by Brent Peters
A Life Adrift
It is 1949. You are thirteen years old. The country changes around you, but the world of fiction takes your interest. Manga Shounen magazine introduces a new section: reader submissions. You could get your work published. You think to yourself: I can do this.
It is 1952. A cup of coffee costs twenty-five yen. Tezuka releases the first chapter of Astro Boy. Manga contests appear weekly. You’ve earned some ‘honourable mentions,’ but no prizes. It’s difficult to balance studies and manga.
It is 1957. You work for a company. Your mother is sick. The medicine for her illness has recently been invented, but it’s expensive. You sometimes draw in the evenings, but the money is inconsistent and insubstantial. It’s difficult to focus.
It is 1964. Anpo is in effect. The first issue of Garo Magazine sits in your hands. It sparks a fire you thought dead. It reminds you of the protests that rocked the nation. The artwork reminds you of a passion you once had.
It is 1971. There are two children in next room. Your spouse lies beside you. This is the domestic ‘bliss’ you were told to want. You wonder: how’d I get here? How can I raise children? Who’s the person beside me? Why did I stop drawing?
It is 1991. Garo is no longer independent. Your children are grown. One of them has their own child. You stand in the bookstore, leafing through the new Golgo 13. Your spouse waits at home. You do not recognize them. You barely recognize yourself.
It is 2022. Your apartment is empty. Your spouse, and one of your children, have died. While shopping, you see that Kyojin No Hoshi has gotten a rerelease. Nostalgia-hungry, you buy it. The dated images stoke the embers of passion. You download a drawing app.
The Big Picture
Welcome to the final installment of Chrysanthemum Roots. In the past five issues, we’ve made three rose-coloured glances at Edo, saluted the artists and war criminals of early animation, and linked arms with the rebels of cinema. Today, we round out our amateur art history by looking at some problematic pioneers of comics.
Welcome to the opening days of Japan’s biggest entertainment industry. Before multiple Prime Ministers addressed manga in speeches. Before Demon Slayer and Attack on Titan became bookstore essentials around the world. Even before the Shoujo boom of the 70s led to the creation of Japan’s first ‘Comic Market’.
This is about a handful of starving artists in Osaka. How did severe economic shifts, changing technologies, and massive protests lead to an attempt at creating a new kind of comic.
These artists didn’t want to make manga. No, they called it gekiga.
The Funny Pages
The story begins in 1920. Reporter Suzuki Bunshirō of the Asahi Shinbun goes to America. His assignment: cover the peace talks. While there, he reads American newspapers and discovers the comic strip. Immediately, he wants these in the Asahi. They take up little space and increase reader engagement. Scholars point out that they also allow for a subtle means of injecting political messages, but there’s no way to know Suzuki’s intent.
Maybe he thought they’d increase readership.
Whatever the case, serialized comics came to Japan in 1923. Suzuki became chief editor of the Asahi Graphic Weekly. Among his first actions were the release of Shōchan’s Adventure (created by writer Oda Nobutsune and artist Kabashima Katsuichi) and the translation of American comics.
I want to stop here a moment and talk about language. Were these the first ‘manga’?
I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.
Manga evolved a lot as a word and even more as a medium. Hokusai’s multivolume Manga series was a collection of artbooks, not comics. Maybe we should start with Okamoto Ippei, who founded the Nihon Manga-Kai (‘Japanese Manga Association’). Through his efforts, manga entered the Japanese dictionary of fine arts in 1914 [Hirohito, 44].
The lack of serialization or recognizable paneling makes it difficult to classify these works.
Scholars have poured through the decades to find the ‘origin’ of the art. There’s no clean moment of where it began. If anything, the research shows how gradual and multifaceted the evolution of art can be. It’s impossible to state ‘it started here’.
For our purposes, gekiga has a direct ancestor. Some artists began here, and the rest were inspired by it. I present the kamishibai.
