Matthew
Hello, welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. Friends, you’ve heard us talk a lot about anime, and as we’ve done that, we’ve talked about manga, the source material from which a lot of anime television comes. And as I mentioned in another recent episode, a lot of the time my guest and I will talk about a work someone else did and try to guess why the author made certain choices. And I’m finding it’s actually more fun if you just have the writer themselves on. Today I have an author whose book, if you Google it right now, you may not find it because it has yet to come out. They were very kind to reach out and ask if we wanted to do this podcast, and I was very excited to have them. So I have today Helen McCarthy, the author of The Manga Bible. Helen, remind me of the exact date that is going to become available.
Helen
That is going to be available in the USA on the 24th of March, and in the UK on the 5th of March. We get it before you guys.
Matthew
Wonderful. I think you deserve that every now and then. Although please tell your readers — no spoilers for those of us who are going to follow along. Helen, how are you doing today?
Helen
I am doing great, thank you. Apart from the fact that this time last week I tripped over my own front doorstep and detached the head of my left humerus, which is all very funny. At the moment I’m sitting here wearing this incredibly elegant blue surgical sling, waiting for a call from my orthopedic surgeon to say, “Get into the hospital now. We have drugs waiting. We’re going to rebuild your arm.” So I’m going to be bionic. You’re getting me for the last time as a mere mortal. I’m about to have the Iron Man upgrade.
Matthew
I was about to say, I have watched enough anime and know enough about manga that often you go in for surgery and come out being able to shoot laser beams.
Helen
So if I don’t at least get laser beams and the power of flight, I’m going to be disappointed.
Matthew
I can understand — these are the kinds of standards this stuff has set for us. Well, let me start there, because The Manga Bible — I got a chance to look at an early copy of it. It’s a great book for someone like me who is not very knowledgeable about manga. I’ve watched some anime and read about it. My former co-host Riki was incredible about helping to educate me — he had grown up with it. But it’s still something I don’t know very much about, and the book does a great job of really introducing you to that whole world. Helen, one of the things you talk about in the book is a lot of stereotypes about the kinds of folks who do or don’t read manga. I have to say, when someone reached out and told me a person had written a wonderful overview of manga, a little old British lady was not what I was expecting. Talk to us a bit about your personal journey.
Helen
You would never believe the number of people who meet me and say, you really ought to retire and make room for the rest of us. My answer is that I’ve done a dozen books now, and I love to write. I love what I do. I speak all over the UK, and when I get the chance overseas, I say, just bring it — come on, do your book. I want your book. I would never have written my first book if someone else had written the book I wanted.
I actually started looking at anime and manga in 1981, and the reason I started is it’s a love story. I met a guy who was such a keeper that he is still my life partner. He had just been on a graduation trip with his art school friends — they were all fine art and illustration graduates — and they went to Mallorca, which is an island that’s part of Spain.
Mallorca is famous for three things for young Brits leaving college: sun, sea, and sex. But this lot, being art graduates, actually wanted to see the culture. They went into town and explored all the little back alleyways and shops, and watched local TV. One night they saw a giant robot cartoon marathon that exploded their tiny brains. They were illustration students, art students, used to interpreting things through visuals. I come from a story background — my family is Irish, we’ve told stories since I was in the cradle, I follow narrative. But they were suddenly looking at a new way of telling stories visually in a style they’d never encountered. They loved it. Long story short, they came home, Steve and I met, we did the usual boy-girl thing, went to meet each other’s families. And he said to me, “Okay, I’m going to show you the stuff we picked up in Mallorca in the summer, because there’s this amazing thing called manga and anime that’s really Japanese but it’s all over Spain.”
And he showed me the stuff they got. I thought, this is really interesting, because I read no Spanish and no Japanese at that time, and yet I could follow the story — not the fine detail, but I could follow the story through the narrative alone. I thought, here is a way of telling stories that doesn’t depend on my verbal competence.
That really fascinated me. If you can take something from one language, Japanese, into another, Spanish, and have it still communicate to someone who speaks neither, that’s sensational. Anime and manga seemed to me like the most astonishing visual language, and I had to find out more. That was where my writing career was essentially born.
Matthew
There are a couple of things in that story I love. First, I have a similar thing — I had very little contact with anime, manga, or a lot of things Japanese until I met my spouse, Mary, who is herself white. She’s from Minnesota, where I now live. But she became very involved in those worlds when she was a kid and spent a semester in Japan. So she’s been my introduction to that.
I love that part of your story. I’ll say, though, the sad part is that I was born in the 70s, I’m Gen X, and I remember that when I was in college a lot of my friends first started getting into anime. This was when the movie Akira was coming out, along with things like Ranma 1/2 and Revolutionary Girl Utena. They were all convinced they had discovered anime. So hearing that it was out in the early 80s, even in Spain, is a little hard to hear. But I trust it’s possible my generation didn’t actually discover all these good things for the West.
Helen
Doesn’t every generation rediscover its own thing and then be terribly surprised that its elders have had some similar experience? I remember one of my nephews — and I adore my nephews, we get on really well — came up to me one day and said, “I found this incredible band. I was just nosing around YouTube and there are old videos, and I don’t know anyone who knows this. They’re amazing. They’re a bit rough, a bit edgy.” Iron Maiden. I let him educate me, and a few years later he said, “You know, I know what you did there.” And that was really nice.
Matthew
In high school, a friend of mine introduced me to a lot of great older music, including Creedence Clearwater Revival, which is still a favorite of mine. I was playing it, thought it was the coolest thing in the world, until my dad got home, heard it, and goes, “Oh yeah, I love this music.” All of a sudden it wasn’t so cool anymore.
