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East Meets West: Anime and Manga of American Superheroes

I'm Lovin It!

There's more to an art form than the medium itself. Some subject matter lends itself better to a particular style. I'm sure you could do a landscape of a spring meadow with a sculpture, but surely an impressionist watercolor is better suited. That's a bit of a stretch, as different painting styles really can't be segregated that way, and there's an exception to every rule. In the plastic arts (wikipedia) this may not be so clear cut. Even in literature, it becomes difficult to make divisions along the lines of content being paired with style.

Serialized illustrated work seems to have taken an interesting evolutionary path.  Compare the American comic book and  Japanese Manga industries.  While there are standouts, the American comic book is often about a costumed super hero.  Sometimes there are secret identities, but more recently they have taken a back seat to the main course: heroes vs. villains.  Crazy fights in worldy and other places with amazing powers.  All of this done in beautifully drawn and colored artwork.  These are amazing to behold.

Looking at Japanese manga, there's a change in both content and presentation.  There are books for many different market segments, with named categories: shounen, shoujo, etc.  Not only are they aimed at different people, but these aren't super heroes aimed at girls for example.  They are just stories that appeal to different people that happen to be drawn in a serial art format.  The format is also usually a small paperback size, and in black and white.

The differences here are pretty drastic.  Part of it is definitely cultural.  In our beautiful USA, cartoons and comic books are for kids.  In order for adults to be entertained by it, it has to be filmed with actors.  Just look at how successful the DC and Marvel movies have been lately.  I'll omit the bad ones, but the newer Batman movies, Spiderman, X-Men, and my favorite Iron-Man have all done very well.  They're the same stories told in the comic books which themselves have definitely matured over the years.  Meanwhile anime and manga have no problems with containing material that isn't targeted at children and reaching a market.  According to manga critic Haruyuki Nakano, the baby boomers continued reading their favorite manga in to adult-hood.

All this leads up to Americans reading Japanese manga.  I never thought I'd see the day when mainstream booksellers like Barnes & Noble have entire sections in their stores dedicated to manga and Best Buy having an anime section.  Like it or not, anime and manga have grown popular amongst America's youth.  The first anime I saw was a passed around bootleg VHS since there was no way to purchase anything, let alone with any sort of English.

Batman: Death Mask

It only makes sense that the comic book industry, which is a shadow of its former glory, would try to cash in to this growing market.  What piqued my interest in this comparison was picking up Batman: Death Mask from Charging Star Comics.  It's a manga in the comic book size format from DC's CMX imprint.  After reading it, I was surprised that the story was wrote Batman.  There's a mystery involving an unknown killer, internal Bruce Wayne/Batman strife, and a curious woman.  The black and white art works relatively well with the overall style of Batman, being dark and gothic in setting.  It is written and drawn by Yoshinori Natsume.  Not very prolific, his series Togari was well received and features a villain who slowly becomes good.  There definitely is a sharing of themes with the Dark Knight.

Although a fun read, I immediately wanted to compare it to the last Batman I had read: Hush.  The next two nights I reread parts one and two.  Gone are the understated tones and sharp lines of Death Mask.  Here we have Jim Lee's huge men and huge women (I'll let you figure out which parts are huge).  The plot is more epic, but they have more time to tell the story, being more issues in length.  Death Mask is a good effort but Hush is just more impressive.

Batman however is a good example of a cultural crossover.  He fights crime to avenge the death of his parents.  Instead of a caped crusader swinging over the night sky of Gotham, he could definitely be a masked ronin samurai ridding the country side of bandits.  It's a relatively straight forward story that transfers over well.  Batman is an honorable warrior who fights for justice with his mind and body.

Really?

Then there's a different approach to transferring properties over.  They turned X-Men in to a shoujo manga.  That means it's "for girls".  The men look all flowery and pretty.  That's all I'm going to say about that since I'm definitely not in their desired market segment.  But it's interesting that they tried to take an American comic book property and place it in one of the Japanese manga segments that X-Men definitely doesn't fit in to.  It's definitely a risk and experiment, as it would have been easy to just take X-Men and place them in a shounen manga that's all about the fight of the week.

Similar things are happening in the world of animation as well.  Saturday morning cartoons here in America have been populated with re-edited Japanese anime for many years now.  I grew up watching Robotech (rehashed Macross), Transformres, GoBots, and Voltron (mashed up GoLion).  The trend is still going strong, only now accompanied by American animators mimicking the anime style.

We're also starting to get American based properties, animated in Japan, not aimed at children. The Animatrix kicked it all off with their compilation of shorts done by notable Japanese anime studios.  More recently Batman: Gotham Knight was produced in a similar fashion to help promote the 2nd new Batman movie: Dark Knight.  And arguably targetted at a slightly younger audience is the yet to be released: Halo Legends.  All three of these titles feature prominent Japanese studios creating anime shorts utilizing American properties for an adult American audience.  Unlike the earlier mentioned Batman manga, these feature anime sensibilities in their story telling, the American producers having given their contracted studios some freedom to tell their stories.  These three works do well since they are well conceived and preserve their source material.

There are two upcoming Marvel releases that don't hold as much promise.  Both Iron Man and Wolverine have "anime" releases coming.  These are more like anime re imaginings of their source material, with Iron Man looking more like kaiju giant robots with over the top villains and Wolverine  a girly, angsty samurai.  I hope they're good and do well, but it's not looking very promising.

I hope that these industries continue to innovate and experiment with properties, although I'm not sure I like the trend of Hollywood deciding to make live action movies of anime.  We've yet to see one make it to release and I'm eagerly waiting to either cheer or rip them to shreds!

What do you think of this phenomena? Leave a comment and chime in!

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