Mecha on Olympus: Masamune Shirow's 'Appleseed' more

Mecha in Olympus: Masamune Shirow’s Appleseed Thank you, Diana, and good evening. This paper will introduce Appleseed [SLIDE 1], a series of manga (roughly speaking, graphic novels) written and illustrated by the Japanese comic artist Masamune Shirow, perhaps known to some of you as the author of the cyberpunk series Ghost in the Shell. Running to four complete volumes of narrative and inspiring three animated films (or animes) and two videogame adaptations, Appleseed made quite extensive use of characters and motifs drawn from classical mythology, to explore the hidden costs of a utopian future society in the aftermath of global war. It’s likely that most of my audience this evening would not identify as dedicated fans, either of comics and graphic novels, or of Japanese pop culture – although I think I can take it as read that you’re fans of Classics. Unavoidably, therefore, much of this paper will address the generic contexts within which Appleseed was produced and consumed, especially internationally. What’s notionally the same classical allusion may create very different effects in the different national cultures by which it is received. What’s more, the medium of comics in translation raises some unusual and acute issues in adaptation – the major thematic strand of our Text seminar series this semester. 1. Context First I will briefly explain the position of Appleseed, and manga generally, within the medium of storytelling with words and pictures – a generic field for which I’ll use the term ‘comics’ as a shorthand, despite its potential to mislead (through being invisibly culture-specific). I’ll also sketch out some problems I see in studying comics, whether as a literary-slash-art-form or as a social practice. My discussion of manga will emphasise how they come across in English translation for Western readers. I emphasise that I have no academic expertise in Japanese language and culture. My knowledge of manga in their home culture is strictly that of a hobbyist, acquired at second-hand. This introductory material will be old news to any comics fans in the room, and for that I apologise, but for non-initiates some explanation of background is necessary. We are dealing here with a socially marginal medium – at least in the English-speaking world, where comics are perceived as pandering to a subculture, mostly made up of adolescent male low-achievers. The perceived vulnerability of a readership viewed as passive dupes has (as Wright documents) induced moral panic-mongers to propose various forms of protective censorship. (The sad – indeed, the shameful – story of American censorship of comics is evocatively told by McCloud (2000): 86-92.) The limited scholarly literature on comics in English is mostly addressed to the sociology, or depending on one’s point of view the pathology, of comics fan culture – comics themselves are reckoned too ‘low’ to merit critical engagement. It thus comes as no surprise that comics and graphic novels have until now occupied a marginal position within classical reception scholarship, although Luke Pitcher’s 1 excellent recent article on classical themes in superhero comics is surely a step in the right direction. An edited volume by Toph Marshall and George Kovacs [SLIDE 2], Classics and Comics, will very shortly be published in OUP’s Classical Presences series – the publisher was showing it off at the APA, but I’ve not had my contributor’s copy yet. The situation in other, non-Anglophone comics cultures is rather different. A touchstone for contributors to Kovacs and Marshall was Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics, an ambitious attempt at a new and purpose-built narratology for the medium as a whole. Groensteen’s conclusions in fact are more or less local in their applicability, to the lavishly produced bandes dessinées (or BD) which are such a distinctive and relatively mainstream aspect of French and Belgian culture. Brussels (Groensteen’s hometown) has a museum of comics, [SLIDE 3] and its tourist board actively promotes a walking tour themed around classic characters from the local masters of the medium. And the situation is different again in Japan, Appleseed’s country of origin. A different local history has given Japanese comics, or manga, a form very unlike the comics consumed in Western cultures. The quickest way to explain this is to refer to some visual examples. American comics vs. manga You will see that the American comic [circulate this] is slender – 22 pages of story is standard, with additional pages taken up with advertising, editorial material and a letter column. Typically the comic is about superheroes in one form or another, for reasons which have to do with the history of censorship there, but which also reflect a specifically Western fascination with the powerful male body, [SLIDE 4] idealised in a particular style which ultimately derives from classical canon. (On the ‘fit’ between superheroic body styles and adolescent anxieties, see the provocative and enjoyable Scott Bukatman.) The comic is printed in colour; tells