Helen
That’s the slayer, isn’t it — when dad tells you at the point of entry, or your big brother. And that’s one reason why anime and manga have been so successful: they tend to retell the same type of story but dress them in new clothes every incarnation, so the kids seeing them now — the seven year olds, ten year olds — are not seeing the same story their big brothers had. Their big brothers can still relate to it because it’s the kind of story they love. That’s part of the genius of this whole medium — they pick up threads almost like myth themes, in much the same way that American comics do. Myth themes and political and ideological themes run all the way through, but they’re always presented in new clothes for the generation approaching them for the first time. That is wonderful. That’s genius.
Matthew
That’s so very true. And I’m glad you mentioned American comics, because that was one of my next questions. You talked about how for both you and your husband this idea of visual storytelling was so revolutionary. And of course, while anime and manga are their own thing, we do have comic books in America and England. I’m curious — because I think it’s easy to just say manga is your Japanese comic books, and that may be technically true but really doesn’t capture the essence of it — what was it specifically about manga and anime that spoke to you in a way that, say, Batman or Archie hadn’t?
Helen
Well, two things. First of all, Batman, Archie, most American comics — to be fair, a lot of British comics — had no place for me when I first encountered comics. I read comics as a child because when I was growing up Britain had stacks of girls’ comics and cross-gender comics that girls or boys could read. I read those with great enthusiasm, but they died out around the 60s for a variety of structural reasons I won’t go into. And as a girl going into comic shops and finding only American comics, the atmosphere was often actively hostile. They only had one kind of girl. Every other kind of girl was subsidiary. Older women were nothing. I come from a culture where older women are very much something. American comics excluded me at that time. They weren’t interested in me. I was told you could be on the sideline.
And then I got into Japanese comics. A lot of Japanese boys’ comics have similar roles for females, but there’s a whole separate thread of Japanese girls’ comics and women’s comics and drama comics that cater for anyone. There are comedy comics where I was told, yeah, there are comics that adjust for you — if you want to exclude the guys you can get those, but there are also comics that show you in high school on equal terms with the boys. That was a revelation. Japanese comics gave me a place I didn’t find anywhere else, except in French and Italian comics.
The other thing was that business of telling the story through narrative line — not through words, but through images. If you’ve ever looked at Barry Windsor Smith, one of my countrymen who did a lot of great comics for Marvel — a lot of Conan and so on — I love Barry, he’s a fabulous artist. But he crams every inch of the page with squiggly little black lines, and any page without squiggly little black lines, he writes novels on.
So many British and American comic writers think that in order to be effective they have to occupy space on the page, and they don’t. Their role, in my view, is to provide the narrative structure that enables the artist to bring the story to life. Keep steering the artist toward the best opportunities, the best ways of doing it, but not to try and go equal space, mano a mano with the artist. When I see a comic where the writer is obviously saying, “I’m going to take up as much space as the pictures, so help me God,” I think please. So for me, manga did both those things and did them magnificently.
Matthew
Well, that’s interesting, because for myself my brain has never really been able to process comic books or manga quite as well as when it moves to a TV screen. I know a little bit. But if you ask me the names of famous comic creators, I’ll come up with Stan Lee, then also Grant Morrison and Alan Moore — it’s not the artists.
I love what you’re talking about with feeling welcome. Many years ago I had a wonderful guest in Jessica Plummer, who does incredible stuff about women in American comics. One thing we talked about was how a character like Lois Lane, introduced in the 30s and 40s as this woman journalist — crackerjack, able to do so many great things — by the 50s and 60s and the Comics Code in American comics had become just the girl with hearts in her eyes pining after Superman. So it’s interesting to hear the other side of that: how if that’s what you’re raised with, of course something that really shows women characters and other kinds of characters in very different ways would be much more appealing.
Helen
The other thing is that women are very strongly represented as creators in the Japanese comic universe, which until fairly recently hasn’t always been true in the West. My other half is a huge Marvel and DC fan, and looking at his stories of the Marvel Bullpen, there’s this one girl in there, Mary Severin. And she’s there because her brother works there, basically. She’s astonishing — a real talent, a writer, an artist, an admin person, a wrangler, a great liaison with the fans. But it’s her. Outside on the streets of America, just as on the streets of everywhere else in the world, it’s pretty much 50-50 male-female. In a comic book office that’s selling dreams and ethics and ideas to American kids, we’ve got one girl in the office and maybe three or four girls for every eight or nine guys in the magazines.
Unless the girls are super heroines with superpowers, they’re nowhere. Well, trust me, we are used to that. We’ve been fighting that since the days of the suffragettes. But we don’t care for it in representational terms.
If you look at anime and manga, the women who started doing manga often started the same way guys did. They were in small towns all over Japan. In the post-war years, when Japan was pretty poor and taking a while to get its economy going, they looked at comics and thought, “Wow, I love this story. I love these people. I identify with this team going into space. I identify with this high school. I identify with these adventurers trying to bust racketeering rings. I’m in there.”
And where things started in Japan is that people started very small — very often in high schools or local community halls, doing their own comic circles. They would make their own comics and share them. Somewhere along the line the idea came up that if they could afford to make copies instead of just passing the one they’d drawn around, maybe they could share them more widely, make a bit of cash, talk to other comic fans. Gradually, particularly in the 70s, a range of comic fairs and comic markets grew up where complete amateurs would sell their goods to each other in local school halls, local county halls — tiny places. This built up a network of places where girls and boys alike could get together in what they called doujinshi circles to make comic magazines, often parodies or homages to their favorites, and sell them on weekends. Gradually they built up a chain where today, Comiket — the twice-yearly comic market in Tokyo — is I think the single biggest non-sports fan event in the world. Just before the pandemic they were averaging 750,000 people at their events.