One-Man Show
As comics hit the newspaper stands, kamishibai hit the streets. (That’s ‘Japanese Paper Theatre’ or ‘Portable Slide Picture Show’ depending on your definition). Essentially, it was an artist/narrator who carries a miniature stage on a bicycle. They narrated self-written stories while swapping out illustrations of the key scenes. Attendance was free. All proceeds came from the sales of candy and other small goods.
These performers (Kamishibaiya) worked gruelling hours. They drafted new stories and images constantly. Entertainers needed to keep interest and attract newcomers. Because of this, marketing became part of the story. The performers shouted sound effects, clacked hyōshigi (wooden clapping sticks), and pounded drums. That got passersby to stop and pay attention.
By the 1930s, this became a major hit. According to a review of Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theatre, ‘twenty-five hundred kamishibaiya in Tokyo [performed] ten times a day for audiences of up to thirty children, reaching a daily total of one million kids’ [5].
Of course, children weren’t the only viewers. Most adults had little money for entertainment. People couldn’t afford much. The guy who sold candy offered a fun way to kill an hour.
So, who were these performers and what were their stories?
Starving Artists
Let’s zoom out for a moment. The decade crosses into the 1930s. Japan is at war. Censorship rules the stage, page, and screen, but you are a Kamishibaiya, one of dozens of thousands. Government censors can’t keep track of that many people. Your work isn’t regulated.
Therefore, you can get away with a lot. Why not make an American-style sci-fi like you saw as a kid? Audiences love that. While you’re at it, why not ‘borrow’ ideas from another performer? Nobody’s gonna catch you.
The biggest example of this was Golden Bat. This old series hold the double honour of being the most popular Kamishibai show and Japan’s first superhero story. Everyone had their spin on it. While the original creators (Nagamatsu Takeo and Ichiro Suzuki) eventually earned money through decades of anime and manga adaptations, those early, unregulated days saw countless bootleggers and plagiarists.
Beyond superheroes and sci-fi, genres included: ‘Japanese ninja and samurai stories[sic.], imperial propaganda, and war tragedy’ [5]. Let me stress again: the artists who made these worked quickly, constantly, and cheaply. Under threat of starvation, they developed a work structure and rate of turnaround that no healthy person would want to imitate.
That lifestyle would hone your skills as an artist. Working to deadlines and adapting to trends? No problem. After WWII, several Kamishibai transitioned into the manga industry. Among the artists who made this shift include Mizuki Shigeru and Shirato Sanpei. We’ll get to them later.
For now, it may be wrong to call it a shift. As with the benshi narrators who died out with the advent of sound cinema, TV ended the paper theatre.
Video Killed the Picture Star
When television entered Japan, people called it denki Kamishibai (‘electric Kamishibai’). The technology had changed, but the impact of old stories remained. Moreover, few people could afford TVs.
Instead, people tuned in to public screens in salons and malls. A simple book was often too expensive, let alone a television. Instead, people rented books. The rental book industry became a staple for students, labourers, and salarymen alike.
Researcher Tsurumi Shunsuke summarizes it best:
‘[Artists] were employed by lending libraries to turn out comic books. The clientele was young workers who had come up to big cities from farming areas which were dwindling fast under the pressure of accelerated industrial growth. They lived in rented rooms, and, being unable to afford their own television sets, read comic books in their free hours, sometimes borrowing from the lending library as much as a hundred comic books every month’ [pg. 752].
For the curious, it cost about five yen to read three books through this system. This is a time where a plate of curry and rice cost eighty, according to Tatsumi. When magazines entered the game, they changed the publishing landscape. Suddenly, there was a new and cheap format for stories.
Most importantly, readers could interact with magazine publishers. For the first time, anyone could submit their work.
Price of Submission
Manga Shounen magazine began requesting reader-submitted stories. This gained immediate popularity and spawned imitation in other magazines. Young creatives got the chance to present their work and learn the names of fellow fans.
Through these connections, the Children’s Manga Association began in 1950, perhaps the first amateur manga publication. While these artists were inspired by many of the big names at the time, one superseded all.
