Usagi Yojimbo DojoBoard

I don't know if anyone has posted on this yet. This is an excellent book about the birth of manga after WWII and the young men who first mastered it. I highly recommend it.

http://www.amazon.com/Drifting-Life-Yos ... 455&sr=8-1

I've been interested in reading this for a while. One reason is that Osamu Tezuka is a character in it.

I finished reading this last night, and I liked it. I think that it might be one of the best manga to ever be published in English. Anyone who liked Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics or Reinventing Comics should read this since it touches on some of the same issues (if nothing else, I think that it's one of the best explorations of the old "art vs. commerce" issue in the comics world that I've ever read). The size of the book might be a little intimidating to some people, but it's a page-turner once you get into it (I actually wanted it to be a little longer).

I do think that there are some parts of it that people unfamiliar with manga might not understand very well, such as the whole "gekiga" thing that becomes such a big deal toward the end (my quick explanation would be that gekiga is somewhat analogous to works by people like Frank Miller and Alan Moore that are a bit more gritty and "adult" than what most people associate with "comic books"). However, I think that anyone interested in a pretty thorough "tour" of the early manga world (the main story ends around 1960, which is a little before what I think of as the real "boom" period for manga) and an introduction to the young men (the early manga world is depicted as pretty much an all-male one) who had such an important impact on Japanese pop culture and on the medium of comics as a whole (I thought that it was kind of interesting that Golgo 13 creator Takao Saito is not presented very favorably). I also think that it's an interesting work because it shows that manga did not evolve in a vacuum and that the influence of American pop culture on manga goes far beyond the influence of Disney and Fleischer cartoons on Osamu Tezuka.

As a little aside, I thought that it was kind of funny (but probably not intentional) that one of the manga artists in the story looks a little bit like the way that Stan Sakai draws himself.

Dear Readers,
Anything by Frederick L. Schodt will also help us understand manga.
I have met him twice and he is a great person.
Currently I am reading Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics.
This book also has a foreward by Osamu Tezuka and many pages from Phoenix.
Enjoy!
Best wishes to all!
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