The Comic Book History of Comics 3pts

 Starting on page 187 The Comic Book History of Comics by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey briefly discusses Japanese manga and anime. As an animation buff, I loved seeing some of my favorite ground-breaking characters from animation. Astro boy, otherwise known as Tetsuwan Atom (Iron-Armed Atom) created by Tezuka Osamu who loved Disney, was the first Japanese animated series that incorporated the "anime" technique of using fewer frames to lower production costs and speed up the process for weekly episodes. Sparked by American animators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, creators of The Flintstones, this idea revolutionized animation for television in Japan. By using panning and other camera actions on the rotoscopes or only changing a small part of the frames within a shot, like mouth movements, anime artists can create the illusion of movement without drawing out as many complex frames per shot. Some early versions of comic books in Japan, i.e. the emakimono (handscroll), inspired animation. Heavily influenced by the progressive images in rolling scrolls between hands, the Japanese form of animation brings images to life and tells stories for the viewers, similar to today’s webcomics that scroll mainly vertically on a screen instead of horizontally on paper. Just like the ancient scrolls, manga follows the Japanese writing system, read right to left, and combines text dialogue and narration with images that progress from top right to bottom left on each page. Similar to television animation, the manga industry today also still relies heavily on tight deadlines, especially for those serialized in weekly installments like many of Shounen Jump’s popular titles; a full chapter gets produced within days by a mangaka and his or her assistants and then sent back and forth between them and their editors for revisions before publication by the following week. Since no media exists in a vacuum, many manga are based on "light" novels, or short stories, and later get adapted into anime or live-action J-dramas, just like much of western literature and media, turning written stories into visual narratives. It is interesting to see how art begets art, even back and forth between different countries and mediums.

Watching anime like Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh on TV while growing up in the United States, sparked an interest in me for animation and foreign cultures. Because of the shows brought over, albeit at times censored - unknown to young audiences like myself, I got introduced to a variety of languages, worldviews, and story-telling methods. Now as an adult I hope to someday work in animation to use my artistic skills to inspire future generations of artists and consumers. Since first watching cartoons before I can even remember, I have studied several languages and visited most habitable continents. My heart has a special place in it for Japan because of the shows I watched as a kid, which also introduced me to manga and cultivated a love for reading and literature, especially visual storytelling.

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