Barefoot GenJapanese Manga: A Glimpse of the Classics

September 5-October 6, 2006

Lamson Library

Opening Event September 13 4—6 p.m.
Gallery Talk September 20 at noon
with curator David A. Beronä, Lamson Library Director

This exhibit is a collaborative project with The Karl Dreup Art Gallery and Exhibitions Program associated with "Asian Games: The Art of Contest."

Japanese manga is similar to the comic book, though more popular than the comic book in America.  Weekly sales of manga in Japan are higher than the total sales of American comics for a year.  Like the growing acceptance of graphic novels in America, manga is a respected art form and a recognized form of popular culture with a distinct style. This exhibit in Lamson Library provides a few selected classic manga and well as more recent examples of the novelle-manga from our collection.  Pages from these selected titles are blown up to display manga’s distinguishing style.  Display copies of these manga are available for browsing.

The popularity of manga today is due to our booming visual culture.  But unlike most visual media, manga, and comics in general, requires active participation by readers. It shakes up the static print literature, with its humdrum display of horizontal fonts, and combines a dynamic display of text with highly inventive images.  Manga shares with today’s finest graphic novels the capacity to create page-turning, imaginative stories that touch our lives and, in some cases, opens the door to self-discovery. 

Barefoot Gen: Life After the Bomb - A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima By Keiji Nakazawa
Barefoot Gen is a masterpiece of the manga genre that recounts the bombing of Hiroshima from the perspective of a young boy, Gen, and his family. But the book's themes (the physical and psychological damage ordinary people suffer from war's realities) ring chillingly true today. Gen and his family have long been struggling without much food, money or medicine, but despite hardships, they try to maintain a semblance of normal life. The adults are exhausted and near despair; the children take air raids and starvation more or less in stride. Nakazawa, a Hiroshima survivor, effectively portrays the strain of living in this environment and shows how efforts to stay upbeat in dire circumstances sometimes manifest as manic, irrational humor. 

"In spite of BAREFOOT GEN's age, though, no volume of gag-strip tropes (from sweaty foreheads to steam shooting out of ears) could brace the reader for its last forty pages. There are images in these panels that will stay with you the rest of your life, images taken from a first-person perspective on the streets of Hiroshima as the bomb detonates. What Nakazawa saw as a seven year-old boy after the bomb fell is here with the same startling cartoon clarity of the book's first two hundred pages. The conclusion of BAREFOOT GEN is some of the most disturbing comics autobiography ever committed to page." more --Matt Fraction

Black & White By Taiyo Matsumoto
Two lost boys, named Black and White, wander the  streets of Treasure Town, a surreal city of mimes, freaks, crooks, cops, drifters, and down-and-outers. Matsumoto presents a surreal and strangely touching story of these young street fighters in three volumes (Vol. 1, Vol. 2, and Vol. 3).  

Akira By Katsuhiro Otomo
Originally serialized in Japan between 1981 and 1993, Otomo's 2,000-plus-page science fiction epic Akira was reprinted as a monthly comic book in the U.S. in the early '90s. Regarded by many as the finest comic series ever produced, Akira is a bold and breathtaking epic of potent narrative strength and astonishing illustrative skill. Akira is set in the post-apocalypse Neo-Tokyo of 2019, a vast metropolis built on the ashes of a Tokyo annihilated by an apocalyptic blast of unknown power that triggered World War III. 

"For me, AKIRA is pure adrenaline somehow distilled into comic book pages. It looks like science-fiction -- but that's just a backdrop for some of the most intense action sequences ever put to the comic page. It still amazes me, as I flip through these nearly 400 page tomes, just how quick the pacing is; once you start reading, it's nearly impossible to put down." more --Peter Aaron Rose

Lone Wolf and Cub By Kazuo Koike, Goseki Kojima
An epic samurai adventure of staggering proportions -- over 7000 pages -- Lone Wolf and Cub (Kozure Okami in Japan) is acknowledged worldwide for the brilliant writing of series creator Kazuo Koike and the groundbreaking cinematic visuals of the late Goseki Kojima, creating unforgettable imagery of stark beauty, kinetic fury, and visceral thematic power that influenced a generation of visual storytellers.

"He is a ronin, a masterless samurai, a soldier of supernatural skill reduced to the state of a killer for hire. He walks the land with a wooden baby carriage, in which his infant son lay. "Rumour has it that the child himself takes part in the killings. The child of a wolf... is still a wolf." In Western style, this is the story of a Man With No Name travelling formless, endless dusty land in a quest to clear his name. In Japanese style, this is a quest of personal and familial honour. This is Ogami Itto, once executioner to the Shogun, now betrayed and walking the assassin's road in a bid to restore his name and exact necessary vengeance. And awful circumstance dictated that he must take his three-year-old child with him on his descent into hell." more--Warren Ellis

The Push Man & Other Stories by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Legendary cartoonist Yoshihiro Tatsumi is the grandfather of alternative manga (gekiga) for the adult reader. Predating the advent of the literary graphic novel movement in the US by thirty years, Tatsumi created a library of literary comics that draws parallels with modern prose fiction and today’s alternative comics. Tatsumi’s stories are simultaneously haunting, disturbing, and darkly humorous, commenting on the interplay between an overwhelming, bustling, crowded, modern society and the troubled emotional and sexual life of the individual. more

"Yoshihiro Tatsumi has earned his place in the as yet very small pantheon of translated Japanese cartoonists whose work demands our unequivocal attention.more--Tim O'Neil


Ponent Mon/Fanfair Publications

Kinderbook by Kan Takahama,  Translation by Elizabeth Tiernan and Shizuka Shimoyama
"KINDERBOOK is a collection of short stories, written and rendered by Kan Takahama. Refuting the logic that manga must be in excess of a thousand pages to tell a complete story or communicate something meaningful, Takahama’s stories are rich in detail and nuance without lingering even one panel beyond the number necessary to finish the job. The scenarios and the characters that inhabit them are drawn from everyday life and derive their strengths from the recognizable intricacies we expect of it mirrored within deftly." more--Rob Vollmer.

The Walking Man By Jiro Taniguchi, Translated by Stephen Albert
"THE WALKING MAN 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 a break from moving into a new house. Amidst tableaus of sunning housecats, tall trees and fish swimming under bridges the man happens upon a bird watcher. They look at birds together. By the time the man returns home a dog has appeared from under the house. Rather than build drama from outsized events, Taniguchi instead dramatizes the small moments of our lives." more --Andrew Arnold

Blue by Nananan Kiriko, Tanslation by Elizabeth Tiernan and Shizuka Shimoyama
"If Sex and the City took place in Tokyo, if chick lit was less chick and more lit, and if falling in hate could be as captivating as falling in love, then somewhere in this mix you would find the work of Kiriko Nananan. While the manga market is dominated by shojo (girls' comics), Nananan sets herself apart stylistically by aiming at an older female reader. Nananan is a Japanese manga-ka (writer and artist) who creates josei manga, or titles geared toward young women rather than teenage girls. Her work is virtually unknown in this country." more --Kai-Ming Cha

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