Story by Julia Rogers
Illustration by Charlotte Cheng
In a blue robe, paper mask, and belt, four-year-old Bird Man flew around fighting crime. He was the superhero alter ego of young Jonathan Mullins, who eventually came to the dream-crushing realization that he would never have real superpowers. But rather than let reality stamp out his imagination, Mullins was inspired to put his ideas to paper. He became an artist at the age of six. “I’ve always wanted to fly around and fight bad guys, but unfortunately those things don’t exist,” Mullins says. “So my back-up was drawing comics.”
Mullins, who is now 22, currently works for the Texas-based comic book publishing company Antarctic Press. He says his first exposure to the world of cartoons was through Nickelodeon’s Doug, a TV show about an ordinary kid who has interactions with purple and green people. Mostly, Doug’s adventures take place in his imagination with his own superhero persona, Quailman, who was the inspiration for Mullins’s Bird Man.
With Doug as his gateway into the world of cartoons, Mullins soon discovered Dragonball Z, a popular Japanese adventure story that drew him into the genre of anime and manga. “As I got older, I watched more and more Japanese cartoons, and I really liked how they drew faces, clothes, poses—everything,” Mullins says. “In the past few years, I’ve had a lot more cartoon-y influences, but ultimately, the Japanese manga look is the coolest to me.”
Manga, or Japanese comic books, became mainstream during the 1950s in post-WWII Japan. The big eyed cartoon style leaves space for dynamic interpretations outside the boundaries created by literal representations of anatomy and stricter, more realistic styles of art. Rather than detailing veins, dirt, and other unflattering lumps like other comics might, in manga, more white space is incorporated into character and scene designs. It is common for manga artists to superimpose pre-made texture sheets onto their work by cutting shapes out instead of drawing a texture with ink, which is how textures are created in western comics. What sets apart the genre’s characters from other cartoon styles is the way manga artists illustrate fashions and hair color. As a manga artist, Mullins has to come up with original ideas and designs for his characters within this spectrum of simplicity. “I usually daydream a lot,” Mullins says. “When a cool idea comes to my mind, I try to keep that image in my head until I can get around some art supplies.”
Historically in Japanese storytelling, words are accompanied by images reflecting the meaning of Japanese characters. In contrast, American picture books are generally associated with childishness because the pages of books for children are full of pictures with few words, while books for adults generally lack any prominent visual elements. According to Akiko Walley, assistant professor of Japanese art at the University of Oregon, there has never been a strict division between reading books and picture books in Japan. “That’s kind of the way things developed in the West, but in Japan there has always been an interpenetration of image and text,” she explains.
Manga’s intense layered visuals and diversified content have made it socially acceptable reading material for all ages in Japan. However, comic books in the U.S. appeal mainly to the teenage male demographic. Mullins incorporates the genre’s defining elements into a manga series he writes and illustrates, titled Chicken Fighter. The main character, Johnny Mo, finds out his girlfriend, Pretty B, is pregnant. The couple’s town, New Orleansavannahville, is terrorized by a gang of evil mutant chickens led by the villainous Clucker “Clucky” Cockerson. Clucky, seeking popularity, attacks Johnny Mo for being cooler than the chickens. Over the course of nine months, Johnny must defeat the chickens to score “cool points” and save the city before his baby is born. Hero adventures like Mullins’s are a common theme among Japanese manga imported to the U.S., but there are many more titles and niche genres that never make it overseas.
As postwar Japanese children grew up, manga grew with them, catering to their college interests and, later, to their workplace and homemaker interests. Today, special interest manga series are devoted to anything from wine to erotica to The Manga Cookbook, which includes recipes for bento, a boxed meal, as well as instructions for eating with chopsticks. The wide spectrum of genres manga incorporates is one of its culturally defining traits.
Stuart Bracken, manager of Emerald City Comics in Eugene, Oregon, says the earliest manga to be sold in America were titles targeted at men and women in their teens and early twenties. Following WWII, manga attracted fans in the U.S., and by the 1990s, manga had grown popular in America.
Bracken says the boom in manga’s popularity since the nineties has stylistically inspired artists outside Japan. Canadian Bryan O’Malley’s adventure comic series, Scott Pilgrim, was published in a manga pocket-sized digest and produced as a major motion picture in 2010. The starry-eyed cartooning style also inspired Korean-American cartoonist Jim Lee, who worked on DC Comic stories such as Batman: Hush and Superman: For Tomorrow.
Over the decades, Bracken has watched trends in manga and anime shift the contents of his comic store. The emergence of online translations has reduced the amount of Japanese manga circulating in print, consequently creating holes in manga series—one particular volume may have been printed fewer times than its siblings because of its online availability, which can lower demand. With ongoing stories, such as the supernatural Fruits Basket series or the pirate adventure One Piece, avid fans try to amass an entire series, searching through comic book stores’ used sections in the hopes of filling gaps in their collections. Bracken also sometimes sees customers give up on titles as they grow out of a particular style. When they resell individual volumes to make space for a new favorite manga, Bracken is left with partially complete, abandoned sets. “There are none of those that can be re-ordered,” Bracken says. “Keeping the stuff in print is sort of a deal that’s done in Japan.”
Since manga doesn’t enjoy widespread popularity in the U.S., the question for Mullins is whether or not a market exists for his talent. “I don’t think I’ll ever stop drawing, and that’s actually the reason why I’ll succeed,” Mullins says. “Every artist wants to be famous. If you enjoy what you create, be social enough to make connections, and never give up—being famous will just come.”