its story through a balance of action and dialogue; and portrays a single, self-contained episode, with a clear beginning and end. The narrative flow is straightforward enough. With some exceptions, for which one quickly picks up a knack, one reads from left to right and top to bottom, just like a regular book. The episode both stands alone as a more or less complete short story, and (most often) contributes to the development of a larger story arc, much as an episode of a long-running television drama contributes to the season. A published series such as Superman typically consists of numerous such story arcs, one after another, again rather like a television drama or soap opera. Typically a series will run for as long as the product remains commercially viable – there’s no way Superman will be wrapping up any time soon, any more than East Enders will. The move towards defined story arcs, as opposed to an endless and essentially plotless succession of villains-of-the-month, defines the evolution of American comics from the 1990s to the present day. It reflects the growing commercial importance of the so-called 2 ‘graphic novel’[SLIDE 5]. Graphic novels can be sold outside comics shops – the bookstore chains will stock them, and their shelf-life is incomparably longer than that of a single issue of a comic, which is typically pulled off the shelves after a month or two. ‘Novel’ suggests a stand-alone narrative, after the manner of the European bandes dessinées, and some examples fit the bill: for instance, Art Spiegelmann’s Maus, or Alan Moore’s Watchmen. More often, though, the description ‘graphic novel’ is applied somewhat misleadingly to a single story arc from an ongoing monthly series. These series are still the primary market. If you look at the front matter you will see that the comic is the product of a collaborative process – one might say, of a corporate ‘production line’, running to a tight monthly schedule. Typically the credited writer composes the script, which includes not only the dialogue spoken by the characters, but also more or less detailed instructions for what will be shown on each page. These instructions are interpreted by an artist called the penciller – one might say that he or she translates the descriptive element of the script. The pencilled pages are passed along the line to an inker, who turns what may be quite sketchy and provisional pencils into a crisp and definitive form; then to a letterer (who adds dialogue and captions), and a colourist. In the bad old days, all these creators remained anonymous – comics publishers were slow to credit the minions who toiled on what were very much corporate properties, often with quite a rapid turnover of personnel. Typically the only way to escape these constraints has been to work outside the commercial mainstream in independent or ‘small-press’ comics, typically with very small print runs and for love rather than money. With regret, I must largely exclude the small press from my remarks today. The Japanese examples [on your handout] are from stories by several different authors, including some Appleseed. You’ll see some basic similarities – for instance, the use of word balloons, which they adopted in the early twentieth century from American newspaper comic strips. The visual style of the genre’s post-War pioneers also shows the influence of Disney cartoons, including the use of big eyes to telegraph emotion. Readers new to manga often assume that these big eyes mean the characters are supposed to be non-Japanese, but that’s not the case. There has also been some influence from French bandes dessinées, leading to the emergence of a stylistic school called by its practitioners ‘nouvelle manga’ (Gravett 157, 169). The extent to which manga represents cultural hybridity – an Westernisation of Japanese illustrative traditions, and/or vice versa – is a matter of some scholarly debate, of which Kinsella and Schodt are representative. But alongside these familiar aspects, there are also obvious differences. Contrary to commonly held expectation, the visual styles of manga artists are quite diverse – it’s not all big eyes and speed-lines, and different genres of manga have evolved their own graphic conventions. Still, in general one can say that the narrative idiom is much more cinematic, with less use of dialogue. There’s a tendency to linger and explore aspects of a scene, or the emotional tone of a moment in time, rather than move the story briskly forward with action and reach closure. (On the narratology of manga I commend to your attention the analysis by Scott McCloud (1993), himself no mean comics practitioner; 3 his follow-up (2000): 123 concisely surveys some of the different styles associated with manga genres. Ch.1 of Schodt is also well worth your time.) The materiality of manga Japanese comics are typically printed on low-quality paper and in black and white, not colour, reflecting the austere Occupation and Post-Occupation economy in which manga first achieved mass popularity – initially through circulating libraries rather than private purchase, again for reasons of