They’re building up slowly again since the pandemic, but all those people come from all over Japan to either sell the comics they’ve made or buy the comics other fans have made. And that gives girls a way in.
Matthew
That’s such an incredible story, because the ones we hear about in the States — especially San Diego Comic-Con and things like that — are very dominated by the big publishing houses, Marvel and DC, or television and movie studios. And I think you did a great job of tracing the history of manga all the way back to illustrations from hundreds of years ago that really have the roots traced.
I love this idea of something that — because I think for a lot of creative people, anyone can write something, anyone can draw something, but then in the States and I think in Britain and other places, there are these big corporations that control what gets published, what makes it to the TV screen, what goes out to the comic book stores. And so knowing this entire industry kind of grew up around people just skipping that middleman entirely — it’s kind of like a farmer’s market where people don’t have to sell their stuff to grocery stores, they just sell it directly. I was just so thrilled reading about how that happened in the manga world.
Helen
What I love about that is that an awful lot of people use that system just for fun, just for their hobby. And like all of us when we have hobbies in our teens, some people drop out along the way — you meet people, you get a job, you go to uni, all these things happen. But you can carry on with it at the level you want. And if you happen to make it big, great. But then if you do go to one of the big comic publishers and they say they love you and they’ve got a book ready for you, the story gets interesting.
Like there’s an artist I mention in the book, Baron Yoshimoto. Now, Baron Yoshimoto is a really great artist — a great classical artist in every sense — but he also did manga and was very successful. He went to America, was very enthused by American comics. So he wrapped up all his work in Japan, went to America, and Stan Lee loved him and got him to do some comics. But Stan wanted him to do Japanese stuff. And he was saying, “I’m in America, I’m an artist, I’ve studied Michelangelo, I’ve studied Dali. You just want me to draw samurai and geisha. That’s not me.” So off he went to do illustrations for people like Playboy.
But in Japan, he would have a way around that. If his studio or imprint said, “We just want you to stick to your groove, we don’t want you to experiment,” he could just shrug and say okay — and then go to the fan market and put out whatever he liked under a pseudonym. Put out parodies of his own work, parodies of other work, totally different work. Let’s say he was working in the teen market. If he wanted to take those characters further and darker — into erotica, extreme violence, extreme politics — he could do that under a pseudonym in the fan market. As a creator, your opportunities and choices are only limited by your energy and the amount of work you’re prepared to put in. You can function both as a well-known creator for a major imprint and as the edgiest indie artist on the block under another name.
Matthew
I love that. And the Stan Lee story is so important — and I’ll grant it, Stan himself, for all the things that were great about him, was by no means a paragon of racial understanding. And you look at a lot of the Marvel and DC heroes we think of today as great representation — a lot of them started as very much stereotypical characters: Luke Cage being very much blaxploitation, early Asian characters being very much that. So for Stan to say, “Oh, you’re Asian, you of course must draw only Japanese stuff” — that’s something I think when I was first discovering manga and anime I had some of that as well.
I remember encountering things like Howl’s Moving Castle and thinking, “Wait, this is a story about European castles. This is not what I expected.” And finding — this one’s live-action — the Kurosawa movies that are very much samurai movies but are 100% Shakespeare. You know, Thrown of Blood being Macbeth, and Ran being King Lear. And talk a bit about that — because I think one of the things about manga that is so interesting, that you discuss in the book, is that it is not by any means just topics people think of as stereotypically Japanese storytelling.
Helen
Well, that’s the thing. In the West, certainly in the 80s and 90s right up until broadband spread so wide, our idea of Japan was that it was samurai and geisha and castles and everybody does tea ceremony. When all the time, people were growing up in Japan just like us, thinking that everyone in the West was completely equal, completely fair, completely non-discriminating. Everybody had jobs, everybody had money, everybody had cars. The Japanese were sold a story about us by the occupying authorities — one that legally could not be challenged — that the West was an absolute fairyland of equality and justice. At exactly the same time, people like Stan Lee — who wasn’t perfect, but give him credit, he fought for what he believed in — people like that were writing Black exploitation comics saying, “Look, you’re presenting America as this wonderland of equality all over the world. What about Black Americans? What are you doing for ethnic minority Americans? What are you doing for Native Americans?” All of that was coming in.
And I think ethically it seems to me the West has walked a really difficult line and is still walking it. Because we tell ourselves our ethics are the pure classical Greek and Greco-Roman ideals. Well, great — they believed democracy belonged to men who owned property, slavery was fine for everyone else, and women shouldn’t be seen outside the home. So maybe Greco-Roman democracy isn’t all that hot. Maybe we’ve built our ethics on a questionable foundation. In the same way, many Asian ethics are still patriarchal — Chinese Confucianism being the huge example — and all over Asia, including Japan until very recently, women and ethnic minorities are still fighting for recognition. Do you know when the Ainu people of Japan, one of the aboriginal peoples of Hokkaido, first got recognized as a separate ethnicity?
Matthew
I don’t know if it’s from your book or something else, but I remember something like 2005 or something like that.
Helen
Yeah, something like that. And until very recently, many Ainu people were not allowed to speak their own language — literally not allowed to speak their own language. Now, my family are Irish, and we have that experience with the British in Ireland. Welsh people share the same experience. So I think that triggers me quite powerfully. But the whole system we base honorable superheroes — or honorable super heroines — on is very skewed toward what Western majority culture, which was itself skewed by religion that had a vested interest in keeping men in control, has brought into being.
