SKIN DEEP MAGAZINE • 25With manga themed tattoos turning up ever more, we quite often argue the
hell out of whether they should be submitted into the ‘Japanese’ category
in convention competitions—they sure ain’t traditional Japanese in the
strictest sense. We sent Paula Hammond to the British Museum to dig into
their new exhibition and hoped she would come back with answers...B
ig-eyed school girls
in cutsie uniforms,
drawn to a standard-
ised formulae.... We
may think we know manga but,
as the recent exhibition at the
British Museum proves, that
impression couldn’t be further
from the truth...
The characters that make up
the word manga can variously
mean ‘whimsical pictures’,
‘pictures unbound’, or ‘pictures
running riot’. Whichever trans-
lation you prefer, these expres-
sive terms perfectly describe
an art form that embraces
thousands of years and dozens
of cultural traditions—from
ceremonial bells decorated
with narrative scenes, cari-
cature-style graffiti scrawled
on temple walls and, most im-
portantly, the painted scrolls,
which brought sequential art
to the masses a thousand years
before anyone had ever heard
of Judge Dredd.
Today, the billion-dollar manga industry is a phenom-
ena. Everyone in Japan reads manga. Whether you’re
into sci-fi, superheroes, horror, historical fiction, sport,or romance, there’s a manga
for you. There’s an entire genre
called Boy Love—featuring gay
romances which are mostly sold
to young girls. Gender-fluid char-
acters like “Princess Knight” are
mainstream. Gekiga style manga
is political, gritty, and violent.
In “Saint Young Men”, Jesus
and Buddha are flatmates with a
blog. In “The Female Fridge No.
1” a young woman turns into the
fridge in the apartment of the
man she has a crush on. And in
“Children Can’t Choose Their
Parents”, a young man has an af-
fair with a chicken.
It’s wonderful, it’s bizarre, it’s
inclusive, and it’s big. So big that
“One Piece,” an adventure story
about a boy who wants to be a pi-
rate, sold 2.5 million copies in its
first year. In comparison,“Harry
Potter and the Deathly Hallows”
sold 1.8 million copies.
While the West has a tenden-
cy to view comics as kid’s stuff,
manga deals with sweeping sto-
rylines, controversial issues, and real-world consequenc-
es. The plots, however strange, are never throwaway or
patronising. But while a good story is vital to a successfulMAGNIFICENT
MA N GA
MAGNIFICENT
MA N GA