Manga's First Century

The book has been in a few bookstores. I got tagged by a comic shop in the Lower East Side in Manhattan on Instagram that's carrying it. There's at least one other bookstore in San Francisco that's carrying it. For a person looking at it in a store, the cover is quite good, I think. So that definitely catches the eye, both online and in the store. I would hope that people pick it up and see that it is aimed at people who don't know a lot about manga—and that is the majority of academics as well. I did my best to sort of explain things as I went along. There's a glossary in it too. I really tried to make it as easy for people without a ton of background to understand it.  

I would hope that people who read it would come away with the knowledge that there are reasons that manga is popular worldwide. Manga is as much about the way the industry in Japan has evolved as they are about the good stories and art. I think my book is really trying to explain how manga got to the point of becoming globally popular in the 90s. It ends in 1989, partly because it was getting very long, and a lot of stuff changed in the 90s.

That’s what I hope people take away—the sense that manga has this long and varied history. It would be really great if some of the earlier stuff I talk about in the book were translated at least once. There’s some really great early manga. It’s not necessarily well known in Japan either, because it’s not in print. Some of it still is, but not all.

I want people to understand that there was a history to all of this, how it evolved, and that fans have played a huge role in shaping that development. That is very important to keep in mind, even as publishers and other rights holders sometimes aren’t thrilled about fan involvement. But the fans are key. That is a huge part of how manga has become what it is.