Transnational girlhood and the politics of style in German Manga

ABSTRACT

Japanese manga has long existed in Germany. Nakazawa Keiji’s Barefoot Gen, for example, was translated in 1982. During the 1990s manga began increasing in popularity, and by 2007, 70 percent of all comics sold in Germany were manga. The most striking element of the German manga boom, however, is not the wealth of manga translated into German, but the German manga – or Germanga – produced by young artists, most of them women, in the German language. While the German genre initially featured many of the same conventions of its Japanese origins, it has since evolved to differentiate itself from the manga tradition in significant ways. Today, German manga is a hybrid form that possesses elements from both the German and Japanese cultural contexts. This article examines this category of German manga with a focus on the role of women artists in its development and themes, specifically analyzing the work of Christina Plaka and Anike Hage. Investigating questions of national and transnational culture in conceptions of gender, sexuality and feminism in shōjo-manga, this article seeks to understand both the dominance of manga in the German comics scene as well as the emergence of German-language shōjo-manga as a political act.

KEYWORDS:

• manga
• German studies
• comics studies
• gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality in comics
• feminism
• Germanga
• transnational girlhood

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the reviewers of this manuscript for their comments during the revision process. Their insight was invaluable and their feedback guided me in making many improvements to this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This article uses Western name-order conventions, putting the family name second, for Japanese names, which would otherwise start with the family name.

2. Prussian Blue began to be published under the name Yonen Buzz after the discovery that there was an American female singing duo also called Prussian Blue, who used their music to disseminate racist and white supremacist ideology; however, since Plaka was moving her series from Carlsen to Tokyopop at the same time, the name change also served to differentiate the Tokyopop series from its beginnings at Carlsen and Daisuki and was therefore also justified in terms of licensing and copyright law. The name of the fictional rock band itself, Prussian Blue, morphed into Plastic Chew by the second volume in the Yonen Buzz series, and Tokyopop’s reprint of the first volume of Prussian Blue was later republished under the name Yonen Buzz Band 0 (Bürk 2012; Malone 2010a, 230; Jüngst 2007, 257).

3. It would be inaccurate to say that the German press did not publish on the graphic representation of sex, violence and non-heteronormative romance in manga; however, articles, such as the Spiegel’s ‘Manga Chutney’ by Jörg Böckem and Christoph Dallach (July 2002), did not as readily take a moral stance on manga content and instead reported on growing interest in the manga form.

4. The first Japanese animated film, Shōnen Sarutobi Sasuke (1959), Magic Boy in English and Der Zauberer und die Banditen in German, appeared in 1961 in German theatres. However, it was the appearance of anime on German television – Kimba, der weiße Löwe und Heidi first aired in 1977 – that caused the spike in interest in Japanese culture. For more information see Michaela Sturm and Melanie Teich’s ‘Faszination Manga und Anime: Der Erfolgskurs asiatischer Comics und Animationsfilme in Deutschland.’

5. For example, the experimental and avant-garde art to emerge out of Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman’s RAW (1980–1991), its Swiss equivalent Strapazin (1984-), the German indie comics publication Schokoriegel (1994–1997) by Zyankrise and the work of Anke Feuchtenberger, ATAK, M.S. Bastian and CX Huth challenged readers in terms of both content and visual language.

6. Barbie and horse-related comics never received the popularity in Germany that they did in other parts of the world (Jüngst 2007, 258). Consequently, according to Heike Jüngst, before manga came to Germany, there was barely a market for comics made for girls, and in turn girls rarely read comics (Jüngst 2007, 258).

7. The term la nouvelle manga is another variant of manga influence in France, though it is not equivalent to Germanga; rather la nouvelle manga is a separate cross-cultural phenomenon which combines Franco-Belgian artists influenced by manga (e.g., Frédéric Boilet) and Japanese artists influenced by bandes dessinées (e.g., Jiro Taniguchi).

8. Here, it’s important to note how manga has two meanings outside of Japan. Scholars, fans and publishers typically use the term to designate Japanese ‘comics,’ the sociocultural objects themselves and the industry and fan culture surrounding them (Cohn 2010, 188). However, the other use of the term ‘manga’ is to name the visual language typical of the form but not necessarily specific to the geographic region of Japan (Cohn 2010, 187). Consequently, what many scholars refer to as global manga, following Neil Cohn, is in fact international comics that mobilize the visual language of Japanese manga.

9. Carlsen started publishing its yearly anthology of German manga entitled Manga-Talente in 2002, which ran until 2011. Egmont published its German manga collection Shinkan Special from 2003 to 2005 in conjunction with Germany’s largest annual anime and manga convention, Connichi, featuring the winners of the fan art competition. Lastly, Schwarzer Turm published its anthology of German manga, Paper Theater, from 2006 to 2010. All three of these publications also demonstrate that German woman dominated German manga production across the board. For more information, see Paul Malone’s ‘Mangascape Germany: Comics as Intercultural Neutral Ground’ in Comics as a Nexus of Cultures (2010).

10. The same can be said for the second edition of Manga Fieber, where the artists are predominantly female. While both volumes also contain work by young male artists, looking at the two collections together, none of these male artists (with the exception of Tram Nguyen, who works in a team with female artist Nam Nguyen) have yet to published a tankōbon (a single- or team-authored paperback book version of manga of about 200 pages), whereas several of the female artists whose work is featured in the first Manga Fieber collection have indeed published outside of edited volumes (Jüngst 2007, 257).

11. Christina Plaka, Judith Park, Anike Hage and Nina Werner all started their careers by winning manga competitions, after which they published their first series in Daisuki, before finally publishing them as collections in tankōbon (Jüngst 2007, 258).

12. Moto Hagio (b. 1949), Riyoko Ikeda (b. 1947), Yasuko Aoike (b. 1948), Toshie Kihara (b. 1948), Ryoko Yamagishi (b. 1947), Minori Kimura (b. 1949), and Yumiko Oshima (b. 1947).

13. Boys’ love manga is also an important market in Germany that warrants further research. For example, at Connichi, the largest annual anime convention in Germany with over 24,000 visitors in 2013, the 2016 winner the Pochi Award for Best National Manga was Sternensammler by Anna Backhausen und Sophie Schönhammer, a boys’ love manga (Kotomi 2016). Also in 2016, Mikiko Ponczeck won a prestigious German Max & Moritz Prize for her boys’ love manga Crash’n’Burn (2014). Zofia Garden and Martina Peters are two other German mangaka working in the genre of boys’ love.

14. Malone observes that this element of direct address characterises both original Japanese-language manga as well as German manga, where the artists give background on the creation of the book and inside information on particular scenes or characters as well about themselves (Malone 2010a, 231).

15. Inga Steinmetz’s Alpha Girl (2012) is a good example of erotic manga in the German language.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by The Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies.

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Nijdam

Elizabeth Nijdam is Assistant Professor in German Studies in the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She graduated from the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 2017. Her research focuses on the representation of history in comics and graphic novels, comics on the refugee crisis, and comics as a feminist methodology. In addition to founding the University of Michigan’s first comics studies working group, the Transnational Comics Studies Workshop, Biz is also the Treasurer for the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum and President of the Executive Board of the Comics Studies Society's Graduate Student Caucus. Her recent publications include articles in ImageText, World Literature Today and International Journal of Comic Art, and chapters in the edited volume Class, Please Open Your Comics (2015) and the forthcoming books Comics of the New Europe: Intersections and Reflections with University of Leuven Press and The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies, edited by Frederick Aldama. Biz is also currently co-editing a special issue of the German Studies journal Seminar on German comics and social justice.