"As usual, we caricature what we are fond of, and we are fond of the British…However, when it comes to presenting this skit on the British to the British, we feel we owe them a word or two of explanation. Our little cartoon stories do not make fun of the real thing, but the ideas of the real thing that people get into their heads, i.e., clichés."
—introduction to the first English edition of Asterix in Britain, by Goscinny and Uderzo (1965)
Call it sociology or call it mere cultural vanity, but my manga sensor always perks up when a manga depicts America. I even considered creating a "Manga about America" category in
Manga: The Complete Guide. Whether the mood is that of a history, an accusation or a celebrity roast, it's fascinating to see America from an outsider's perspective.
For the most part, manga is for and about Japanese people; Western characters in major roles are rare (not counting half-Japanese or simply "half" characters, like Asuka Langley in
Evangelion, whose cultural differences are usually limited to hair color). But manga about America have deep roots: Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama's
The Four Immigrants Manga, created between 1904 and 1924, shows the experience of four Japanese immigrants living in San Francisco: cultural misunderstandings, earthquakes, Prohibition, looking for work, etc.
The Four Immigrants Manga ends with the protagonists disillusioned with the wave of racist legislation aimed at preventing Asian immigration, and Japanese-American relationships got worse before they got better.
But by the booming 1980s, the pendulum had swung completely around, and Japan was fascinated with American pop culture. Katsushiro Otomo moved to New York in the 1970s to practice his art, just as Yoshitaka Amano and
Hiroki Otsuka would do in the future. Shojo manga like Minako Narita's
Cipher and Reiko Shimizu's
Moon Child depicted America as a paradise of fashion and glamor, while men's manga like Kazuo Koike's
Mad Bull, Wounded Man and Starving Man depicted it as an enticing den of violence, depravity and uncensored porn. In the '90s, Japan's Occidentalism subsided a bit, and Japanese pop culture started to take more cues from Korea and the rest of Asia. Midori Takanashi's 2004
America nante daikirai ("I Hate America"), set in the period immediately after 9/11, takes a young Japanese woman on a tour of a disturbing country obsessed with guns, Osama bin Laden, Hooters restaurants, and so on.
Meanwhile, America's on-and-off obsession with Japan was on the rise. American comics artists, tempted by the mystique of the artist abroad, hoped to break into the vast riches (in real life, not so vast) of the Japanese manga industry. Western artists bikkuri and rem (pen names) won the
Morning International Manga Competition held by Japan's Morning magazine, and Madeleine Rosca's
Hollow Fields won the first government-sponsored
International Manga Award. American artists went looking for opportunities in Japan;
Jamie Lano and
Jeremy Mauney got jobs as assistants to Japanese mangaka, while Japanese-Canadian Marvel artist
Takeshi Miyazawa moved overseas and posted about his discussions with Japanese editors on his blog.
But producing relevant work for a foreign audience is hard. This is why Yoshinori Natsume's
Batman: Death Mask is so unmemorable; in trying to write Batman with a "Japanese" twist, Natsume merely duplicates Batman clichés that were old when Frank Miller started writing superheroes 30 years ago. The same applies to Western artists working in a consciously "Japanese" style, whether they take the high road for tedious maunderings on Japanese culture and
bushido a la Sharman DiVono's
Samurai, Son of Death, or take the low road for
truly horrible things with the name "manga" attached to them. This is why the Morning International Manga Contest changed their name to the Morning International
Comic Contest; they were sick of getting entries from Americans which crudely mimicked the "manga" style.
For years
Paul Pope was the closest to a Western artist making it in Japan, working on and off for Kodansha on a number of pitches from 1995 to 2000. Kodansha had chosen him because of his uniqueness; his non-traditionally-Western, but also non-manga-like style. But in the end, as Pope explained in 2001 in an interview in
PULP magazine, Kodansha decided to groom a Japanese artist to take his place instead: "I don't blame them, because his style was close enough to mine, he was about the same age, his output was about the same, he was willing to work with editors, etc., etc., but his work was a
little more Japanese."
A little more Japanese?! What about not wanting manga? What about wanting uniqueness? In
Iron Wok Jan, one of my favorite manga, there is a recurring theme in the cooking competitions, in which the judges rate the cooks on how well they have taken a foreign food or ingredient and "made it suitable to the Japanese palate.'" It's a phrase which seems odd to American ears; surely the very
purpose of eating a foreign food is to experience "foreignness," authenticity, a
new palate! But then, the Japanese food served in America is very Westernized, very different from Japanese food in Japan. In short, in food as in other aspects of multiculturalism, Americans talk the talk but don't always walk the walk. The Japanese attitude towards "foreignness" is more cautious, more pragmatic, more blunt. And it's not like Marvel Comics was just inviting Japanese artists to work on their characters however they wanted, in black & white, 20 pages a week.
So it was a big deal when, in 2008, Felipe Smith did what Paul Pope couldn't, and managed to get a manga running in a Japanese monthly magazine,
Morning 2 (the sister magazine of
Morning). The editors at
Morning 2 had immediately recognized his incredible talent. Smith – whose most obvious influence is the untranslated manga artist Tatsuya Egawa – is a brilliant comic artist and cartoonist, an artist whose every character is distinct and every line is alive.