And so for me, the other thing about Japan is it said, “Look, this isn’t perfect either. This is a patriarchy too. But there are ways of doing patriarchy differently. And let’s unpick what happens when two different kinds of patriarchy collide.” Because that’s what happened in Japan. In the years after America opened it up to the world, all the major colonial nations dived on Japan like ravenous wolves and behaved very badly, it has to be said. We gave Japan its pattern for colonization, and Japan went and repeated that in China with disastrous results. But that whole thing showed people that there were a lot of different ways of approaching living in a modern, evolving, developing society, that you could do it and make a place for yourself.
Even if you started out with nothing, even if you started out really, really poor. One of the things I always point people to, which they laugh at hilariously, is Downton Abbey. But Downton Abbey presents a society that was frozen in time before World War One, fractured completely by World War One, had to learn to adapt. And by the time you got to just before World War Two, people who beforehand would never have left their villages — who would have been literally the only gay in the village, in the case of one character, or never had the chance to finish school — were finding that in this new, much more confused but much more diverse world, they could get an education, remake themselves under a new name, shed their past completely and become someone else. And that I think is one of the things that anime and the development of Japan after the war offers to the Japanese people, and to us fans coming in later: that there are ways we can remake ourselves. We just have to choose better role models than the ones the world is selling us.
And that again is where manga comes in really strongly, because if you look at some of the great characters in manga, they are fallible and they often screw up completely. Many of them are fantastic role models. You mentioned Howl in Howl’s Moving Castle. Howl is actually a Welshman.
Matthew
Yeah.
Helen
He’s Howl Pendragon. He comes from Diana Wynne Jones’ great novel, Howl’s Moving Castle, which is one of a trilogy. But Miyazaki keeps that Welsh vibe with him because he actually loves Wales. He did a whole movie set in Wales long before Howl’s Moving Castle — he did Castle in the Sky. And Howl is someone who will take the money — he’s not above taking money from the establishment or whatever — and do the best he can with it. But gradually, as we see him mature through the film, he realizes that’s not who he is. He can be better. He can do better. And with the help of not just the love of his life, but of his friends, he is better and does better. So anime and manga give us all these diverse views of people that you really wouldn’t be rooting for from the word go.
And it’s one of the things I love about the work of the late great Akira Toriyama, who did Dragon Ball. He said he liked having his main characters be little — literally physically little — or two-bit people, old guys like Turtle Hermit, or like Son Goku, who nobody would pick to win a fight against some big, enormous, powered being. And he said he liked to show that little people could really, really surprise you. And of course, that was a brilliant move, because most of the people who read his manga initially were kids — junior high, some elementary. And they’re always the little guys, aren’t they? Even when they’re big for their age, you’re always the little guy.
Matthew
And again, it’s another wonderful way of similar themes popping up, because you say that and immediately I hear Gandalf quoting Tolkien about hobbits — the smallest of people can have the biggest effect. I’m butchering the line, but — there are four or five things I want to jump on from what you said.
First of all, a personal pride point: you talked about the Welsh. You can’t see it well enough, but behind me is the iconography of Clan Davis from Wales, which is my mother’s family. This one shows that our clan once owned two castles. I’m sure there are twenty different people who will sell stupid Americans twenty different versions of what their ancient clan back in the British Isles was, so I make no historical claim to it. But I do love pointing up to the Welsh and the castles.
Going back to what you were talking about — recognizing the problems in your own culture and then looking to others — especially in the 90s and early 2000s, when a lot of my contemporaries were really jumping headfirst into manga, anime, and through that all things Japan, we were in high school or college, thought we were the smartest kids in the world. And of course, that was the age at which we were realizing that the idea of the perfect West, capitalism, and all the stuff we’d been sold was maybe not so good. And we began a process that I think now people can look back on and see is just as problematic — where it became, “Okay, West bad, East good. America totally bad, Japan totally good.” And the name “weeaboo” became, I think it took root in Britain, but certainly in America, for the American kid who was just obsessed with all things Japanese. And that could sometimes come from a place of respect, but it could certainly also take on an aura of exoticization and Orientalism — “the mysterious Japan and all its wonder” — and that being incredibly racist in its own way. I’m curious if you saw that, and to what extent it was an American phenomenon, or whether in British and European fan culture you saw elements of it too, and how that played into your understanding of the history of how manga and anime have been seen in the West.
Helen
Well, I saw a lot of that at home, actually, because my father never served in Asia — he was in Africa and Greece, the Gallipoli area — but he had a lot of friends who served in Asia, including some who died in Japanese concentration camps and some who died on the Burma Railway. So he was, like many men of his generation in the British and American armies, very anti-Japanese.
Later in life he said to me that he had thought about it, and thought that they were probably just like him — guys who were called up and told, “You’re going to serve your country and stop foreigners coming in and attacking your mums and dads.” So he said they were coming from the same place he was, and he recognized that. But he still felt that as a culture it was really, really negative — very militaristic, very violent, very dismissive of non-Japanese people.
And at the time I didn’t know anything about Japanese history beyond what I’d learned in school. But as I got older and started to explore more, I gradually thought — well, look, I’m from an Irish family. My family spent its entire life being colonized and victimized by the British, and now we live in Britain. Most of us, the people back home, are fine — they have their freedom. We’ve got our own ideas, and we have British friends and British colleagues and British workmates. And I thought, that’s surely the same for the Germans. Not all Germans are Nazis. Not all Germans were Nazis. Okay, we can argue that they could have done a bit more to stand up to the Nazis — but I wasn’t there, so I wasn’t going to make that call. I said to myself, the Japanese are probably exactly like me, except they speak a different language and they’ve got different food and different cultural stuff. As humans they probably come from the same place I do. They want their family to be okay, they want to do all right in school, they want to get a decent job, maybe meet the right person, maybe have a family of their own. They just want what I want.
