie's Angels and Beverly Hills 90210, the cartoon Totally Spies (2001), we consume Manga graphics without reading a single page. For the uninitiated it just seemed to come from nowhere, but in 2002 there were two exhibitions. The landmark exhibition 'Manga' toured Japanese comic artwork around England courtesy of the Japan Foundation. Paul Gravett responded by coordinating 'Za Manga!', an authentic Z to A of popular Manga. A David Mach-like wall of Japanese pulp publications was set up in a sleek Magma bookshop, looking as curated as an Amazon warehouse. Too accurate as a micro-reconstruction of a corner of Tokyo, it made Manga appear impenetrably Japanese and the sole preserve of pony-tailed guys in Matrix-style leather coats.

Happily Manga: Sixty Years Of Japanese Comics rips off the wraps and takes a hint from the medium itself to survey its staggering versatility in exuberant spreads of words and images. We enter a different publishing world. Comics as thick as telephone books, and just as disposable? Statistics and personal accounts from artists and editors locked in the relentless creative process that yields sales figures of millions conjure the empowering reek of black ink. Gravett introduces a feast of storylines and styles that make the book dazzle with screaming action and poetry and every human emotion in between. He is inspired less by nipponphilia than by this historical and transcultural renaissance of the comic form. Forgotten American and European examples are revisited, and contemporary role models are reviewed demonstrating the sociological forces at play in the comic industry's rise in Japan.

Japanese officialdom proclaims that Manga began with ancient scroll painting, but modern Manga is distinguished from the children-oriented mainstream by its gekika ('dramatic pictures') style that rose from the gutter. In the streets of post-war Japan , actors performed to a TV-shaped window displaying story-sheets to millions of people a day. The writers brought the storylines to Manga, reflecting the brutality of contemporary life, from the darkness of criminal business to the desperation of stillborns stripped of the valuables swaddled with them as they wash into the grasp of sewer workers.

Manga: Sixty Years lands you in a reeling variety of weird worlds and graphic technique, but despite that you do come to understand what Manga is. This will become a classic reference sourcebook for every art school library. So I wish I could but can't – as yet – hand over this book to my daughters. They are well-versed in Manga, especially the ongoing sex-comedies dating from the mid-1990s, No Time for Tenchi (featuring Ryoko of the pneumatic breasts) and Rumiko Takahashi's transgender, trans-species farce RanMa ½. But – here's the novelty – comic book sexual content is not the preserve of teenagers. Manga: Sixty Years examines a lifespan and as Manga matures along with its audience, Gravett illustrates how its artists redefine erotic genres using folklore and the female as well as male imaginary. From satire to pornography, Manga's urbanity is thoroughly adult rather than Men Only.

Parental Guidance notwithstanding, shock was delivered in the chapter on horror. Scissors push through a child's eyes: is this her dream or …? The action is spread over seven panels transfixing the viewer in a way that much video art tries to do. Manga, "the poor man's film" is a sequence of images that can screw down any conceivable moment for eternal flashbacking even as the eye scans ahead for resolutions. To achieve that effect in a time-based medium, you would have to press replay. As if.

”Englanniksi julkaistaan paljon mangaa, mutta enimmäkseen se kaikki on samanlaista viihdettä. Olin lukenut sitä jo pitkään. Kirjahankkeella halusin päästä näkemään myös taiteellista mangaa - avantgardea. Olen yrittänyt ymmärtää sitä jopa alkukielisenä”, Gravett tarkentaa.

Suurin osa mangastakin on nuorille tehtyä seikkailu- ja ihmissuhdeviihdettä. Seikkailuissa sankareiden kummat kyvyt ja oudot otukset eivät ole kovin kaukana amerikkalaisista supersankarisarjakuvista.

”Minulle manga on myös tapa tutustua Japanin historiaan ja keino päästä sisään sen kulttuuriin. Japani avautui kansainvälisesti aika myöhään. Japanilaisten tavoin myös me britit olemme omituinen saarikansakunta. Ehkä siksi arvelin pystyväni ymmärtämään sitä. Halusin näyttää, ettei manga ole vain tissejä ja lonkeroita”, Gravett miettii.

