Yesterday we published the latest in Ryan Holmberg's consistently excellent series of columns exploring under-known aspects of manga. This week, he delves into the pop-music manga of Hayashi Seiichi:
One finds an entirely different way of exploiting female tears, and an entirely different kind of gender-crossing, in Hayashi’s work of the late 60s. The work cannot be classified as shōjo manga, published as it was in the male-dominated and male-targeted Garo, and treating as it does women’s emotions and experiences, not young girls’. Furthermore, while heartbreak and depression and crying recur, one cannot exactly describe his stories in the terms of psychological depth and intensity used in manga for female teens and young women especially after the emergence of the Shōwa 24 Group in the early 70s. Emotion is strong in Hayashi’s work, but it is almost always expressed, and self-consciously so, through popular culture clichés, whether they stem from woodblock prints, folktales, children’s literature, film, or music. In the case of “Flowering Harbour” (“Hanasaku minato”) -- the focus of this essay -- first published in the May 1969 issue of Garo, the primary such medium is enka, a genre of music that is sometimes referred to in English as Japan’s “country music,” sometimes as “Japanese blues.” There are numerous rock and roll manga from the late 60s and early 70s, and later decades would bring manga about enka stars, real and fictional. But Hayashi appears to have been the first and one of the very few to try and embody the aesthetics of the music in comics form. In the 70s and 80s, he also designed not a few enka record covers.
And then this morning, we have the latest column from Joe McCulloch, who not only recommends the best-sounding comics newly available in stores this week, but first goes deeper than anyone else would think to go into the obscure Jademan line of comics from Hong Kong:
I’ve written about this before, but not in detail. From 1988 to 1993, the monolithic Hong Kong comics publishing entity Jademan (Holdings) Limited, which once claimed to control 80% of its domestic comics market, released 300 individual publications to North American comic book stores. Many of them were 64 pages in length, to account for the huge amount of translatable material at hand; it was by far the largest English translation effort undertaken for manhua at that time, and the thousands upon thousands of resultant pages of art still command fascination from back-issue specialists and Asian comics aficionados.
But where there is fascination, there is also intimidation.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Interviews. Chris Mautner talks at length with the Barnaby reprint co-editors Eric Reynolds and Philip Nel. Tim O'Shea, on the other hand, talks to Eleanor Davis. Chris Roberson talks to Allison Baker about her new position as director of operations for IDW.
—Misc. A Portuguese beverage company seems to have shamelessly plagiarized its package design from Charles Burns. The new issue of Artforum looks like it is worth picking up. Tom Spurgeon reports from HeroesCon.
—Spending Opportunities. This is the last day to participate in Zak Sally's Kickstarter for his Schoolhaus project, which is just about $1000 away from being funded as of this writing.
—Funnies. As I'm hardly objective, I try not to link to my wife Lauren Weinstein's comics projects, but since Robert Krulwich at NPR is writing about it, I guess it's safe for me to do too.
—No More Comments? We are strongly considering shutting down the comments section on this site. Reader response and back and forth are obviously very important to this publication's history, but we are thinking that we might get a higher signal-to-noise ratio by publishing letters to the editor instead. If you have an opinion on this you'd like to share, pro or con, please take this opportunity. And feel free to send us e-mail on this topic if you'd prefer not to say anything publicly.