You know his name: Osamu Tezuka. Here’s the man who wrote Metropolis and began Jungle Emperor Leo while in medical school. His work ethic inspired people as much as his work.
If you wrote or read manga at this time, you knew and adored Tezuka. Soon, you might even be able to afford his books. The so-called economic miracle began in the early 1950s, funded by the American government which used Japan ‘as a military base of operations fighting on the Korean peninsula’ [Tatsumi, 68].
In this turbulent time, the popularity of manga soared. Tezuka graduated and began working in animation. Young readers became pro writers. Manga became a regular part of the media diet. Of course, popularity didn’t equal acceptance. Controversy arose. A major part of this was marketing and shelf space. Adult-focused pieces such as Black Blizzard (a harrowing survival tale) and Throw Out the Old in Tokyo! (a satire on elder abuse) sat on the same shelves as Sazae-San.
The covers were enough to anger people. A brief spike in the popularity of murder mysteries saw many covers of grizzled men with revolvers. The content didn’t appease PTAs either.
Days of Hell
These comics were a mix of anger, subversion, and experimentation. There were critics of all kinds. First, you had the pearl-clutchers, decrying the morally corrosive nature of the images. You also had the politically furious. Many of these artists advocated against things for which the government stood, or highlighted the many problems in society. As one researcher noted, ‘many manga publications were antiestablishment and leftist, a stance that appealed to the working classes who were its largest audience’ [2].
Granted, most of the backlash was pettier. As happened with the crusade against hard rock in the 80s and that against video games in the 90s, manga was derided by people who’d never read it. This reached its most absurd when a newspaper article declared that ‘any book with pages, two thirds or more of which is without text, is immoral’ [Tatsumi, 815].
On its face, this is hilarious. Parody wouldn’t imagine this. Yet, it had serious consequence. When manga artist Masaaki Satō wrote a story referencing this article, the full force of conservative controversy fell on him.
The publishing industry blacklisted him. Everything with his name became poison. Each word and image became the subject of dozens of angry editorials. The hate mail came in from angry parents. He spent six months in self-described ‘days of Hell’ before rebuilding his career [Tatsumi, 816].
The story is sadly familiar. The times haven’t changed as much as we’d like to think. At least nowadays we don’t (usually) need to worry about sports manga.
Work Hard, Play Harder
The mounting frustration of Japan’s youth showed in its art. Gekiga exemplified this. The style changed. Stories grew darker. Artists pushed the boundary of what they could draw and discuss. Here especially, you can’t remove politics from art. Look at sports manga.
When MacArthur’s ban on traditional Japanese sports (e.g. kendo) ended, sports manga flourished. Igaguri-Kun by Eiichi Fukui became a runaway success with its story of a judo athlete. This also saw the introduction of ‘sports-guts’ manga: series with unrealistically brutal training, horrifically obsessive devotion to the sport, and crushingly bittersweet endings.
The king of these was Kyojin No Hoshi (Star of the Giants). This baseball manga showcases a few traits of gekiga. First, its realistic by the standards of the time. The team in the series is real, with only the characters being fictional. The artwork is dark. We still have big eyes, but we’re leaning away from the exaggerated and cartoonish. Everything is coated in heavy crosshatches and shadow. Everything is bleak.
The conclusion fits the tone. Spoiler alert: the series ends with the lead character injuring his arm, thus becoming unable to play the sport which consumed his life.
Gone are the young scamps and peerless warriors. What’s left are the injured, infuriated, and incorrigible.
On the marketing side, these series stood out. This was definitively not for kids. But there it was, sold as ‘manga’ beside the ever-friendly Sazae-san. Artists like Tatsumi needed a new way to market their work. How could they distinguish themselves?
They weren’t making manga. No, they needed a new word.
The Workshop is Open
In 1958, Tatsumi published Ghost Taxi, which he described not as a comic, but as ‘dramatic pictures’. Better known as ‘gekiga’. Tatsumi loved manga, yes, but much of his inspiration came from other media. He watched films constantly, obsessing over how different sound effects changed the mood. He read the magazine Scenario, which aimed at aspiring screenwriters.