affordability. The volumes of manga circulated by those libraries were fat omnibuses, containing episodes of stories by many different contributors, and omnibus-style magazines remain a typical mode of publication for manga in Japan to this day. Published on a weekly schedule, they run to hundreds of pages, and are typically read very fast indeed (Schodt p.26 cites as typical the astounding figure of 3.75 seconds per page). This rapid reading is partly explained by art that is often very basic, and even crude. Unlike the American commercial model, each manga is typically the work of a single writer-artist (a mangaka), perhaps working with one or two assistants, and the black-and-white publication model allows for semi-professional and fan contributions to fill out the weekly omnibuses; this is how newcomers break into manga production. Where American comics are hyped as collectibles (people will pay literally millions for an early Superman in mint condition), manga are disposable – skimread, passed on, and recycled. Following their initial publication in omnibuses, the most popular storylines are then compiled for republication in bound volumes, ensuring continued availability and enabling a more attentive re-reading process. The titles that are commercially and critically successful enough to be worth translating for the Anglophone market thus tend already to have been collected into a close equivalent of our graphic novels, delivering either one complete story per volume, or a major segment of it when the complete story is too long to fit in one volume. Katsushiro Otomo’s cyberpunk classic Akira, [SLIDE 6] for instance, fills six fat volumes, each of over 400 pages, and some longer-running titles would fill wheelbarrows – Lone Wolf and Cub runs to nearly nine thousand pages. Even in the case of a very long-running story, though – and Long Wolf and Cub is a unique instance – there was never any doubt that it would eventually end and achieve closure; that it would in retrospect be one long story, in a way that Superman never could. Continuing to look at the examples, you’ll notice that everyone appears to be left-handed; this is because Japanese comics are read from right to left, starting at what we would consider the back of the book and working towards the front. Early translations of manga into English, of which these are examples, solved what was evidently then perceived as a basic intelligibility issue (and/or a marketing nightmare) by horizontally inverting the artwork – a practice known as ‘flipping’ or ‘flopping’ – and lettering onto this mirrorimage of the original. Sometimes instead the panels would be moved around on the page, which solved the handedness problem but introduced others. To achieve readability as a Western comic the speech balloons of the flipped panels would sometimes need to be moved around a little, which in turn could entail some time-consuming curatorial work, touching up aspects of the surrounding background art. (This could get particularly fiddly 4 in the case of an artist such as Appleseed’s Shirow, whose backgrounds use increasing amounts of Letratone – ready-made acetate sheets of shading and textures, of which a much wider variety is available in Japan than elsewhere.) Some early translations (fortunately not including Appleseed) were subjected to additional and more intrusive interventions, including censorship and colorisation, to make them more compatible with the expectations of Western comics buyers who had not encountered manga before. Practices now are very different. More recent translations [pass one round] reflect a maturing market – the back-to-front format of the Japanese original is retained, and the uninitiated reader who opens the book at the wrong end is gently warned that s/he needs to start at the ‘back’ and read ‘forwards’. Is Japan only about giant robots? The examples I’ve shown you reflect the tendency of publishers, at least until recently, to select manga that play to the interests – and the expectations – of the pre-existing commercial base of Western comics fans. Western consumers’ first exposure to Japanese comics culture was through cartoon versions, called by fans anime, and the ones exported to the States tended to be on science-fiction themes, in part perhaps because they seemed less obviously foreign. Unlike printed manga, these cartoons were easily and cheaply adapted for Western consumption – there was no need to flip anything, and dubbing English actors’ voices over the soundtrack is obviously much less time-consuming than re-lettering a comic (Gravett 152). We sometimes also got these shows here, and titles such as Astro Boy and Battle of the Planets [SLIDE 7] may ring some bells among the nostalgically minded. (Schodt 311-12.) These titles, of course, often bore no relation to those of the Japanese-language originals – just the same thing as happened to the Italian sword-and-sandal films of the 1960s when dubbed into English, and an indication that the originals weren’t being taken terribly seriously as ‘art’. Because anime relates closely to manga, the selection of only