<a href="https://www.nypl.org/blog/2018/12/27/beginners-guide-manga" rel="no<a href="https://comicvibe.com/promising-virtual-reality-stocks-to-follow-now/” title=”Promising Virtual Reality Stocks To Follow Now”>follow noopener” target=”_blank”>Manga are Japanese comic books and graphic novels. They are typically written and illustrated by a single person, known as mangaka. They are usually printed in black and white and read right-to-left. And they are incredibly popular, in Japan and beyond.
When Frederik L. Schodt, author of Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics, published his book in the 1980s, “almost no one in the United States knew what manga was,” he tells the New York Times’ Shivani Vora.
Things have changed. Manga’s popularity is booming in the United States. “Today, young Americans have no problem with manga at all,” he says. “They are happy to read them Japanese-style, turning pages and viewing panels right-to-left.” More than 40 percent of Gen Z watches anime shows, which are often adaptations of manga, compared to just 25 percent who follow professional football.
Now, the illustrated medium and its most well-known mangaka are the centerpiece of a new exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. “Art of Manga” is the country’s first large-scale show to explore the art form’s evolution, individual voices and cross-cultural impact.
“The show’s focus on artists is what makes it so special. U.S. audiences almost never get a chance to see original drawings for Japanese manga, let alone such an extensive selection,” Joan Cummins, a curator at the museum, says in a statement. “The artwork offers a window into each artist’s creative process and an opportunity to focus on what distinguishes their work. Using astonishing drafting skills, these artists create whole worlds that are alternately relatable or completely fantastic.”
The 10-room exhibition, which includes more than 600 original illustrations, begins with a first-floor introduction to manga. Visitors become acquainted with the medium’s structure, history and two influential mangaka. Those are Fujio Akatsuka, the “King of Gag Manga,” who helped push the medium into absurd, comedic realms, and Tetsuya Chiba, a storytelling master who explored themes of war and peace, economic insecurity, sports and social divisions, laying the groundwork for other mangaka to do the same.
In the exhibition’s primary space, eight major mangaka, leaders of the meduim in the 20th and 21st centuries, take center stage. There are four men and four women whose manga represent different styles, traditions and publishers. Unlike their books, many of the pieces on view were never meant for public display, a behind-the-scenes view of how the mangaka work.
Several artworks on display have been loaned out of Japan for the first time ever. Among these are an unfinished, pencil-drawn self-portrait by mangaka Jiro Taniguchi and an illustration of the iconic final scene of Chiba’s Ashita no Joe, which features the protagonist boxer slumped in the corner of a ring, having just lost his title, with a slight smile on his face.
Paula Abreu Pita
Twelve life-sized paintings by Hirohiko Araki, creator of the manga JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure,which has been serialized for nearly 40 years, ground the exhibition’s center hall.
“Araki-sensei wanted it displayed so the viewer can imagine themselves inside the JoJo landscape and with his characters able to come into our world,” Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, a scholar of Japanese art and culture and the exhibit’s lead curator, tells the Art Newspaper’s Tim Schneider.
In 2022, an artist bound together every page of Eiichiro Oda’s serialized manga One Piece, which has appeared every week since 1997. At 21,450 pages, it was the longest book in the world.
The show debuted last September at San Francisco’s de Young Museum and was expanded for its current run in Brooklyn.
“When I saw visitors cry in front of manga drawings at the de Young, I knew that it belonged on these walls,” Rousmaniere tells Crunchyroll’s Briana Lawrence.
“There seems to be a somewhat irrational bias towards the printed word rather than the drawn image in certain cultures, but this was not always the case historically,” she adds. “There is a wide range of manga expressions, some of it basic and some of it exquisite. But it is the pulse of visual storytelling in Japan and increasingly around the globe and deserves a seat at all museums.”
“Art of Manga” is on view at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City through January 31, 2027.