And so from that point of view, my own background gave me the ability to access Japan on a slightly better level, I think, than a lot of people had. Because there really weren’t many Japanese people in Britain in the 80s when Steve and I started getting interested in tracking anime and manga — there were two or three. Luckily, we both lived in London, and there were two or three Japanese shops in London. But they mostly catered to the Japanese expat market. For example, the Japan Centre, which used to be in the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral — all of that has gone now, it’s all been rebuilt — but the Japan Centre was down a little alley, and it was kind of like a secret code between budding manga and anime and Japan lovers. You’d say to people when you met them, “Where’d you get your stuff? Do you know about the Japan Centre? Oh, you don’t? Well, this is the address, this is the phone number. Call me when you’re coming down, we’ll go.”
They had maybe two staff who spoke much English because their clientele was mostly Japanese. And suddenly these kids were going in there with photocopied bits from Japanese game magazines, mostly — this robot, this book — and they were a general Japanese store. They did books, magazines, general goods. You could get matcha there, tea sets, that sort of thing. And suddenly they were faced with these kids bringing in bits of Japanese pop culture from gaming magazines saying, “Help.”
They helped find us. They gradually got more English-speaking staff, which was good. But for a long time you would go there and order Newtype magazine — which became our go-to — or Hobby Japan magazine, also a go-to, at hugely inflated prices because of course all they could do was import them and pay the import duty and transit. So we paid that, got them, and shared them among friends. Bit by bit we built up that knowledge. I’m sure most of the Japanese people in those shops thought we were absolutely crazy. They would get these magazines in for Japanese teenagers who came in, and most of us were twenty-somethings, some of us a bit older, bringing stuff in — they must have thought we were wild.
But after they’d known us for a little while — after they’d known Steve and me for a little while — they actually let us know that they had a library of tapes sent from Japan that they rented out to Japanese customers. And they said, “If you can play them, if you have a Japanese video player, we can rent them to you.” Of course they were all in Japanese. But we could go there and pay what seemed like a lot of money at the time — about five pounds, about half a day’s rent — and rent a video tape where somebody in Japan had recorded it off the air and sent it to them so that people could keep up with their shows. We could rent that and share it with friends and sit and try to puzzle it out together. Bit by bit we made our way, and the sharing that people were willing to do once they trusted you — once they knew you were okay, you were a regular customer — that relationship was really lovely.
Matthew
Oh, yeah. And I love what you talked about with the Irish history. I spent — it’s not the same by any means — but I spent a year studying at Trinity when I was in college, and I really love the culture there. And I think that both then and more recently, as we’ve seen Ireland be one of the leaders in calling out colonialism in Gaza and East Timor and other places — a recognition from a Western country that also has an experience of being colonized rather than colonizing — it makes sense to be so different from the American relationship to it.
I want to talk a little more about that time after World War Two that you mentioned, because one of my favorite episodes we’ve done on here was about the original movie Gojira — Godzilla as it’s known in the West. The Japanese version of it, because the first version was made right at the end of the American occupation of Japan, and Godzilla is in very many ways a commentary on that occupation but especially on Japan coming to terms with being the one and only country that’s been the victim of a nuclear attack, and how horrific that was in ways that they could never talk about openly with American soldiers on every street. So that kind of got me really interested in this idea of how a monster movie, a Godzilla movie, could kind of get around the censors — it’s a metaphor without directly saying, “The Americans did this horrible thing to us.” That’s very interesting to see in your book as well — how a lot of the early manga of the late 1940s and 50s was doing something similar: exploring people’s feelings about World War Two, the American occupation, and all of that. Can you say a little bit more about what manga was doing at that time?
Helen
Well, during the war itself manga was actually fairly marginalized. Japan, like Britain, like France, like many countries that were fighting without much money, essentially channeled all supplies away from non-essentials like entertainment, clothing, and everyday stuff into the war effort. So even paper was really difficult to get — you had to get government chits to get paper. The same with film — you had to get government chits to get film, cameras, cameramen, and camera time. So an awful lot of people in Japan whose main thing was making manga couldn’t do it. If you were well in with the establishment, you could. But some people hesitated to do the level of government propaganda that was wanted.
Manga was kind of marginalized — the government didn’t seem to want to involve manga writers in the war effort. There were a number of manga writers who enthusiastically supported the Japanese war effort and were fully behind Japanese colonization of Asia, because they saw it as fighting Western colonization of Asia. Their reasoning was: if we have a strong Asian power leading a strong Asian coalition, this will be better than Western powers taking control, stealing our resources, and exploiting us. And looking at how history has gone, who can argue? It’s just that the Japanese didn’t make the best job of it because they used Western colonial role models.
It was so difficult for people to resist and stand up. And again it goes back to what I was saying about Nazis — I mean, now show me a Nazi and I will punch them, because we all have choices. But then I’m not sure I can judge, because you could literally be disappeared off the street and your family murdered if you resisted. For the Japanese, anyone who raised their head or their voice against the war effort faced a very simple consequence — every man in their family was recruited and sent to the Pacific front, where the majority of them died. The great writer, folklore scholar, and manga artist Shigeru Mizuki was, I think, 19 when he was sent to the front, and was the only member of his platoon of about 150 to come back — at 22, minus one arm. It was that bad. So people tended to toe the line. Most manga was either done by people who enthusiastically believed in what the government was doing and made propaganda, or by people who were keeping their heads down and being as quiet as they could.
Matthew
I just want to interject — and I want to hear more of the story — but for anyone who might want to judge the manga artists who were doing propaganda: take a look at Superman from that time, where he is beating up horrifically racist caricatures of Japanese soldiers. And as you said, look at World War One British comic strips about “the Huns.” Recruiting artists of all stripes into propaganda is just what governments do during war. It’s by no means unique to Japan and manga.
