26 • SKIN DEEP MAGAZINE
manga, the art is everything.
In a publishing business that prints over 270 manga magazines, and in ex-
cess 100,000 pages of original content every month, there are bound to be il-
lustrative short-cuts, conventions, and popular archetypes. But what we often
see in the West is just the tip of a very large iceberg. And, if it’s not stretching
the metaphor too far, that ‘berg has been drifting around for quite some time.Looking Good
So, if manga isn’t all cutsie schoolgirls, what is it?
The Chōjū-giga Scrolls—sometimes referred to as “The Scrolls of Frolicking
Animals”— are one of a series of drawings of woodland creatures created in
the 12th and 13th Centuries. With their dynamic brush work and sequential
storytelling, they’re widely considered to be Japan’s first true manga.
The word itself was already in popular use by the 1830s when Hokusai —of
The Great Wave fame—became, arguably, the first artist to use it in the title
of a series of works. “The Hokusai Manga” are actually copybooks for art stu-
dents, bound into fifteen volumes. Hokusai’s own take on the word manga was
‘brush gone wild’ and his free-form images, don’t tell a story so much as cap-
ture the spontaneous spirt of manga, with its eye for small human details and
the beauty of nature.
It was Hokusai too, who, while in his 70s, crafted another hugely influential
series known as “One Hundred Ghost Stories”. Designed as aide-mémoires for
story-tellers, these are a dark delight. In Japanese tradition, party guests light“Manga”, edited by Nicole Coolidge
Rousmaniere and Matsuba
Ryko, is published by Thames &
Hudson in collaboration with the
British Museum to support The
Citi Exhibition: Manga. With 256
full colour pages, the volume
tells the story of Manga, from its
historical roots to its place as a
contemporary global art form.
ISBN: 9780500480496,
priced £29.95.Whether^ you’re^ into^ sci-fi,^ superheroes,^ horror
, historical^
fiction,^ sport,^ or^ romance,^ there’s^ a^ manga^ for^
you.