science-fiction animes by American and British broadcasters fostered an unrealistically narrow impression of what the Japanese comics scene was good for. Science-fiction comics featuring giant robots and power-suits (called mecha), and post-apocalyptic scenarios, are a distinctive subgenre in Japan, and their publication (as for instance with Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira) can be a major cultural event; but they by no means dominate the market through weight of numbers, in the same way superheroes do in the Anglophone West. The generations that grew up with manga after the War, and especially the baby-boomers who were teenagers in the 1960s, carried on reading them through college and into adulthood. (Gravett 116) The home market for manga thus became incredibly diverse, with titles addressing all genders and ages and a wide range of interests (from horror to comedy, sports to historical drama, sex to workplace angst) and varying widely in sophistication. Paul Gravett observes in his introduction that nearly 40% of publications in Japan are in the form of manga, representing a $5bn annual turnover; these figures are now some years old and if anything are now likely slightly to under-represent current realities. (Gravett 152). There are even manga about the trials and tribulations of being a manga publisher. 5 But the existing market for comics narrative in the West was demographically – and thus, thematically – much narrower when manga started being translated; and the market for animation was if anything narrower still. Cartoons were, and remain, pigeonholed as children’s programming. It so happened that giant robots were what we saw first; there turned out to be a sizeable niche market for them here; and for a while at least, the result was a self-perpetuating cycle governing what was adapted – giant robots bred more giant robots. It didn’t hurt that giant robots were so merchandisable, through trading cards, model kits and toys (Jenkins 2006: 159). (The Transformers franchise (recently the excuse for several lame blockbusters) was a Western ‘take’ on the new craze from the East.) To read manga in translation at this early stage was thus always inevitably to read it heavily winnowed, and filtered by publishers’ preconceptions about what kinds of product would succeed in the sales spaces to which they had access. Of course, these preconceptions will differ according to the local reception culture. The comics cultures of France and Italy are much more mainstream than UK or US equivalents, and more Japanese animation was seen earlier on television there than elsewhere, with the result that their reception of manga has emphasised less ‘cultish’ kinds of subject-matter, including erotica (which is huge in Japan, including for women) and children’s stories. This doesn’t mean that stereotyping and orientalising cliché have been entirely avoided, especially in the early phases of absorption of manga content and of its influence on local graphical storytelling traditions – see Pellitteri, text 1 on your handout. (Gravett 154-5; Schodt 307-8; on manga and ‘cultural hybridization’ in Italy, Pellitteri). Prior to the arrival of manga, these continental European national traditions already had an extensive track record in recreating the Greco-Roman past on the comics page (see, any day now, Dinter). These national traditions of rendering the Classical in comics must, in turn, surely inflect how a mythically allusive manga such as Appleseed would be received in its French or Italian translation – but that would be a topic for another day, and a more qualified speaker. Local patterns of reception also change over time. As the Anglophone market matured in the early to mid-2000s, publishers of translated manga tried to expand beyond the established niche or ‘cult’ market of specialist comics shops, and place their product in chain bookstores. Their commissioning policies actively broadened the range of topics being translated to include humour and soap opera, so as to appeal to a more mainstream ‘youth’ audience, female as well as male – people who didn’t ordinarily read comics at all, or at least who wouldn’t see themselves in terms of the negative social stereotype of the comics ‘fan’. At the same time the publishers shifted away from flipped to unflipped books, reading right to left instead of left to right. On the face of it this delivered a more authentic experience, one which respected the artistic intention of the original authors. At heart, though, it was a marketing strategy, aimed at promoting manga to this new, chain-store readership as a fresh and culturally ‘different’ alternative to established ‘youth’ brands in other media, including youngadult fiction and magazines and, increasingly, videogames. (Gravett 155-6). Henry 6 Jenkins, quoted as text 2 on your handout, is perhaps useful to think with here. The shift to ‘unflipped’ books also meant that new manga translations would be cheaper and faster to produce, with no need to retouch artwork, thus fuelling the boom. Simultaneously, a new wave of so-called ‘original English language manga’ was sold alongside the Japanese manga in the same colourful, youth-branded format, adapting the storylines of favourite American teen-lit. franchises such as Meg Cabot’s The Princess Diaries. 