The Adventures of Little Shô

There was a variety of drawing styles in manga before the war, but Little Shô was probably the closest thing to “realism.” Most prewar manga were much more stylized. No, Tezuka was definitely not the first manga artist to introduce cinematic techniques. Tezuka had a famously large ego, and often seem to take credit for single-handedly inventing the modern manga, but at other times he admitted that earlier manga artists had used cinematic techniques, and also admitted to influences from such American cartoonists as Milt Gross. European art definitely had a big impact on pre-war Japanese children’s magazine illustration, and to a lesser extent manga. Artists who worked only in manga showed less influence, while others, such as Kabashima and Katsuji Matsumoto, who worked both in manga and illustration, showed more influence.

I was trying to figure out what you meant by “as a Sagi.” In Japanese, there are two homonyms pronounced “sagi.” One means “heron,” the other means “con artist.” I was wondering why either of those would be interested in centaurs, until I realized you were abbreviating “Sagittarius.” (^_^)

By the way, I still have had no luck getting my gallery back up, and my inquiries to the so-called support people at Gallery2 have been ignored.

Geoff, Kitazawa learned Western cartooning techniques from Australian Frank Arthur Nankivell, who, trying to make his way to the U.S., ran out of money in Japan and ended up staying for several years, earning money by cartooning for the Yokohama-based English-language magazine, “Box of Curios.” As far as I know, Kitazawa did not travel to Europe before 1929, when he visited Paris at the invitation of the French ambassador to do an exhibition. On that occasion, he received the Légion d’honneur. Okamoto traveled Europe from 1929 to 1932. I need to study more about Kabashima, but although the influence of contemporary European art on his work is obvious (much more so than in Kitazawa or Okamoto’s work), as far as I know he had not traveled abroad at the time he was drawing Little Shô.

As for the whole cinematic thing, Ôshiro and others (mostly influenced by American newspaper strips such as Little Nemo in Slumberland, Happy Hooligan, etc.) were experimenting with different camera angles. What you don’t see in prewar manga (or at least I haven’t seen it) are things like simulated slow motion and dramatic close-ups. What I’ve always said is that Tezuka’s real innovation was the introduction of serious themes. They were neither fluff nor moralistic tales, but rather complex works that combined traditional manga humor with serious and nuanced explorations of life and death, good and evil, etc. In terms of technique, Tezuka’s early work looks like the scribblings of a child compared with Kabashima or Ôshiro. But his stories were mesmerizing. The children reading them may not have understood them completely, but they knew instinctively that there was something new and profound in Tezuka’s work, something that made them want to reread them again and again, and to keep reading his manga even after they were supposed to have “grown out of” manga. That was what made his work so shocking to the old manga guard of the day: they thought his work was grossly inappropriate for children. That’s why, when a young Tezuka traveled to Tokyo to show “New Treasure Island” to “Bôken Dankichi” creator Keizô Shimada, Shimada said to him, “It’s your right to make this kind of stuff if you want to, but I hope it doesn’t catch on.”

Great American newspaper cartoonists were using dramatic close-ups and simulated slow-motion when Tezuka was in diapers, but Ôshiro and Kabashima had no use for such techniques, because they had no place in the children’s manga they were creating. But such techniques fit naturally with the content of Tezuka’s work. Tezuka was in the right place at the right time. No cartoonists in the West, and no prewar manga artists, could have found a place to publish thematically sophisticated comics even if they wanted to create them. They were constrained by the contexts in which they worked.

Sorry. I’ve gone into essay mode here. This could be an entire blog entry. This is something I get passionate about in my classes: the fact that all creators, whether they realize or not, are constrained by countless factors that may seem to have no direct connection to their work–socially, culturally, economically, and historically.

Little Shô preceded Tintin by about six years. Considering that Hergé couldn’t possibly have know of Little Shô when he created Tintin, and that the two artists were on opposite sides of the planet in very different cultures, the similarities are pretty remarkable. But the use of simply drawn characters against detailed backdrops is probably the most striking. Both artists much have realized, if only on a gut level, what Scott McCloud noted decades later: that the simple characters were easy to identify with, while the intricate backgrounds created a sense of reality and “being there.”

Most of Hergé’s early work originally printed in black and white. After WWII, Hergé redrew all of his earlier work (except for the Soviet Union and Congo books, which were long out of print). So it’s not quite fair to compare the gorgeous, color Tintin works most of us know so well with Kabashima’s work from the 1920s. Hergé’s early work is frankly quite crude in comparison–something Hergé himself would no doubt admit. (His draftsmanship improved enormously as he matured.)

Kabashima’s first strip, too, was in black and white, quite small, and therefore quite simple (and cramped). When he was given more space to work in (and color), he did fantastic work. He was an extremely gifted draftsman from the beginning, and in fact did far more work in realistic illustration than he ever did in comics and picture books.

Prewar Japanese manga were commonly printed in color. Some used only black and red ink, but much of it was full-color, and the quality was surprisingly good. The quality was very much like pre-war American color newspaper comics, and much better than the color printing in American comics.

In a sense, Kabashima had no contemporaries. He was the first Japanese cartoonist, as far as I know, to create a serialized strip with ongoing stories.