Helen
And there was a recognition of this among Japanese manga artists who actually ran a magazine for a while — which the government later shut down because they thought it was too left-wing — because this magazine was presenting examples of people from other countries who had used comics to support their own war efforts. They specifically cited Chinese comics protesting against the actions of the Japanese and suggesting ways to fight the Japanese. Artists were looking at this across the spectrum and saying what they should be doing is borrowing those tactics and using them to fight their own war on the home front, to win hearts and minds and keep morale going. The Japanese government was like, “No, no, we won’t do that.” You can’t tell governments anything. They always think they know everything, and that’s one reason why they so often fail — because most of them are not geared for change and not geared for speed. But that’s a discussion that will be had in a much more serious way all over the world for the rest of this year.
So no, it was very interesting to see how in the wartime years manga was virtually broken. Before the war there had been a rich, dynamic manga culture with really exciting science fiction, thrilling drama, thrilling romance, all sorts of good ideas coming out — a strong strand of girls’ love, really powerful stuff. The war broke it. And luckily, a few people who had worked before the war and kept their noses clean enough that the occupation authorities didn’t ban them, along with the young people who had come up during the war, managed to start doing manga after the war that carried that tradition forward.
Because you’ve got to remember — for a decade in Japan kids didn’t have proper comics. They had virtuous, preachy stuff, but not real comics. So that was a whole generation that grew up with no idea of what comics could be. So teenagers like Osamu Tezuka, who was 18 when the war ended, and older guys like Ryuichi Yokoyama, who had been working through the war and trying to keep his head down, had to come back and restart comics with everything they remembered. And that led to some really interesting misunderstandings.
Those of us in the West who started looking at Japanese comics in the 70s and 80s had no knowledge of what had gone before. You have to remember that for a very long time — really until I’d say the mid-2000s to 2010s — not that many people in the West read Japanese. Not many even spoke Japanese, but reading and being able to translate Japanese, that was rare. And as a result, not that many scholars — not necessarily Japanese scholars first and foremost, but anthropologists, ethnologists, literature scholars, art scholars, comics scholars — not many of them could access Japanese material. They didn’t have the contacts, they weren’t encouraged to make academic contacts outside their own countries, and they just didn’t have the language. So until we got to about — I mean, I’ve been studying anime since 1981 — until we got to about 1995, I had a lot of really stupid notions based on assumptions derived from post-war stuff. I gradually began to clear those out. But it’s still taking a while. I still catch myself thinking things and say, “No, no, check back, because it’s changed.” We didn’t actually find out what had gone on in pre-war and wartime Japan until a long time after, so a lot of wrong assumptions grew up.
A lot of people would tell you that Osamu Tezuka invented girls’ manga — which of course he didn’t. He gave it a huge boost after the war, but he didn’t invent it. Or that Osamu Tezuka invented cinematic manga, which of course many manga artists — some of whom had read Western comics from Germany, England, France, and America — got the cinematic idea from newspaper strips in all those languages. So all of that stuff was there waiting to be discovered. But we didn’t have the tools to discover it until recently.
And now — one of the things I say in the book — I’m going to hold the book up if I may, because I love this.
Matthew
What does it look like? Go ahead.
Helen
Well, The Manga Bible says — one of the things it says is that we live now in a golden age for manga and for anime. We have so many materials made available to us straight from Japan, almost as soon as they appear in Japan. We have so many more people doing translation. We have so many more tools to enable us to stumble toward the language ourselves. You can sign up to Duolingo for free and start studying.
Matthew
One thing I always thought was a wonderful irony: I think you’re right that there was this huge ignorance about so much about Japan for so much of our history. Now the filter is not holding back, and I’ll make sure a picture of the book is in the show notes.
Helen
There we go — The Manga Bible.
Matthew
And you know, one of the things I think you saw at least in the United States in the 80s and early 90s was all of a sudden there was a focus on learning Japanese and eating sushi and learning Japanese customs for business — because this was when we really started interacting a lot more with Japanese business, and Japanese finance was seen as super important. So you had a lot of people who really wanted their kids to study Japanese so they could go off and be capitalist masters of the universe. And then those kids took the Japanese their parents made them study in school and used it to read manga. Which I just thought was this wonderful irony.
That brings me to one of the last questions I want to ask you, because this is a fantastic conversation and we could go on so much longer, but I do want to respect your time. When I first got contacted by your folks, one of my first thoughts was, “What is a British lady doing writing about a Japanese art form?” Not that it’s an art form everyone shouldn’t be able to engage with — but knowing all the assumptions that you yourself talk about, knowing that Britain is not great and America is worse in some of these ways. One thing I was really struck by in your book was that it didn’t feel like you were trying to give the definitive history of manga. You were really trying to say, “Hey, people in the West, here’s what you should understand about manga” — and it felt very addressed to that Western audience from your perspective. Talk a little bit more about that process, because I have to imagine somewhere along the way someone said, “Wait, you’re going to write The Manga Bible?” What was that process like?
Helen
Well, the process was really interesting. The publishers are Octopus, who are an imprint of Hachette. About ten years ago they bought a small British imprint called Ilex Press. Ilex had always done design-led, picture-led, photographic, and technical books on all sorts of interesting subjects. They asked me to write a book for a little series of theirs called A Brief History of, and they asked me to do A Brief History of Manga. The book is about slightly bigger than a standard snapshot — about seven and a half inches by five, weighs less than a sandwich — and it gives you the whole history of manga up to 2012, which is when I finished writing it: 96 pages, a ton of pictures, a historical timeline. That book was a big success and it’s still selling pretty well. It was popular because it was easy to read, it was light, it was fast, it didn’t talk down to its audience, it was fun.
