Manga, a Bay Area Love Story

A new exhibition at the de Young Museum explores how the Japanese art form conquered the world.

I wrote a piece for Alta Weekly about the fantastic new exhibit on manga at the De Young Museum, and how the Bay Area has played an instrumental role in turning manga into a global phenomenon. Unfortunately, the article had to be cut down substantially for publication. I’m posting an earlier draft (unproofed, not fact checked) here on my newsletter. You can read it below, underneath this excerpt from Kiyama’s The Four Students Manga. You should go see the De Young manga exhibit if you can, it’s fantastic!

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The Art of Manga: A Global Medium, a San Francisco Story

A comprehensive new exhibit at the De Young Museum how the Japanese art form became a global phenomenon—with the help of California artists and publishers

Manga is a centuries-old Japanese tradition of sequential storytelling that blends illustrations with words. You can’t simply call it the Japanese version of the American comic book—it’s a far older medium that’s artistically richer than comics, more formally innovative, more diverse in subject matter. It’s also having an even greater economic and cultural impact than American comics—around the globe, and even in America.
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Manga represent 43% of the U.S. graphic novel and comics market in 2023, compared to 15% for superhero comics. but that doesn’t begin to capture its popularity. In North America, manga has become the fourth-best-selling book category overall, outstripping most genres of fiction. It’s estimated to bring in $1.2 billion in 2025.

Manga now dominates streaming platforms and movie theaters as well as bookstores. Netflix’s live-action adaptation of the manga One Piece has been one of the platform’s most popular original series. Earlier this month, the animated feature Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle, an adaptation of a hit manga, opened as the number one movie in America, bumping Superman and Fantastic Four from the top of the box office. Manga characters are also the source material of innumerable lucrative animated series, toy lines, and video games.

What was once a niche curiosity available only in specialty comic shops in this country is now a cornerstone of most American childhoods. Kids are now so fluent in manga they have accustomed their eyes to the monochromatic style, so different from the gaudy colors of American comics. These kids’ love of manga has also driven them to learn how to read “backwards,” reading manga right-to-left and back-to-front, in the manner of Japanese text.

The Art of Manga, an exhibit opening at San Francisco’s De Young Museum on 9/27 and running through March, explores the creativity, artistry, and global influence of this vibrant medium. It’s the largest and most comprehensive exhibit on manga in the history of America, and there’s no other place it could happen. San Francisco was manga’s port of entry to America, and has played a central role in introducing the art form to the West for a century.

What makes manga special

“Manga is an immersive narrative language with its own grammar,” says Nicole Rousmaniere, a scholar of Japanese art and curator of the De Young exhibit. She connects it to other visual mediums like ukiyo-e woodblock prints epitomized by Hokusai’s 1831 masterwork “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” as well as the thousand year-old emakimono, narrative handscrolls, that combined text, image, and oral storytelling.

Rousmaniere also compares manga to performed art like kabuki. “It engages the five senses in a way Western comics don’t — it’s performative,” she insists. She describes how readers of manga don’t just look at discrete panels; they absorb visual rhythms that play out across two-page spreads, and interpret an elaborate iconographic system of visual shorthand that can immediately convey complex motions and sophisticated emotions. The admixture of text and images has a fundamentally different impact than it does in Western comics, because in Japan words are pictures—speech balloons and thought bubbles and vividly rendered sound effects feel much more integral to the overall visual experience.

The De Young exhibit in San Francisco, like a previous well-received exhibition on manga that Rousmaniere mounted at the British Museum in 2019, grapples with the impossible task of giving a full picture of this enormously broad art form. There are manga stories targeted at boys and girls as well as grown men and women. There are manga that focus on action, romance, history, fantasy, sports, music, and cooking. There are biographical manga, erotic manga, avant-garde manga, manga released by businesses and political parties, manga about the LGBTQ+ experience.