2. Appleseed Having established some necessary context I now come to Appleseed, which had an important – one could well say, a historic – role to play in the introduction of manga in translation to Anglophone readers. Although there have been occasional continuations since then, most recently in 2007, Appleseed’s four main volumes appeared between 1985 and 1989. The English adaptations were the work of Toren Smith’s Studio Proteus, a small, self-described manga ‘packager’ based in San Francisco. Smith, an experienced comics writer fluent in Japanese, identified manga which had Western commercial potential; bought the rights; and sold his translations as camera-ready finished products to established American publishers. Appleseed was one of Studio Proteus’s first adaptations, and was initially published through the now-defunct Eclipse Comics. The books were subsequently picked up by another publisher, Dark Horse, and remain in print to this day. Smith has frankly stated in interview that the formal features that made Appleseed an attractive proposition for the American market – detailed quasi-realistic art, and dense, action-packed storytelling – are precisely those which make it atypical as a manga. Its publication history in Japan was also atypical – it bypassed serialisation in an omnibus magazine, and went straight to the bound-volume stage. Its dark science-fiction theme is also not as mainstream within a Japanese context as exposure to translated manga ‘over here’ might have led us to expect (Schodt 319-20.) Schodt (319) goes so far as to hint that, if Masamune Shirow is now big in Japan, it’s probably because he became huge overseas first. Appleseed is also unusual in making extensive use of ancient Greek mythology. It’s not unique in doing this (cf. Saint Seiya), but it’s an unusual and perhaps a piquant choice within Japanese manga culture; we may be in a better position to see what buttons it’s pushing once we have Theisen’s chapter, again imminently forthcoming. This use of Greek myth is faithfully reflected in the translation. Such fidelity should not be taken for granted; the translators who adapt manga for Western consumption sometimes rename characters and places to make the story more accessible to American readers, or simply to push different buttons. (Again, the Italian strongman epics make an intriguing comparison.) Consider briefly the case of Yukito Kishiro’s Battle Angel Alita [SLIDE 8]: like Appleseed, a dystopian science-fiction story with strong philosophical elements, centred on a female warrior. In the original the heroine isn’t called Alita at all, but Gally – the 7 translators clearly decided Western readers wouldn’t find this feminine enough, so made up a sexier name ending in ‘-a’ (suitably exotic-sounding, but formed like a Latin feminine). In a dystopian world of endless factional conflict, Alita’s adventures increasingly direct her towards a remote aerial citadel, Tiphares; it’s subsequently revealed that this was formerly linked by an orbital elevator to an even higher orbiting spaceport, Ketheres. [SLIDE 9] One could write a lovely paper on Kabbalistic symbolism in Battle Angel Alita, only to find that actually in the original they’re not called that either – instead Kepheres and Tiphares are ‘Jeru’ and ‘Salem’, which as well as being politically in dubious taste, is a bit lame. Battle Angel Alita is a case where the name-change in translation actually results in a more resonant and complex image, at least for ‘us’. Renaming Jeru and Salem after two of the ten Sephiroth – Tiphareth (‘Adornment’), and Kether (‘Crown’) – supplies a certain spiritual as well as spatial logic to Gally/Alita’s quest which wasn’t explicitly there in the original, or not in those terms. These adaptations to basic identities in the franchise have sexed Alita up – intellectually and otherwise – for the Western market, enough so that Avatar director James Cameron is now threatening to make her story into a film. Appleseed is different: it carries its original title (an English word phonetically rendered into Japanese), and its classical allusions are there in the original as well, as Shirow’s own embedded commentary makes explicit. These frequent references are not mere name-dropping: typically they shade the plot with symbolic or allegorical nuance. I can cover them only briefly here, and by no means exhaustively – an incentive, if you’re keen, to go away and read the manga. Appleseed is set in the early 22nd century, in the aftermath of a non-nuclear World War. Devastated nation-states have been supplanted by new, transnational organisations, including Poseidon, a sea-based commercial power based around old Japan. The new superpower and self-appointed global policeman is Olympus [SLIDE 10], an ecologically perfected city-state, built on an artificial island somewhere off the coast of Africa – in other words, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, just