The Oldest Manga
So this is my weeks blog on Manga (as I will be off work most of this week and spending it with Jewel) I thought what would be an interesting fact finding mission for myself this week. Last week I had a look at age demographic and that got me to thinking on age. What is the oldest Manga of all time so I started to do some digging and found some very interesting things. I must say when i started this I thought that it would be a short post and a quick look. But in fact I found some truly amazing things. Like did you know that Golgo 13 has been running since 1969 and is currently ongoing! or that in 1976 Kochikame first kicked off and is another ongoing series, these two are the oldest manga still running. But this was not what I set out for on my quest I wanted the oldest manga ever. not ten years not even fifth teen I wanted to go back further and that lead me to think what is Manga to us how is it different from comics, The art, the story what draws us to this type of work over the shiny American comics. I came up with many answers but to me it would be originality, Most Manga's have very different characters and stories that don't just focus on the main character. Take bleach for instance the last three weekly chapters have not had a sight of its main character and this is something seen throughout Manga, Also Manga has been around a lot longer then comics!
Take work such as the The Four Immigrants Manga (original title: Manga Yonin Shosei, "The Four Students Manga") was drawn by Henry (Yoshitaka) Kiyama, a Japanese immigrant who came to San Francisco in 1904. It consists of 52 two-page spreads--a year's worth of weekly comics--following the lives of four Japanese students in America. A book collection was published in San Francisco in 1931. Much later, manga historian Frederik Schodt rediscovered it and put out this translated edition with lots of excellent notes and explanations of the historical stuff. The first official comic came to us in 1842 "The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck" the first collection of panel art with text to hit the US. Would it shock you to know Horusai Katsushika was the first person to ever utter the words Manga almost thirty years before the first comic! But sadly it was not until 1902 that Kitazawa created the first serialized Japanese comic strip. It as if there will always be the debate of what came first the chicken or the egg or in our case the comic or Manga.
As I said this was not an easy task digging into the history of the Manga world is no small feat, you would think that Kitazawa in 1902 would be the first Manga and that is where the trail should end, or should it? Where do we draw the line in Manga world so I looked on to find something very interesting titled Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga , this was a set of four scrolls written by Toba Sōjō and is credited for the origin for right to left reading direction in modern manga and novels in Japan. These scrolls are over nine hundred years old, These scrolls belonging to Kōzan-ji temple in Kyoto, Japan. The Chōjū-giga scrolls are also referred to as Scrolls of Frolicking Animals. The story tells of the antics of a monkey and it is also believed that these scrolls have inspired many stories over the ages. So how old is Manga well that’s up to us to determine hope you enjoyed the blog.
