Underground Comics 2.0
I remember when I had first gotten into Manga, seeing it as a refreshing change from what I found beneath my own creative standards, when I had lost an interest in super heroes while others my age were into that genre. I found Manga to be the escape, to let me know that being the weird one was OK, and that it was fine that almost everyone else liked super heroes. In this essay, I will discuss my own theories on how a future underground comics scene will diverge from the original movement in the seventies. A product of millenial youth.
Sometimes around the 2000s, manga became an imported American phenominon, and I found it an escape from the super hero genre. Previously I had largely moved away from comics, having previously considered it an inferior medium of expression, similarly to horror. Though I liked Japanese horror, and my preference for the Japanese approach had been a recurring thing for me. There were many of the same genres that I had found in science fiction, which I had begun writing at the time. It filled the various niche desires I had. This was before I was aware of things like Heavy Metal magazine.
Manga and American Comics have largely a diverging history, although Heavy Metal magazine is the closest equivalent to the stuff Japan does that still survives to this day. Like Mad, they were largely immune to the Comics Code Authority, which was instrumental in creating most of the differences that I noticed between American and Japanese comics. For the longest time, having not been aware of Heavy Metal, I found Japan to be the answer I was looking for, and tried writing comic script, although without going into specific ( maybe for another essay ) I eventually adapted into drawing my own stuff.
But now it looks to be for naught. I can’t help but feel like my growing disinterest in Manga, is also happening as I discover more publication options in the US that had gone out of business. What I basically feel like is, if I want to publish a comic then: (1. I better draw it myself, (2. I better self-publish that sucker. This is compounded by the fact that I had always wanted to do a bilingual or trilingual story, although I wasn’t specifically planning on one of these being French.
And now I hear about Japan starting to worry about the future of Manga. This is despite the fact that they had several chances to open their industry to foreign creators. And it’s only now they started getting worried, because China is competing with them. And yet overall the manga-approach in the US seems to be growing in popularity. I feel like, if there are youths out there now that were like me growing me, then the underground movement will come from people that feel a sense of cultural isolation; a growing sense of aculturalness while everyone else clings onto entertainment nationalism.
The underground scene will be global, and not bound by any one countries desire to censor comics. It will come largely from the decentralized web. The only downside is, I worry about the future of print.