like Plato’s fantasy-land of Atlantis. Olympus is a Utopia of peace and stability – Shirow never gets explicitly into Plato, but it’s obvious that he’s at least read the local equivalent of Cliff’s Notes on the Republic. Just as in Plato, the ideal polis cannot come into being without a carefully planned and game-changing intervention, which imposes a clean start on the lives and identities of its inhabitants. For Olympus, this takes the form of social engineering carried out at the genetic level. Post-human ‘bioroids’, artificial people genetically unchained from humanity’s inborn propensity for aggression, are in the majority, creating social tension among the remaining ‘natural’ human inhabitants, many of whom are first-generation immigrants brought in from the badlands left by the War. The combat skills of these ‘natural’ human immigrants are necessary to protect the city from hostile foreign powers – think of them as the spirited horse of thumos from Plato’s chariot simile. But 8 incorporating these outsiders into the polis also threatens to destabilise the social and technological progress being made there. The heroine, Deunan Knute, is one such outsider [SLIDE 11] – and as such, of the few major characters not to be classically named. The bioroids of Olympus have rhetorically drawn a line under the military-industrial past by styling their Utopia fairly comprehensively after the figures of classical myth. The prime minister or Permanent Secretary of Olympus is the wise and devious Athena; her loyal Home Secretary is Nike. Naming these characters after Greek goddesses is all the more appropriate because bioroids have no natural life-span; provided they regularly receive rejuvenation treatments, they are potentially immortals. Like the goddesses, they are above human cares. Athena and Nike head the Central Management Bureau, also known as Aegis [SLIDE 12] – an obvious reference to the protective aegis of Athena in myth. Its policy is shaped by the advice of a powerful artificial intelligence, Gaia, who safeguards the intentions of Olympus’s founders. Her name is a Greek mythological allusion (the primal mothergoddess) filtered through the ecological philosophy of former NASA scientist James Lovelock, whose ‘Gaia Hypothesis’ was influential on the Green Movement from the early 1970s onwards. A second specialised supercomputer, Tartarus, handles bioroid production. The title of each volume of Appleseed uses overt mythology to conjure up large philosophical issues, relating to Olympus’s juggling act between personal freedom and social harmony: The Promethean Challenge, Prometheus Unbound, The Scales of Prometheus, and The Promethean Balance. These thematic titles also speak to the double-edged gift of the new technologies introduced as the story develops, particularly Hermes, a magnetic field which (appropriately for its name) unshackles its users from the pull of gravity. But these figurative winged sandals change the rules of combat even as they revolutionise transport. Like Prometheus giving fire to humankind, the post-human philosopher-kings of Olympus can never be certain to what uses their gifts will be put. Recurring characters are similarly representative of philosophical issues. The rogue bioroid Artemis Alpeia [SLIDE 13], whose pursuit is a major plot element of The Scales of Prometheus, was genetically coded by Gaia to introduce an element of wild nature into bioroid society, and thus preserve its stability from stagnation. This tendency to introduce characters as allegorical placeholders is by no means unique to Appleseed’s storytelling toolkit: other manga do it too, but the Greek mythological framework makes Shirow’s application of the trope uniquely resonant. Sometimes these allusions are impressively recondite. Calling Artemis ‘Alpheia’ is one example: many lay readers will have heard of Artemis, but very few would know her cult name. There’s a small glitch in the orthography – Alpeia for Alpheia – which I think must result from the cult epithet having been transliterated into Japanese and then back into English, but the level of detail is quite impressive for what from a Western point of view is just some action-themed comic book. Similarly, the heads of Olympus’s FBI are 9 Arges, Brontes, and Steropes. Like Alpheia’s, their names get a little mangled by having jumped the language barrier twice – Arges becomes Arugess, Steropes becomes Strepos – but these are the three stubborn Cyclopes who, in Hesiod, forged Zeus’s thunderbolts. I hadn’t known that, and it’s an appropriate motif given the characters’ anti-terrorism role. Deunan’s combat partner, mentor, and lover is the cyborg, Briareos Hecatonchires [SLIDE 14]: again, a reference I had to look up. The Briareos of myth was one of the Hecatonchires, the hundred-handed giants who sided with Zeus against the old order of the Titans. The naming of Appleseed’s Briareos is thus thematically well fitted to his ongoing role in the plot: [SLIDE 15 he watches Deunan’s back as she straps into her battle armour to defend the new post-human order from aggressors rooted in