Manga comics sweep Europe
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Customers browse manga books at a Japanese bookstore in Duesseldorf. Young adults are a growing market in publishing: Walk into a bookstore in a European city on a Friday or Saturday afternoon and you can find teenagers crowded in front of a wall of the comic books - a sight nearly nonexistent a few years ago. [Shanghai Daily] |
To understand Europe's growing fascination with the wide-eyed innocents and baroque demons of the Japanese comic books known as manga, it may help to look back at the end of the 19th century.
"I envy the Japanese the extreme clarity that everything in their work has. It's never dull, and never appears to be done too hastily," the artist Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in 1888.
Van Gogh, whose boldly outlined, vivid painting is now instantly recognizable, copied some of the Japanese woodblock prints by Utagawa Hiroshige that are considered precursors to manga, which roughly translates as "freeform pictures."
"Their work is as simple as breathing, and they do a figure with a few confident strokes with the same ease as if it was as simple as buttoning your waistcoat," he wrote.
With bold black lines and graphic coloring, Hiroshige's prints were delicate - Van Gogh's 1887 painting of a flowering plum tree, a copy of a Hiroshige print, hangs in Amsterdam's Van Gogh museum.
Fast-forward through the industrial and nuclear age, the cultural might of America and ensuing backlash against Mickey Mouse, and there is a logic to the appeal for a generation of Europeans of the hyperbolized cartoon characters.
Young adults are a growing market in publishing: walk into a bookstore in a European city on a Friday or Saturday afternoon and you can find teenagers crowded in front of a wall of the comic books - a sight nearly nonexistent a few years ago.
On Duesseldorf's Immermannstrasse, an avenue lined with shops catering to the city's Japanese population, is a scene that could come straight from Harajuku, where Tokyo's youth congregate - except the butcher around the corner sells sausages.
German teenagers dressed as Japanese goth rock stars, with multi-colored hair and heavy eyeliner, mingle with Japanese schoolchildren in a bookstore on the street, giggling as they step into "purikura" photo booths that shoot instant snapshots that people decorate themselves and print as stickers.
"They have something special," says Berenike Schmoldt, whose fascination with manga has turned the German teenager into a full-blown Japanophile at 17, during a Friday expedition with her friends. "I spend hours every week reading them."
Already fluent in basic Japanese, she is making her fourth visit to Japan this month to soak up the culture, eat her favorite dish of yakisoba fried noodles, and read manga.
It's a scene replicated in Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris and Rome: local bookshops have expanded their manga sections and feature hundreds of French, Dutch and Italian titles. Often without the credit cards to shop online, these teenagers visit the stores as part of their social life.
"It is something that is much more than a fad," says Paul Gravett, a publisher and expert on comics in Europe.
"The term 'manga' is becoming a global word."
Sales of printed manga books have fallen in Japan in recent years but grown elsewhere, particularly among European young people who are consuming such titles as "NARUTO," "Fruits Basket" and "Death Note" with the same appetite as an earlier generation showed for "The Adventures of Tin Tin" and "The Adventures of Asterix."
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