In 1959, he founded the Gekiga Workshop with a group of likeminded artists, including Susumu Yamamori, Fumiyasu Ishikawa, Masaaki Satō, Motomitsu K., Takao Saitō, and Shōichi Sakurai (Tatsumi’s older brother).
These artists did to manga what the New Wave did to cinema. They broke boundaries, explored new styles, pushed against censors, and laid the groundwork for those who came after them.
Among their first published works was the ‘Gekiga Manifesto’. This declared the group’s two major intentions. First, they would aim at older teens and young adults, a group they felt was underrepresented in manga. Second, they would try to create ‘a complex visual style influenced by other media’ [Shamoon, 28].
According to Shamoon, a third element pushed the artists: protests. For years, gekiga would be tied with the student protests of the 1960s. It was no coincidence that the artists were the same age as their target demographic. As the Anpo ratification vote approached, these men saw the marches. They saw anger and passion that needed a voice and an outlet.
They provided.
Who did What?
For the sake of time, here’s a brief synopsis of some of the major artists. There are many more, and each has more to be said of them. But we’d be here all day.
Tatsumi Yoshihiro: founder of the Gekiga Workshop. Coiner of the term ‘gekiga’. Artist, author, editor. A lot of the dates listed here come from his A Drifting Life, referenced earlier. Drawn and Quarterly did a great job translating it and several of his one-shots.
Takao Saito: a man who deserves a full article. Author of Golgo 13, the longest running comic by a single author of all time. It made it to 201 volumes in 2021, released monthly since 1963. Saito died last year, soon after breaking the record for manga length and receiving an expo on his work.
Shigeru Mizuki: a kamishibaiya who became an artist. He’s also one of the best-known gekiga authors in North America. While Gegege No Kitaro remains his best-known work in Japan, his historically-minded pieces are the most readily available in English. Showa and Onward Toward Our Noble Deaths are both well worth your time.
Kazuo Koike / Goseki Kojima: I know little of the men and much of their work. Lone Wolf and Cub is something of a legend in film and comics circles. It abandons manga style altogether. No big eyes. Strictly realistic bodies. It’s a bloody historical epic translated into omnibuses by Dark Horse. It also became a cult classic film series.
Ryoichi Ikegami: while Crying Freeman is most associated with gekiga, I’m more interested in his work on Spider-Man. What started as a simple adaptation broke down. Japanese artists had been assigned to adapt an American character, with no care about the difference in cultures. The result a gruesome, existential identity crisis.
Sanpei Shirato: one of the most openly political writers. Kamuiden remains a popular series. It was the first comic published in Garo magazine (Japan’s go-to Avant Garde manga magazine since 1964). Despite being a period piece, Kamuiden began as a blatant criticism of Japan’s government at the time. His other major work, Ninja Bugeichō, was a response to the student protests.
Tsurita Kuniko: a potentially controversial pick. She was only ten at the height of the protests, but her drive for manga was unrivaled. Tsurita bucked gender convention to make the existentialist, fluidly drawn stories that intrigued her. Garo Magazine provided a space for her, and Drawn and Quarterly brought her work to English. You can find some of her one-shots in The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud.
The Workshop Closes
For a short while, the Workshop members were some of the industry’s most in-demand artists. It didn’t last long. The Gekiga Workshop burned out and dissolved in a few years.
The decline was so rapid and intense that Tatsumi saw its flaw by 1960. After being literally caught up in a wave of protesters, Tatsumi commented ‘It’s an incredible force fuelled by anger! That’s the element gekiga has forgotten… anger!’ (sic.) [Bullough, 28]. That anger returned in many of the works mentioned above.
From here, the influence spreads out into a web of smaller stories, each worth telling. The word ‘gekiga’ had connotations. By the 70s, many people viewed ‘gekiga’ as synonymous with ‘porn’. Only diehard fans associated it with artistic experimentation and political rebellion.
