Jason Thompson's House of 1000 Manga: Comics Underground Japan
by Jason Thompson,
Episode VIII: Comics Underground Japan 
One of the interesting things about the state of translated manga in 2010 is that, as mainstream tween-oriented manga publishing declines, underground and art manga is making a comeback. Drawn & Quarterly has established Naruto than pumping money into something more risky.)
From 1964 to 1996, the premier Japanese magazine of underground comics was the monthly magazine Top Shelf released a beautiful anthology of Ax manga earlier this year—from densely detailed to art-naive simple, from horrifically dark to whimsically sweet, a glimpse of the tremendous variety that manga is capable of when the artists aren't busy licensing TV shows and cranking out 80 pages a month. But before Ax, Garo was the place to be for Japanese indy artists, and in sheer consistency and output (once a month for 30 years!), it completely trumped the infrequently published underground comics of America, like Robert Crumb's Zap!. In the early 1980s, creators from Garo were among the first mangaka to be published in English, in the pages of Art Spiegelman and Francois Mouly's experimental comics magazine Raw.
In 1996, the same year that it was dying in Japan, Garo hit the American comics consciousness in two books. First, Suehiro Maruo and Hideshi Hino. Comics Underground Japan was their most ambitious Japanese release, a 224-page anthology of weird and fabulous underground manga. Like all their releases, it was published right to left, at a time when no mainstream manga publisher dared do this. Blast Books couldn't care less the way Dark Horse or Viz did things; their books were aimed at a totally different audience, one that was interested in experimental things, so reading "backwards" was hardly a problem. American underground comics luminaries like Gary Panter and S. Clay Wilson provided cover blurbs. This was a book proving that Japanese comics were Art.
Dark Art, to be sure. Blast Books mostly publishes intentionally edgy, subculture books—coffee-table books of medical oddities and dissection photos, translations of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs—and their manga selecons were likewise centered around horror, guro and the grotesque. Thus, Comics Underground Japan focuses on the transgressive and shocking, although it does include some more whimsical stories. It's not just the sex and violence that makes it shocking—as the introduction points out, in Japan, "All of that is to be found in the most popular boys' weekly anthologies." According to Kevin Quigley, the editor of the book, it's more of an attitude. "What distinguishes the underground is a deeply personal vision, often coupled with a delight in subversion.…more often than not, underground mangaka express a Swiftian horror and disgust with the world.…Pulsing in the veins of even the most lighthearted of these artists is a strong current of cynicism and – that ever-popular world among Japanese youth – nihilism." Interestingly, there is considerably less of this sense of "transgression" in Top Shelf's Ax anthology, published 14 years later. Ax has grotesque and disturbing stories, but it also has lots of mellowness and whimsy—fairy tales and stories about rainy-day gardens, happy stories, glimpses of surrealism in everyday life. (The closest thing in Comics Underground Japan is Pan Migawa's story, in which a woman becomes fascinated by specks of dust sparkling in the sunlight.) One could argue that this expresses a difference between Japanese underground comics then and now, from the political Garo era to the apolitical Ax era. When the manga industry was at its most monolithic, when the Japanese economy was at its peak, the outwardly rosy nature of society encouraged furious rebellion in the underground. Today, with Big Business and Big Manga at the end of a 15+ year down period, and Big Media fragmenting into thousands of subgenres and sub-audiences, there may seem to be less to rebel against. On the other hand, perhaps this dark tone simply reflects the preferences of Blast Books and Kevin Quigley.
Regardless of whether he intentionally chose darker, more political content, Quigley's introduction lays out the history of Japanese underground comics, and does a good job of explaining how they are different from mainstream manga. "The business of mainstream manga publishing is saddled by a Byzantine editorial process…in every Yasuji Tanioka contributes a pair of dark, crudely drawn gag manga, such as the one in which a talking cockroach visits a condemned prisoner to tell him what he knows about death by hanging.
Masakazu Franz Kafka.
"Dreamlike" would also describe the work of Kazuichi Hinawa, who is best known in English for Shōjo Manga to underground manga, but all of it is horror, and this story about a deformed sideshow attraction in a circus of monsters is one of the most conventional stories in the book. Still, it's a satisfying example of Hino's creepy-cute, Family Circus of Hell art style.
Then there are the World War II satires. Deb Aoki called the "Look at my poo/Look at my dick" style of underground comics. His dirty, slime-coated story "Future Sperm Brazil," an excerpt from a longer untranslated work, is set in a forgotten Japanese colony in Brazil where the deranged inhabitants think World War II is still being fought. They send their boys off to war, swimming across the Pacific Ocean, where they die one by one from starvation, exposure and various tortures they inflict on one another. When they encounter a Brazilian freighter, they strap one of their to some sticks of dynamite and send him on a kamikaze attack. Everything goes horribly wrong and ends even more disgustingly than it started. Deeper into the book, Suehiro Maruo's "Planet of the Jap" is more polished but equally nihilistic. This short, exquisitely drawn story retells World War II, as Japan defeats and invades the U.S.. Japan bombs Los Angeles and San Francisco. Japanese soldiers rape and murder Americans, and General Douglas MacArthur is executed as a war criminal. Like Nemoto, Maruo emphasizes the darkly sexual appeal of militarism and fascism, but while Nemoto's crudely drawn soldier walks around with a huge erection, in Maruo's lavishly decadent art you have to look closely beneath the cherry blossoms and purehearted young faces to notice the suggestively positioned tank cannon with white substance dribbling from the tip.
But although it lacks gore, penises or bodily fluids (well, mostly), the best story in the book may be "Cat Noodle Soup," drawn by the artist Hanako Yamada, committed suicide in 1993. Nekojiru also killed herself in 1998, after Comics Underground Japan was published, giving the book the disturbing distinction that half its female contributors committed suicide.
But they left behind wonderful, horrible stories of dreams, and doom, and individuals tragically struggling against the world. For those who won't run in fear from its underground excesses, Comics Underground Japan is an outstanding collection of Japanese comics. If you've checked out Top Shelf's Ax (and you should) and liked it, this is a book you shouldn't miss.
Jason Thompson is the author of Manga: The Complete Guide and King of RPGs, as well as manga editor for Otaku USA magazine.
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