The medium’s foremost creators and its Bay Area connections

The museum exhibit is anchored by the works of Rumiko Takahashi, Jirō Taniguchi, and Eiichirō Oda — three of the most influential manga creators alive. Their touchstone series, from Ranma ½ and Mao to The Walking Man and One Piece, demonstrate the form’s extraordinary range. Alongside them, the show also highlights pioneers like Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka and Hirohiko Araki, whose long-running series JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure has over 120 million copies in circulation. It also features the works of more experimental artists, and those who’ve represented the LGBTQ+ experience in Japan.

Here’s another name of a manga pioneer that more Americans should know: Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama. He came to San Francisco in 1904 four decades after the ship Kanrinmaru brought Japan’s first American diplomatic mission to San Francisco. Kiyama studied art at the California School of Design, and created a semi-autobiographical manga series about the immigrant experience in San Francisco, the 1906 earthquake, anti-Japanese prejudice, and everyday life in the city’s Japantown. His The Four Students Manga, created in the Roaring Twenties and released in 1931, is a pioneering work of the Japanese art form that also happens to be one of the first graphic novels published in America.

San Francisco would continue to be a locus of manga interest in America, with the Japanese bookstore Kinokuniya opening in 1969, college fan clubs popping up in Berkeley, and a growing community of translators creating a local ecosystem. In 1983, Bay area translator and writer Fred Schodt published the first major English-language history of the form, Manga! Manga! The world of Japanese comics. Schodt would go on to rediscover and republish the pioneering Four Immigrants Manga. (He was an advisor to the organizers of the De Young exhibit, and contributed an essay on Kiyama to the catalogue for the exhibit.)
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Schodt tells me what a struggle it initially was to try to localize manga. “In the early 80s, it just wasn’t something I could interest people in,” he says. As a sop to American audiences, manga initially had to not only have all of the words translated—they had to be laboriously reworked to suit what American eyeballs and brains were accustomed to. Color was added, and each page was “flopped” so panels could be read left-to-right and books could be read front-to-back, in the standard Western style.

In the mid-1980s San Francisco companies, Viz Communications and Studio Proteus, became the center of U.S. manga publishing. “The Bay Area’s countercultural comix scene generated an atmosphere of reception,” writes Alvin Lu in an essay in the De Young program. Lu is a former editor at Viz who is now president and CEO of the publisher Kodansha USA. “As hippie lore has it, Viz founders Fuji Satoru and Horibuchi Seiji came from Japan to Northern California in the 1970s to join a commune; when utopia went south, they wandered over to Berkeley and started a publishing company.”

Viz would go on to publish many of Japan’s most popular manga in America, as well as challenging works by horror artist Junji Ito, the disturbingly psychedelic shojo (girls) manga of Junko Mizuno, and the ultraviolent Battle Royale that directly inspired The Hunger Games — titles that showed American readers how dark, wild, and diverse manga could be. The company would also lead the drive to stop “flopping” manga and adding color to it, making the American versions of the work far more authentic (and far cheaper to localize.)

Schodt tells me he’s amazed to see how popular manga has become in America, and how eager young people are to consume it in its original form. “My grandchildren can go in one day from reading left to right to right to left. It’s amazing how flexible their brains are.”

The De Young Exhibition

The de Young’s Art of Manga exhibition features elaborate video and interactive installations, There are also highly Instagrammable components, and the museum will even host cosplay events. But the centerpiece is hundreds and hundreds of examples of genga — the original drawings that are so fragile (and so zealously guarded by artists and publishers) that they are rarely seen by even the foremost aficionados of manga. “You can really see the hand of the artist that the printing process erases in these genga,” says Rousmaniere.

She fully expects that De Young visitors will get such a crash course education in the art form that they’ll be able to pick up subtle details of ink flow, screen tone, rinkaku (line quality) and notan (shading) in this rarely seen source material. “By the time they leave the exhibit,” she promises,“everyone will be fluent in manga.”