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Brain Diving - Schodt Through The Heart

One thing that I find frustrating about reviews of manga tankobon is when the reviewer fails to remember that the tankobon is part of a larger, unfinished body of work. I have seen reviews of one tankobon volume of Kuroshitsuji that complained about slow pacing or lack of info about supporting characters, & these deficits led the reviewer to give the series a bad review, as though just the one book represented the whole of the work. As a fan of the series, I understand that each manga represents a few chapters of a longer work, which has a whole different pacing than what you'd find in a one-book story. These "deficits" in pacing are no longer deficits when the mangaka finally gives us the big reveal we've been waiting for... I wish some of these reviewers would read Mr. Schodt's books! I certainly plan to, so thanks for presenting them!

The book also contains a translation of part of Riyoko Ikeda's The Rose of Versailles; although there are a couple of hard-to-find volumes of the manga that were translated into English in the 1980s, Manga! Manga! is still the easiest way to at least get a taste of this historically important manga.

Now, I've been trying to find both the Astro Boy essays and the Gundam novel that Schodt translated. I both heard about these in Animerica and I STILL haven't got around to reading them... shows how lazy I am.

Another work that needs mentioning if we're going to discuss the foundational works of the study of manga. And that's Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. He breaks down the entire medium of comics, giving even the experienced comic reader an in depth understanding of the workings of the media. He also walks the reader through the challenge of defining the medium of comics. His work on what comics are and how they work is foundational in all comic studies, and provides a medium specific backdrop in contrast to Schodt's focus on the process of producing and the themes on which manga is written.

While his focus is not specifically on manga, he mentions manga and their style and techniques multiple times throughout the work, and his analysis is not cursory or overly generalizing as many works that merely touch on manga tend to be. Instead, he identifies techniques used in manga not normally seen in Western comics, and demonstrates how they work. All of this is made possible largely through McCloud's decision to write the book as a comic.