The same imprint came to a friend of mine a while back — a wonderful manga creator, very active and also one of the most stylish women I know — and said, “Would you write us a manga bible that goes a bit further than this book we did ten years ago and is bigger and more comprehensive?” And she said, “Well, why don’t you just ask the woman who wrote it?”
They didn’t know I was still around — again, assumptions. So they contacted me and said, “We want a book called The Manga Bible. Can you do it?” And I thought, can I do it?
That was the whole idea. We love the attitude of A Brief History of Manga. We love the colors and the vibrancy and the willingness to engage with the audience where they are. Can you do a history of manga? And I thought, The Manga Bible — it’s a big title. It’s a lot to take on. It brings a lot of expectations. It brings the expectation that you will be wholly comprehensive. And there is no such thing. Anyone who is a historian — which is what I was educated as first and foremost — knows that what we are doing is digging through piles of rubble to get the latest piece that gives us a bit more knowledge, and then we in turn become the piles of rubble other people dig through. I am actually building steps with my work, not walls. I’m building steps so other people can stand on my work and go further than I could. I’ve seen this in my own career — I’ve seen other people enabling me to go further than I thought I could, and now I’m enabling others.
So the idea was: we’ll do a book that doesn’t talk down to anyone, but that doesn’t baby you either. That says, “Keep up. There are statistics. There are languages. There are multiple nations and multiple cultures involved.” And that takes the approach that this is going to be fun.
But I must admit — an unworthy hope with The Manga Bible was that somebody in the Bible Belt would look at it and start a big book burning. For one thing, they would buy hundreds of books to burn them, and that’s great. And it would be all across American TV, which is also great. But I don’t think I’ve worked hard enough on it really. I don’t think I’ve made it sinful enough. Except I do include quite a lot of gay stuff, so maybe you never know.
But it is perfectly true — we’ve got the story in The Manga Bible from Go Nagai, who for his breakthrough manga wrote Harenchi Gakuen, which was about what now would seem quite mild, but then were scandalous sexual goings-on. It was burned by parent-teacher associations in Japan, and of course immediately its profile went through the roof — its print run sold out. He was well off from it. And he thought to himself, “Right, in future pick your battles, and pick the ones that will get the most publicity.” And that, God love him, is what he’s done ever since.
So I’m kind of hoping — any of your listeners — I don’t wish to offend anybody and I don’t wish to presume — but if somebody wanted to do a really good book burning on national television, that would be so helpful.
Matthew
I will see if I can help you in a different way, because I do live in Minneapolis. Our dear wonderful president has set his eye upon us, and so we are dealing not just with winter but with ICE. I am someone who is often out and involved in those things, and so what I would try to do when your book comes out is see if I can stand in front of a camera holding your book — that way the conservatives can say, “Oh, that book is clearly inspiring people to fight against our noble ICE troopers,” and you can get associated with that somehow.
Helen
I have the greatest sympathy with you all at the moment, because being in a Nazi moment is difficult for everybody, and resistance is hard. I totally get that and I respect what you are all doing. But I wish there were ways of smuggling books into these ICE facilities — smuggling food as well, of course, and medicine and doctors and reporters — but I wish there were ways of smuggling books in there. Because I think in my darkest hours, which have been nothing like yours are right now, books have been my lifeline. And I really do think that whatever form your book takes — whether it’s a graphic novel, a comic book, a manga, a game, anything — if you’ve got something that can get you out of the dark, you go with that. You hold on to that and keep it.
And what manga has done for me, and what I think a good bible does, is it doesn’t tell you the absolute truth about everything — but it tells you how to find the absolute truth for yourself. And that I think is what we should all be striving toward.
Matthew
I think it’s such a beautiful way of phrasing it. I’ll close with this, and then let you have the final word. There are so many more things I wanted to talk about — we touched on the eroticism and how that’s viewed in both good and bad ways, and I wanted to do more with that. I know you wrote a book called 500 Manga Heroes and Villains, and on this show we talk about the ethics of superhero stories and a lot about villains and ethics, so I’d love to get you back for that.
But I’ll just close by saying this, because it really speaks to what you’ve always talked about — these core ideas of culture speaking across time and place. I spent a year in Ireland, as I said, and as someone who is a student of revolutionary movements I spent a lot of time learning about the fight against the British in the 1800s and early 1900s, and then about what has happened in austerity Ireland and other places, with a lot of the idiot romanticization that a lot of Americans had at that time. Still, I learned about the art and the music.
A couple of weeks ago I was outside one of the ICE detention centers here in Minnesota with a bunch of people protesting — a lot of whom were Latino — and I started hearing a song in Spanish that sounded familiar but whose lyrics I couldn’t place until I realized it was “The Men Behind the Wire.” Some Americans might know it, some might not, but it’s a song sung about the Troubles in the 60s and 70s — British soldiers, in an attempt to find IRA members, just detained anybody who might sort of kind of in any way be associated, which is exactly what ICE is doing. The song is about how even though they came with armored cars and tanks and guns to take away their sons, we won’t forget the men behind the wire. And hearing that song in Spanish outside a detention center just made me cry — thinking about how it’s the same fights, the same struggles, and the same art that we can use. That really came to mind for me as I was thinking about your book.
Helen
Well, a good rebel song always travels. It can work in any language. Rebellion always travels and it matters to us because we are the 95 percent. We — and personally, you and I are among the richest of the 95 percent, because we know where we’re going to sleep tonight, we’ve got clean clothes for tomorrow, and we’ve got food in the refrigerator. But we’ve got a refrigerator. We’ve got a place to put a refrigerator. The ramifications are endless.