Even among artists, the term had no unified meaning. Tatsumi saw it as distinct bubble within manga. Takao thought it completely separate. Whatever the case, it changed the industry. It set precedents for future artists. Odds are, your favourite modern series was influenced by these works in some way.
Of course, this was just one step in the development of an art form.
From Manly Men to Androgynous Others
I have one major complaint with Mizuki Shigeru’s Showa. It spends about three quarters of its time on World War II, then goes through the next forty years in a few short chapters. I wanted to see more details from the end of that era. Why did Mizuki rush the ending?
Yet, here I am doing a small-scale version of the same: covering the 1960s of gekiga in one short section. I could probably do it in one sentence: it kinda fazed out.
No matter how many times I rewrite this, it always comes down to that: it fazed out. Artists went their own ways. New artists took their style, but only a few took the name.
Even Tezuka wrote some. In his late career, the god of manga worked with adult themes. If you want a jarring experience, read late career Tezuka, in which you’ll find bestiality, sexual assault, and genocide. It’s all carried out in his characteristic, cartoonish artwork.
It deserves a mention that neither Devilman nor Barefoot Gen are considered gekiga. Both started in the 1970s and both were marketed as Shounen, with the latter appearing in Weekly Shounen Jump. Devilman offers a phantasmic psychosexual nightmare, while Barefoot Genlays out a gruesomely detailed story of survivors of the Hiroshima bomb.
Even in A Drifting Life, Tatsumi brushes over the ending of the movement he named. He writes up to Anpo, gives a chapter for dissolution, and cuts to the future.
There’s no clean ending.
Thank goodness, too. Because there’s a lot to think about.
Let’s Talk about Spider-Man
Follow me for a minute.
In the 1970s, Shueisha (the parent company for Weekly Shounen Jump) greenlit a Japanese adaptation of Spider-Man. Artist Ryoichi Ikegami turned Peter Parker into Komori Yu. Marvel Comics may be a global sensation now, but that happened over a half-century.
This first attempt was different.
In the opening chapter, we see the cultural gap. Komori gets powers and accepts them in no time. They do not excite him. They frighten him. What gets more attention is the first villain, Electro. This figure, in his neon spandex, gives a sardonic smirk at police officers. He comments on the bulletproof nature of his costume. Multiple panels reaffirm the absurd idea that someone is, in fact, trying to rob a bank. The idea seems ludicrous. The use of superpowers is something alien.
To quote Gene Peic, Marvel Comics’ lead representative in Japan in the 1970s, ‘It’s not a problem of just translating what one person is saying to the other— I have to reinterpret it for them… This is a country of individuals, that is a country of collectivists’ [7].
My point is to highlight how reality, culture, and fiction interact. Ikegami’s Spider-Man floundered for an identity. Quickly, he abandoned the costume and cursed his powers. Those things which made him special and enviable to American kids made him self-loathing in Japan. He was different. He could never be part of the group. This mounting frustration led to sequences of violence against biker gangs. This culminated in a multi-page fantasy which shows Spider-Man looking upon destruction he caused (burned cars, screaming victims, corpses, etc) and thinking ‘what have I done?’ [15]
While many look at this comic and think ‘yep, this is weird alright’. I see something different. In every story’s creation, there’s a long, complex, and invisible conversation. An alcoholic father, French dramas, and protests inspired Tatsumi. Hard-boiled novels and experience with lovers inspired Takao.
Work ethics born from hunger pains. A generation traumatized in war. A group of kids entertained by a magazine. All factors influence each other. There’s a beautiful, horrible, complex, amazing dance of culture and history and art and individuals all influencing each other at once!
That’s why I started Chrysanthemum Roots.
I’m sorry
What are you doing?
It’s a call back to the fourth article.
I get that. But you didn’t conclude. What’s the end?
That’s the history.
You pivoted to this series without ending the part about gekiga.
That’s all I have to say.
Did you do enough research?
The source list is long.
