Superheroes for a complex world

The tales are a far cry from the American comic-book staples of superheroes - invariably male - and clear-cut battles between good and evil with feel-good endings. Instead, there are fantastic post-apocalyptic worlds inhabited by cute, big-eyed children and pubescents, animals and robots. There's more shape-shifting than in Ovid's Metamorphosis among characters who are not simply black or white. For those raised on a diet of Superman and Batman, first contact with such ambiguous worlds can be baffling; they seem familiar but somehow odd, kitsch yet complex, beautiful artwork in a pulp medium.

Manga in Japan is ubiquitous and read across age groups - even the former prime minister Ryutaro Hashimoto acknowledged reading it, while another former prime minister, Kiichi Miyazawa, serialised his opinions in a manga magazine. There, manga and anime are spoken of in the same breath, since stories constantly migrate between the two.

In Australia, manga has so far remained on the fringe, unlike anime which, thanks largely to the films of Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli, whose Spirited Away won an Oscar in 2003, has crossed into the mainstream. But this is poised to change.

The market for translated manga here and in the US has tripled each year since 2002, says Wai Chew Chan, comics consultant at Sydney's Kinokuniya bookstore, the largest stockist of manga in Australia. And whereas the readership of American comics is overwhelmingly male, about 60 per cent of manga readers in the West are women aged from 18 to 29. "One of the biggest things manga has done is bring in a huge female readership," Chan says.

The number of strong female characters in manga is part of the appeal. And for a generation raised on the internet, the graphic art of manga has captured the attention of both sexes. "The visual element is a big part of the popularity," he says. "Because of the internet, words are boring on the screen. So a lot of [young] people are drawn to the visual stimulation of manga ... it's not necessarily heavy reading, which is why people can come to it. It's not classic literature, but it actually deals with the same themes."

And it is not just booksellers rubbing their hands with glee. Some Sydney libraries have recently begun manga collections and are overjoyed at the response. "It attracts another group of people into the library that didn't normally come," says Jane Moffat, children's and new services librarian at Randwick Library Service. Since the library began buying manga and graphic novels three years ago, the demand has been unceasing. "As soon as we started purchasing it, 70 per cent of it was going out at any one time," she says. "Usually you're happy if 40 per cent goes out."

Was there any debate over the merits of stocking such material, as there was a few years ago over Mills and Boon-type romance novels? "No. Most librarians recognise it as legitimate artwork and a legitimate form of literacy and communication," she says. "The consensus is it's the best thing [libraries] have done to get the younger people in and borrowing and reading. Because there are so many other things they can do, to get them reading is wonderful."

Central to the growth of manga and anime are the works of Osamu Tezuka, best known in the West for Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion, which began as manga and were then serialised on television. Dubbed the god of manga, he popularised the form through his innovative style and prolific output, hand-drawing more than 150,000 pages and creating more than 700 titles.

Tezuka's appeal in the West has primarily been to a young audience, yet the range of his manga is broader and more complex. He drew inspiration from East and West, turning Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and the lives of Buddha and Beethoven into manga. Disney was an influence, as was the society in which he was working, in the aftermath of World War II and the nuclear devastation inflicted on his country.

But to call Tezuka the Japanese Walt Disney is a misunderstanding, according to Philip Brophy, curator of Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga, which opens at the Art Gallery of NSW this month. "Disney was obsessed with an idyllic European fantasyland - most of his settings are in Bavaria," Brophy says. "They're not reflecting any contemporary social conditions. Tezuka is in the postwar period in bombed cities and his work reflects that."

Shortly before he died in 1989, Tezuka, a doctor and humanitarian, described encountering dismembered bodies in war-torn Osaka as the most traumatic experience of his life. Some see in Astro Boy, whose black two-pointed hairdo Tezuka acknowledged as a nod to Mickey Mouse, an allegory of postwar, US-occupied Japan. Here is a robot child who seeks peace between the old and new earth.

Certainly there is more behind the cute faces of Astro Boy and his manga and anime descendants than meets the eye. The roots lie particularly in Japan's theatrical tradition of the mask, Brophy says. "Astro Boy looks cute, but behind the mask is this range of empathy and understanding of humanity. Think of kabuki and noh theatre ... you have to respond to stuff behind the mask."

Manga is deeply rooted in Japan's unique visual culture. It can trace its family tree to 12th-century Buddhist scrolls with cartoon-like images. But manga's more racy and recent ancestors are the vivid woodblock and paintings popular among the dynamic metropolitan culture that emerged during the Edo period from 1600 to 1867. These mass-produced ukiyo-e, or "floating world" pictures, depicted such urban pleasures as courtesans, actors, sumo wrestlers, teahouses and, at the more graphic end, stylised sex and violence. Woodblock artist Katsushika Hokusai, besk known for his Great Wave off Kanagawa, is credited with coining the word manga, or whimsical pictures, in 1814.

These floating-world images were the popular culture of their time. And they, like manga today, were frowned on in some circles because of that, says Chiaki Ajioka, a consultant to the exhibition and a former head of Japanese art at the gallery.

"Manga is not considered art in the way that ukiyo-e was not considered as high art," Ajioka says. "It was popular and commercial. With ukiyo-e and manga there is a communication of the art and commitment to entertain and get close to the viewer or reader."

Manga was worth an estimated $US180 million ($240 million) in the US in 2005, up from about $US140 million in 2004, and major bookstores in Australia, including Dymocks and Borders, are beginning to stock it.

Its rise is an indication of Japan's growing "soft power". That's the term coined by Harvard's Professor Joseph Nye to describe the increasing importance of culture and ideas, rather than military might, in gaining global influence. Manga are images from the new floating world of Japanese soft-power.

Most manga available in the West has been created in Japan and translated, or dubbed (often badly) in the case of anime - but the market is changing. What's emerging is a demand for original English-language work, created for a Western audience, says Dean Prenc of Madman Entertainment, Australia's leading anime and manga distributor.

He cites the coming Afro Samurai as an example of where the form is headed. The Japanese-made film has been made first in English by a Japanese studio, is aimed primarily at a Western audience and uses Samuel Jackson's voice. With manga, he expects a similar trend.

Won't that change, perhaps dilute, the nature of the stories told or sap the energy of the form? "They would need to be mindful of making anything too overtly commercial," Prenc says. "The core market that's interested in anime and manga is very media-savvy, highly informed. If anybody was to try that, the core market would see through it."

Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga shows at the Art Gallery of NSW from February 23 to April 29 and includes the screening of Studio Ghibli films. The Chauvel will screen a series of Tezuka's films from March 29 to April 1.