But we are at a point where Western democracy is facing Western capitalism and it’s a death match. An absolute death match. The very few rich, technologically competent people in the world have decided that they are going to absorb all the money we have and make us into feudal slaves living at their whim. And we have to say no. And rebel songs, rebel flags — there’s been wonderful use of the flag from the manga and anime One Piece all across South America, and that just gave me hope. All those things that we share, that common language that we share — we have got to use it.
One of the things that I hate about the tech-bro oligarchy is that they’re trying to take over the language of storytelling. Palantir, for God’s sake — what sort of name is that for an evil empire? They all seem to think that by adopting Tolkien’s language, they will wear Tolkien’s coat. They can’t wear Tolkien’s coat. They’re not fit to wear Tolkien’s coat. They’re not fit to clean Tolkien’s shoes.
We do stand at the crossroads of civilization. But what we’re fighting for is that everybody gets a share and everybody gets a say. And in the end, whether you do it through games, through manga, through rock music, through anime, it doesn’t matter. That’s our fight. That’s where we’re going.
Matthew
Well, that is a perfect closing. Thank you so much, Helen. Just because I want people to be able to listen to this and think, “That sounds like a book I’d like to get,” or “That sounds like a woman who has written some other things I might want to find” — if people come away from this thinking they want to find more about what Helen McCarthy has to say, where can they find The Manga Bible? Where can they find some of your other works?
Helen
Well, Prestel is doing The Manga Bible in the USA, so any good bookstore in the USA — evil empire if you must, I don’t judge — but there are a lot of good independent bookstores out there that need your business to survive, so go into an indie if you love me and buy the book anyway. Prestel are doing it on the 24th of March.
I have a website, helenmccarthy.net, where I’m not a very good web person but I keep it updated with all the things I’m doing and I keep lists of my books. I try to keep in touch, and you can also sign up for my very tedious monthly newsletter if you wish. It’s British, so don’t go expecting too much from it. It’s much more the village than down-to-nabby, if you know what I mean. But helenmccarthy.net is where you can always find me.
I used to come to America two or three times a year to speak at major anime conventions, and sadly that is no longer possible. But hopefully in the future it will be — and hey, Canada, if you’re looking to invite me, as long as I don’t have to go through America, because honestly my social media profile will get me disappeared by ICE. I’m not worried about not getting into the US. I’m worried about only getting out on a one-way ticket to Venezuela.
Matthew
That’s very fair. Please do come and engage with me. I also love to share details about other great British and American writers about manga and anime. There are a lot of us out there and we’re all essentially fighting the good fight.
So come and join us. And I love that, and going back a bit to what you said about being a bridge — that’s so important. At the end of your book, a lot of writers seem to want to say, “Just look at me, I’m the definitive word.” I love that you end your book with a section on gurus, and you talk about — especially — you list all the great Japanese museums and historians. Because I think that’s also a good way of saying, yes, you’re writing from outside of the culture but as someone who really engages with it, and helping to build that bridge to find some of the others.
One thing I want to mention — I don’t know if you have this in Britain, but I love plugging this on the podcast. For those who want to get a copy of the book but, like me, don’t want to have to go into that place with people and things like that — supporting independent bookstores is great, but if you want to have it just brought to your house by a nice person, go to bookshop.org. It will allow you to order the book and have it brought to you, but instead of it going through Amazon or somewhere where workers are treated terribly, what the website does is say, “Okay, you’re in this area, there’s an independent bookstore ten miles away,” and basically it’s just as though you did all the work of finding that independent bookstore and placing the order with them directly, so your money goes directly to an independent bookstore. Same with some of your older books — even ones that are out of print. Maybe a bookstore in your neighborhood doesn’t have it, but maybe one a thousand miles away does. This website will allow you to search those inventories, find it, have it shipped to you, the money goes to a great local independent bookstore, and Jeff Bezos and his empire see none of it.
Helen
Bookshop.org is great. We do have a version of it in Britain, and it’s just wonderful.
Matthew
Yeah, I try to go through it all the time. I will say — this may also improve — I got a PDF version of the book, and the images are such an important part, as much as the words. Which is fantastic, but it meant my normal practice of reading it on my Kindle or phone didn’t work so well. Seeing some of these illustrations — you have comic strips that look like anime animals interacting with a person from the 1800s. One of my favorites was a story about a comic strip that ran in a Japanese American newspaper in San Francisco called The Four Immigrants — and you can read about it, but just seeing the images in the book. So if you can get a paper copy, or at least have an iPad or something like that —
Helen
If you’ve got a public library or a college library, go and ask them to buy it. That way you can read it for free, and other people can also read it, and then it spreads the word further.
I’m so glad you mentioned The Four Immigrants, because one of my personal gurus and heroes — the great Frederick L. Schodt — an American translator, translated that book, and thanks to him it was publicized all over the world and published in Japan for the first time. So that’s beautiful, that’s wonderful.
And there’s only a tiny handful of resources listed in there — I could have done a whole book on sources for manga — but there are a few scholars you should definitely check out, a few books you should definitely check out, websites, blogs. And the other thing is: whenever you get a book, if it’s a scholarly book it will certainly have it, and non-scholarly books sometimes have it too — go to the back and look for the bibliography or the list of references, because that will give you anywhere from 25 to several hundred more books to read. And that’s good.
Matthew
No, it’s wonderful. Well, Helen, thank you so much. This has been fantastic. I really hope we get to have you back. I really hope people enjoy your work. To all my listeners — I would love to hear from you: when did you first encounter manga or anime? I’m guessing for a lot of us it was in high school, college, or through a group of friends. Certainly I knew an awful lot of people who first discovered it because someone they thought was cute was interested in it. That’s a great story — write in and let us know, we’d love to hear that.
So I’m going to thank myself, Helen, and all the people involved here. Thank you all so much. May the Force be with you.
Helen
Thank you.