Mangan monipuolisuudesta on tullut länsimaissa melkein myytti. Usein muistetaan ihastella, kuinka Japanissa tehdään mangaa erilaisille osayleisöille golfareista kotirouviin. Toki tehdäänkin, mutta sitä voi olla jopa vaikea löytää valtavirtaviihteen valtavan enemmistön seasta.

Toisaalta länsimaissa on alettu kauhistella mangan väkivaltaa ja seksiä. Toisinaan rajut jutut näyttävätkin olevan japanilaisille arkisempia kuin meille. Mutta usein reaktiot ovat ampuneet yli samoin kuin ennenkin uuden populaarikulttuurin kanssa. Vuoronsa ovat saaneet muun muassa videot, tietokonepelit ja tietoverkko.

”Amerikka dominoi populaarikulttuurin vientiä melkein koko 1900-luvun. Nyt Japanin volyymi on jo merkittävä. Ei se kumoa Amerikan asemaa maailmalla, mutta tasapainottaa sitä. Japanilaisista kauhuelokuvista on alettu tehdä Hollywoodissa uusia versioita. Manga ja muu pop japanisoivat varsinkin nuoria, levittävät erilaisia arvoja.”

”Esimerkiksi tytöille tehdyssä shojomangassa on vahvoja ja itsenäisiä naisia, mutta todellisuudessa heidän asemansa ei ehkä olekaan niin hyvä. Mangassa voi puhua asioista, joita Japanissa on muuten hankala käsitellä.”

”Tytöille tehdään myös ihmissuhdemangaa, joissa on usein päähenkilöinä homopoikia. Ne ovat todella outoja ja kiinnostavia - erittäin romanttisia ja tunteellisia, kuten muutkin tyttöjen mangat. En halua kuitenkaan liioitella Japanin outoutta. Manga myy länsimaissakin, koska sitä on helppo lukea ja tajuta. Sehän on suorastaan hyvä esimerkki siitä, että toista kulttuuria voi ymmärtää.”

Niinpä niin. Kannattaa muistaa, että viihteen säännöt ovat kaikkialla suunnilleen samat. Mangankin fantasiat edustavat ihanteellisia arvoja ja mörköineenkin idealisoitua todellisuutta hyveellisine sankareineen. Esimerkiksi meillä kovan kohun herättänyt Akira Toriyaman Dragon Ball on harmiton. Gravett luonnehtii sitä fantastisen energiseksi ja asenteiltaan myönteiseksi.

Hän korostaa kirjoittaneensa kirjansa myös niille, jotka eivät ennestään tiedä mangasta mitään. Myös niitä jo lukeneille kirja on antoisa, sillä Gravett onnistuu sijoittamaan mangan ympäristöönsä, Japanin historiaan ja kulttuuriin. Sillä tavalla se tarjoaa uusia avaimia mangan ymmärtämiseen.

Gravett, 48, on työskennellyt sarjakuvien parissa pitkään. Britanniassa sarjakuva ei ole koskaan kukoistanut järin hyvin, mutta ilman Gravettia se olisi pärjännyt vielä huonommin. Hän toimitti vuosina 1983-89 Escape-lehteä, jossa aloittivat suunnilleen kaikki saarivaltion sittemmin merkittävät sarjakuvataiteilijat.

Gravett on myös kuratoinut monia näyttelyitä, muun muassa manganäyttelyä vuonna 2002. Sen yhteydessä sai alkunsa kirjahanke. Näinä päivinä Britanniassa ilmestyy jo Gravettin seuraava kirja Graphic Novels: Stories To Change Your Life, jossa hän esittelee keskeisimmät sarjakuva-albumit.

"Kummassakin kirjassa halusin auttaa lukijoita etsimään sellaisia sarjakuvia, joista he voisivat pitää. Siksi runsaat kuvanäytteet ovat tärkeitä. Halusin näyttää enemmän kuin yksittäisiä ruutuja, korostaa tarinankerrontaa. Valikoin tosin mukaan sellaisia, joista pidän. Mutta minulla on laaja maku."