Smith's work is described in detail in
this interview with Anime News Network, and in
my own review of Smith's MBQ from a year ago. Thematically, his biggest traits include a willingness to do anything to shock and startle the reader (a very manga way to tell a story) and an absolute hatred for the corporate-dominated superhero culture of American comics, the object of much hilarious scorn in
MBQ, the story of an aspiring comic artist working at a burger joint in LA.
Peepo Choo is a tighter story than the sprawling
MBQ, but in another way it's twice as ambitious: it's a satire of American
and Japanese pop culture, aimed at the very people it satirizes. The hero, Milton, is a nerdy 16-year-old raised in the Chicago projects, who must put on a tough front to disguise the fact that he is a huge anime and manga geek whose favorite show is "Peepo Choo" (a thinly disguised…you sound it out). He works at a comics store under Jody, a foulmouthed wanna-be player, who greets him with "Yo! How you doing, you fucking nerd?!" Meanwhile, across the sea in Japan, a violent young yakuza, Morimoto Rockstar, is crazy about gangsta rap and American pop culture, even though he can't spell the simplest English words.
This strange group is brought together when Gill, the mammoth but gentlemanly comic store owner, takes Jody and Milton on a business trip to Japan. Unbeknownst to his employees, Gill is actually a brutal assassin who disguises himself in bondage gear and can slaughter 30 men in seconds with just his fists and a butcher knife. When the trio arrives in Japan, Gill embarks on an orgy of violence, while
Jody and Milton get to know the locals, including Reiko, an extremely busty
Gravure idol who's completely fed up with the sexism in Japanese (and Western) culture.
In the process,
Milton's starry-eyed idealism about Japanese pop culture is torn apart, as is Jody's ego (did I mention Jody's a virgin?), and the bodies of countless yakuza. For anyone who's paid attention to the culture of comics and manga for the last 10 years, there are mind-blowingly great scenes here.
Jody makes fun of a bunch of aging American comic fans and their love of superheroes, then turns around and
insults the younger manga/anime crowd even more.
The hip, young-looking CEO of "Japa-Tastic" entertainment (does their logo remind you of anything?) introduces Peepo Choo to an adoring crowd of weeaboos, then in private he reveals himself as an aging corporate monster who doesn't give a rat's ass about Japan and lights cigars with burning Peepo Choo merchandise. These sometimes disjointed scenes are splattered with generous helpings of sex and violence, mostly perpetrated by Gill. More inhumanly powerful with each passing chapter, Gill combines the two very American character types of the slasher movie serial killer and the superhero; at one point he even vaults into the sky like Superman with a decapitated corpse dangling from his body in a most undignified way.
But of course, as a series running in a Japanese magazine,
Peepo Choo must consider the Japanese audience first. Some story elements suggest the influence of a Japanese editorial hand at work: the weird "Peepo Choo" poses Milton makes don't look like anything from American anime fandom, but they do look like the old-school gag manga poses parodied in
Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga. Contrarily, the American fandom scenes are hilarious to
me, but are they hard for Japanese readers to follow? With its numerous half-Japanese, half-English lines like "YO! お前開いたかよ？あのMOTHER FUCKER GILLが出所したらしいぜ," the whole manga must be a difficult translation. But the most encouraging sign of
Peepo Choo's reception in Japan is that Smith has completed two volumes and is working on a third. Really unpopular manga series don't even make it past volume one.
Another big question is: will the series be accepted as a "manga" by American manga fans? Or is Smith's vision too cynical, his style too confrontational? "Why is everyone constantly flipping me off in his pictures?" complained a poster on Anime New Network. "I'm sorry, but I hate when people overuse curse words or the middle finger." Evidently some people have never read the uncensored version of
Naruto.
Smith's hardcore, irreverent style is very much in the spirit of seinen (men's) manga, but it's far from the cuteness, the calmness, the
yasashii feeling which many Americans seek in manga. In any case, with Vertical's acquisition of
Peepo Choo for a Summer 2010 release, Smith's bloodstained satire will come back home. There isn't a comic I want to read more, but somehow I don't think Felipe Smith will preemptively apologize to English readers, like Goscinny and Uderzo. A middle finger would be more in his style.
********
Jason Thompson is one of the best-known manga critics in the US. He currently writes for Otaku USA and is the author of Manga: The Complete Guide. His website is www.mockman.com.
Manga Salad is © Jason Thompson, 2009
This strange group is brought together when Gill, the mammoth but gentlemanly comic store owner, takes Jody and Milton on a business trip to Japan. Unbeknownst to his employees, Gill is actually a brutal assassin who disguises himself in bondage gear and can slaughter 30 men in seconds with just his fists and a butcher knife. When the trio arrives in Japan, Gill embarks on an orgy of violence, while Jody and Milton get to know the locals, including Reiko, an extremely busty Gravure idol who's completely fed up with the sexism in Japanese (and Western) culture.
The hip, young-looking CEO of "Japa-Tastic" entertainment (does their logo remind you of anything?) introduces Peepo Choo to an adoring crowd of weeaboos, then in private he reveals himself as an aging corporate monster who doesn't give a rat's ass about Japan and lights cigars with burning Peepo Choo merchandise. These sometimes disjointed scenes are splattered with generous helpings of sex and violence, mostly perpetrated by Gill. More inhumanly powerful with each passing chapter, Gill combines the two very American character types of the slasher movie serial killer and the superhero; at one point he even vaults into the sky like Superman with a decapitated corpse dangling from his body in a most undignified way. 
