Art of Drawing Manga Sergi Camara

Of Manga and Mice

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) is surely the best-known Japanese artist outside of Japan. His wood-block prints of Kanagawa's great wave and of Mount Fuji, all thirty-six views, have been reproduced I would wager no less than a million times. He was all the rage in the last part of nineteenth-century France, inspiring Monet, Manet, and Degas, Cézanne and van Gogh just to name a few. And from these Impressionists and Post-Impressionists his influence extended, according to many, well into the twentieth century to the Japanese comic book artists. He has even been called the country's 'first manga master'[1]—if only, I wonder, because he released fifteen volumes (three of them posthumously) of sketches, starting in 1814, with the title Manga.

The Japanese word manga is hard to pin down in Western terms, and if you do a google translation, the flat-footed definitions "cartoon" and "comic" pop up. But essentially it means a picture (ga) without restrictions (man)—drawings without any sense of formality.

In Hokusai's case, his Manga was both a set of art instruction books—images for aspiring artists to copy—and an exhaustive collection of sketches, in which he sought to capture, as he put it, "everything in the Universe"—real and mythical: beasts and Buddhas, scenes from everyday life and humans with funny facial expressions, horse equipment and a huge array of animals—for instance, take the five white mice eating a two-tiered mochi cake (shown here). Above all, in his characters, two-legged and four, the artist's personality twinkles; his humor is clear, cheeky and comedic. Hokusai Manga in total contains more than four thousand wood engravings.

What separates his work from what we recognize as a manga today is the lack of 'sequential art'; his images, randomly displayed on the page, don't tell a story frame by frame. Rob Vollmar on the Comics Worth Reading site points out, in his review of a new (2007) edited edition of Hokusai's Manga, that to draw a direct line from the contemporary manga back to Hokusai Manga, is a disappointing endeavor. It seems for the moment the 'god of manga' Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy is more akin to Siegel's and Shuster's Superman than to, say, Hokusai's "Game of One Hundred Grimaces."

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[1] Christophe Marquet (with Jocelyn Bouquillard), Hokusai, First Manga Master, translated by Liz Nash, 2007.

Other sources, Rob Vollmer, "Review of Hokusai, First Manga Master," Comics Worth Reading.com; Sergi Camara and Vanessa Duran, Art of Drawing Manga, 2007; Department of Art, Digital Collection, University of Michigan.

(Image from Hokusai Manga, "Fauna, vol.14, block 29," Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum  of Art, Japan, reproduced for non-commercial use only.)

Leave a comment   |  tags: Hokusai, Japanese art, Manga, Mice in Art | posted in Art, Illustration, Mouse, Painting, Printmaking, Rodent

"This is where mice do sumo."

Two mice are in the midst of wrestling, with a mouse referee holding a traditional gunbai (wooden war fan). Never mind the wrestlers are spindly, contrary to our expectations of sumo wrestlers. But almost as if to make up for the wrestlers' anemic appearance is a round ginormous fellow, hovering off to the right, who is watching the match. As it turns out this fat happy one is Hotei, the beach ball-shaped god of abundance and good health. Along with Daikokuten, Hotei is another one of the seven Japanese gods of fortune (previous post). He's a charitable god and carries his oversized bag everywhere, chock-full of his only possessions, donated food and clothes, and candy to give out to children. It's not exactly clear what he's doing here at the wrestling match or what he's doing sitting in his bag. Perhaps he's just taking a break from all his good-will.

This is a handscroll painting—with the inscription This is where mice do sumo—by the Zen Master Hakuin Ekaku (1685-1768) who took up his artistic pursuit toward the end of his life. That being said he was no dilettante. In a terrific piece by Seth Segall, the editor ofEncountering Buddhism: Western Psychology and Buddhist Teachings tells us, Hakuin was intent on expressing through his brushwork his Buddhist enlightenment, and produced over one thousand scrolls. "His art transcended the boundaries between high and low, sacred and profane, serious and playful, and verbal and visual." There has been speculation that Hotei's bag in the painting represents the Zen circle of Enlightenment. "Could Hakuin have been making fun of sumo by turning the huge wrestlers into small mice?" "Do the black and white mice represent yin and yang—two, but not two?" Segall asks.

The writer adds a "PS" that catches my attention: I thought these mice bore a certain family resemblance to another group of anthropomorphic mice—the Ashkenazic mice of Art Spiegelman's Maus.

An appealing notion it seems whenever skinny mice in human clothes appear, and immediately brings to mind the review I read about the show at the Met and "The Tale of the Mice" (previous post, again). The art critic said: … with its cast of well-dressed white rodents. One wonders if Art Spiegelman knew of its existence when he undertook "Maus," his graphic novel of Jewish mice and Nazi cats.

But Spiegelman might disagree. In MetaMaus, Spiegleman's back story to his Pulitzer prize-winning book, he reports, in researching images he poured through early photos and postcards of anthropomorphic mice and cats, largely coming from Europe—Belgium and France, with no mention to Japan. Segall actually posed the question to Spiegelman with regard to Hakuin's mice. Spiegelman apparently suggested "Hakuin's mice must be Israeli mice because of their martial arts prowess—definitely not diaspora mice!"

2 Comments   |  tags: Hakuin Ekaku, Hotei, Japanese art, Mice in Art | posted in Art, Mouse, Painting, Rodent

Art of Drawing Manga Sergi Camara

Source: https://mouseinterrupted.wordpress.com/tag/japanese-art/

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