You haven’t been writing a lot lately.
I tried. These articles have been my life for seven months.
Were they worth it?
I don’t regret it.
That’s not what I asked.
That’s the best answer I can give.
Reading Material
The first thing I read for this article was a book called Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan. It’s a good book. Author Patrick Galbraith takes a sociological scalpel to Japanese ‘otaku’ culture. As it happens, he roots it in the major trend after gekiga: Shoujo.
Short version: comics for women took over in the 1970s. Artists like Hagio Moto changed the art and characters expected by audiences.
As luck would have it, I had the chance to see an exhibit on the work of Hagio Moto. I spent an afternoon walking through her art. This woman I’d never heard of had inspired most of my favourite series. She adapted Ray Bradbury, illustrated for Tomino Yoshiyuki, and became an icon for the first Comic Market participants.
Hagio Moto, it turns out, is one of the key pieces in that invisible conversation I mentioned earlier. Just as important as Tatsumi. Just as important as gekiga. Whether you see it or not, the influence is there.
I thank Galbraith for preparing me for that exhibit. I’m less pleased that he called me out.
Cool Japan. Weird Japan.
In the Meiji era, few people spoke well of Edo. In the 90s, few people spoke well of the 80s. ‘In order for it to be missed, it had first to be forgotten’ (Tsurumi, 747). When a time is forgotten, anything can be said of it.
Kabuki has always been a significant part of Japan. It’s rooted in the culture.
Bunraku is a UNESCO recognized treasure. The culture values it.
Or, as Abe Shinzo stated in a 2007 speech, ‘Japanimation [and] Japanese contemporary culture’s coolness is founded in and derived from its traditional culture’ (Galbraith, 235-236).
I hate this sentence for several reasons.
When writing about media on a large time scale, there are at least two great dangers. One is nationalist: everything comes back to tradition and promotes culture ‘as it was’. It glosses the inherently queer (and often censured) nature of kabuki. It forgets the fact that bunraku puppeteers were abused, or that ukiyo-e was used as packing material, or that most of Japan’s great filmmakers criticized the tenants of Nippon Kaigi (a group of which the current PM is a member).
The other danger is to draw straight lines from one period to another.
I’m guilty of this, and I apologize. In the last article, I generalized that shunga could be seen as a direct line to the modern doujinshi market. Those two are worth comparing, certainly, but I shouldn’t have oversimplified the technological and historical differences. Worse. I performed the same stupid cliché that so many fall into.
Tentacle jokes are worse than trite. Without the necessary context, they add to the ‘Cool Japan’ or ‘Weird Japan’ narratives. Both are wrong. Both make Japan a nebulous ‘other’ rather than a complex, distinct culture that evolved over time. Both put focus on a perceived sexual deviancy and assume the cultural ‘normalcy’ of the author.
I’m sorry for that. There’s no excuse, especially when it glosses over a key part of the discussion: just because something is influential doesn’t mean it’s aged well.
Rooted in the Past
There’s a reason that a lot of old media is analyzed rather than reviewed. Gekiga is hard to read.
Ikegami’s work is uncomfortably sexist. The ‘sports-guts’ series are stomach-churningly brutal. Much of the sexuality is gratuitous. Much as I respect Takao Saito as a writer, I have complex feelings about Golgo 13.
Still, I think it’s important for these stories to be available. Artists and audiences should know what those of the past thought and accepted. I take off my hat to Drawn and Quarterly, responsible for translating many of the works referenced in this piece. Credit also to Dark Horse, who recognized that works like Lone Wolf and Cub could be appreciated the world over.
In one sense, we have the inverse of what happened with the Japanese New Wave. Those works became subject to gatekeeping. Gekiga just needed time to become available. There’s still no official translation of Kyojin No Hoshi.
Galbraith said it best: ‘What we presume to know may be a bunch of bunk, but that does not mean that there is nothing to know, if we are willing to listen carefully and learn from our interactions and relations with others’ [pg. 79].