Page 47
Last sentence: Here he helps Oshika carry out a daring horseback rescue of her husband, but there is no escaping their lethal pursuers.
(Oshika/Sugaru is the mother.)

Page 56
Caption for Go Nagai's Grendizer: Above: The guy in the white sweater is Koji Kabuto, who as a teen piloted Go Nagai's Mazinger Z in 1972. Later, in 1975, he joined Grendizer pilot Duke Fleed.

Page 63
The two characters shown on the top left are Ultraman's allies Andro Wolf in red and Andro Meros in green from the planet Andro. In the manga pages shown below, they join the Ultra Brothers to defend the planet Ultra from evil.

Page 66
(Lower caption) Far right: Tatsuhiko Yamagami's demented boy policeman Gaki Deka, naked save for his cap and tie, flashes his phallic daikon root vegetable. (Udon is a type of noodle, but the daikon root is a common phallic symbol.)

Page 98
(Second paragraph, last sentence:) Hollywood itself has now started licensing manga and financing live-action adaptations of Akira, Lupin III and Lone Wolf and Cub. (Monkey Punch is the artist.)

Page 99
The manga series Tokyo Story is called Tokyo Love Story.

Page 113
(Last sentence) The artist's name is Hitosi Iwaaki, not Awaaki.

Page 132
Caption: The artist's name is Shiriagari, not Siriagari.

Page 154
(Left column, 3rd line from bottom, and right column, 1st line) Korean comics are called manhwa, not manwha.

Page 172
The German edition of the book by Jaqueline Berndt is called "Phänomen Manga".

Page 173
The book by Wendy Siuyi Wong is called "Hong Kong Comics: A History of Manhua" ("Manhua" is the most commonly used term for Hong Kong comics).

A review by Paul Gravett:
In his introduction, Timothy Lehmann explains that one of the motivations behind his book of crisply illustrated interviews with current manga creators was to produce "a foil for the rash of how-to-draw-Manga books that had sprung up in the 1990s, reducing all the diversity I was finding in contemporary Japanese comics art to Obig eyes and speed lines." The number of interview subjects may be limited to only twelve, but by careful selection Lehmann presents here a wonderfully rich and varied survey of today's manga in its many assorted genres and styles. And in case you bristled at that masculine 'Masters' subtitle, don't panic - 'Mistresses' of the art are represented too; in fact the selection is split equally between male and female.

So who has Lehmann spoken to? Among the dozen profiles are Western fan favourites such as: Kia Asamiya of Silent Möbius fame; the hugely popular all-women studio CLAMP; Erica Sakurazawa and her delicate love stories; and Takehiko Inoue, author of Slam Dunk and Vagabond. Lehmann has also chosen more cultish translated creators like the genius of erotic-grotesque nightmares Suehiro Maruo; the brilliant French-inspired draughtsman Jiro Taniguchi; the playful deconstructionist Usumaru Furuya; and the reclusive and virtually retired Yuko Tsuno. Equally illuminating are the final four manga creators whose work has yet to be put into English at all: Tatsuya Egawa, a biting satirist and wealthy celebrity; sophisticated aesthete Reiko Okano; Miou Takaya, with her brooding, elegant fables; and hyper-realist visionary Mafuyu Hiroki, who provides a specially drawn new 10-page story, but with no English translation, sadly.

This is a rare chance to learn first-hand and in their own words how differently each of these creators arrived at their careers and to compare and contrast their personal approaches. Sticking rather rigidly to the same questionnaire, Lehmann explores their individual family backgrounds, early inspirations, education and training, their first breaks into print, working methods from script to finished art, their daily schedule and advice for aspiring artists. Inevitably, some are more forthcoming than others, but their personalities come through vividly. Every interview concludes with a spread of photos revealing their sometimes chaotic studio and drawing table, scripts, rough sketches, reference materials and a list of their tools. Some might wish for more colour examples than the 24-page group gallery. Still, through only these twelve storytellers, Lehmann proves how wildly divergent and multifaceted manga, and manga's masters, truly are.

This review first appeared in 2005 within Neo Magazine, the UK magazine devoted to manga, anime, Asian films, games and more.
Text © Paul Gravett