Thank you
WordPress’ analytics tell me that people do read these. Whoever you are, thank you. You’ve joined a weird ride. I’m neither a journalist nor a historian. I’m barely a writer. It’s taken this entire series just to understand the research process.
I still haven’t figured out scheduling. I edit this two beers deep into a Tuesday evening, scrambling to meet an already extended deadline.
Maybe this whole thing is just a research-intensive coping mechanism. My time in Japan is about to end. At least for now. After three years, I barely know the language and I’ve only begun to understand the stories.
Still, thank you. Thanks to the manga-ka, filmmakers, and performers. Thanks to Hiromu Arakawa and Gen Urobuchi, who’s work made a sad uni student feel that stories still had magic.
Thanks especially to Hayley and Josh at Good Morning Aomori. They’ve graciously helped with my slow improvement as a writer. Now, I lack the time or energy to keep up the research.
It’s been a joy to learn about these artists and their culture.
Hopefully, in next month’s Media Bug, I’ll have something original to announce.
Until then, be kind to yourself. Enjoy a good story. Thank you for reading.
Sources
1. Bellot, Gabrielle. “The Groundbreaking Female Artist Who Shaped Manga History.” The Atlantic. August 6, 2020. Accessed April 19, 2022.
2. Bullough, Vern. “The Influence of Manga on Japan.” Mechademia, vol. 1, University of Minnesota Press, 2006, pp. 173–74, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41510888.
3. Fusanosuke, Natsume, et al. “Komatopia.” Mechademia, vol. 3, 2008, pp. 65–72, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41510903. Accessed 11 Apr. 2022.
4. Galbraith, Patrick. Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan. W. Duke University Press, Durham, 2019.
5. Greenwood, Forrest. Book Review – Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theatre. Published January 10, 2022. Last retrieved April 11, 2022.
6. Hirohito, Miyamoto, and Jennifer Prough. “The Formation of an Impure Genre—On the Origins of ‘Manga.’” Review of Japanese Culture and Society, vol. 14, 2002, pp. 39–48, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42800200. Accessed 11 Apr. 2022.
7. Ikegami, Ryoichi. Spider-Man the Manga Vol. 1 No. 1, edited by Tom Brevoort. Marvel Comics. Translated by Mutsumi Masuda and C.B. Cebulski. December, 1997.
8. Inuhiko, Yomota and Hajime Nakatani. “Stigmata in Tezuka Osamu’s Works.” Mechademia, vol. 3, 2008, pp. 97–109, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41510905. Accessed 11 Apr. 2022.
9. Lewis, Leo. “Interview: ‘Golgo 13’ creator Takao Saito. The Financial Times. October 17, 2015. Accessed April 4, 2022.
10. Mateo, Alex. “Golgo 13 Manga Breaks Guinness World Record for Most Volumes”. Anime News Network. July 5, 2021. Accessed April 11, 2022.
11. Santos, Carlos. “Manga for Grown-ups: Gekiga, Garo, Ax, and the Alternative Manga Revolution”. Anime News Network. July 22, 2010 Accessed April 20, 2022.
12. Schodt, Frederik L. “Reading the Comics.” The Wilson Quarterly (1976-), vol. 9, no. 3, [Wilson Quarterly, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars], 1985, pp. 57–66, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40256891.
13. Shamoon, Deborah. Mangatopia: Essays on Manga and Anime in the Modern World. Ed. Timothy Perper and Martha Cornog. Libraries Unlimited, 2011.
14. Tatsumi, Yoshihiro. A Drifting Life. Translated by Taro Nettleton. Drawn and Quarterly Press, 2009.
15. Thompson, Jason. “Jason Thompson’s House of 1000 Manga XV: Spiderman”. Anime News Network. Aug 19, 2010. Accessed April 20, 2022.
16. Tsurumi, Shunsuke. “Edo Period in Contemporary Popular Culture.” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 18, no. 4, 1984, pp. 747–55, http://www.jstor.org/stable/312348. Accessed 11 Apr. 2022.
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