the remnants of the old order. It’s also a name appropriate to his rebuilt identity as a cyborg, following serious trauma in which his human body was left unsalvageable. [SLIDE 16] It’s mentioned in passing that his patched and augmented brain-stem can operate numerous weapons and devices at once, making him ‘hundred-handed’ through prosthesis – he can just keep on plugging more figurative ‘hands’ in, and multi-task between them. 3. Pacific-Rim Classics Lite? Shirow’s use of these mythic motifs may be all the more imaginative because his sources don’t supply very full versions of the stories. The one clarification I’ve found is in the Appleseed Databook, later republished in a revised form as Appleseed ID. There, Shirow attests what I take to be a standard and basic Japanese-language handbook of Greek myths, although I regret that I’ve not yet been able to identify the book and track down a copy. [SLIDE 17] The details supplied are minimal, not even including the name of the author, but it sounds as if it’s non-scholarly and introductory in character. This would still make Appleseed’s use of classical content significantly better informed than the majority of receptions in our own popular culture, for instance in film and television – not that I’m suggesting we start awarding marks out of ten for accuracy, but it’s a point worth making. Instead of film and TV, the appropriate comparator for Appleseed’s style of classical reception is literary science fiction, which has, since its inception, engaged fluently and imaginatively with classical mythic motifs. In part this comes with the territory – tales of galactic exploration and struggle (so-called ‘space opera’) are part of the furniture of the genre, and all those stars and constellations are suggestively named after Greek gods and heroes. In part, too, classical name-dropping at the level of plot and title has served to assert the literary credentials of a genre which, like comics, was until recently written off ‘sight unseen’ by the critical mainstream as sub-literary trash, and which (again like comics) hasn’t yet been much engaged with, in a scholarly way, from the classicalreception point of view. Although there’s no way we can explore the topic today given the time constraints, science fiction’s use of Greek myth is often far from superficial, and Shirow’s clearly familiar with some classic works in the genre – the ‘Hope Plan’, a hidden long-term plan for Olympus’s development, nods towards the ‘Selden Plan’ of 10 Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, but goes further than its model in explicitly invoking classical inspiration. [SLIDE 18] All that being said, I don’t wish to create a deceptively rosy picture of Appleseed’s narrative dynamic. Its plot is sometimes complex, and big philosophical footballs are kicked around in a showy way, but these are features which other science-fiction manga share, and classical appropriations do not make it a profound work, any more than they necessarily do in Western comics (Wonder Woman, anyone?). Cynically one could say these Greek echoes are not much more than window-dressing, casting a thin gloss of ostensible High Culture over an adolescent predilection for big guns, power armour, fights, chases, and scary women in tight outfits. [SLIDE 19] I don’t hate any of those things, and Shirow does them astonishingly well, but I’ll concede that viewed strictly as a classical reception this is merely mildly clever, and perhaps in the end something of a letdown. It’s a fantastic set-up, but after the first few volumes Shirow seems to lose interest in working the classical content. (See Thompson’s perhaps overly snooty review, quoted on your handout as text 3.) 4. Words and pictures in translation As a phenomenon in translation and adaptation, however, this collision of manga with Classics is potentially more interesting. Mixed-media storytelling presents unique challenges for the adapter into other languages and cultures, on top of the issues that surround the translation of a purely written text. The cartooniness or ‘hypericonicity’ of comics art demands more interpretation than realistic representation, not less – a point I owe to Umberto Eco – and also has the potential to be much more culture-specific. We’ve already touched on how very different the visual narrative grammar of manga is from those of Western comics traditions, and how strange some of its visual shorthands can initially seem. For instance, Appleseed’s style of depicting rapid movement is much more intricate than conventional Western equivalents, and follows a different rhythm which makes it very hard to follow until you get your eye in. [SLIDE 20] But the point also applies at the level of the individual panel of art. How facial expressions in manga relate to particular emotions, or states of mind, can be hard for a non-aficionado to figure out, as can the use of a change of drawing style from one panel to the next (for instance, from detailed quasi-realism to cartooniness) to signal a shift in storytelling mood. Here, there’s a real sense in which the reader must be his or her own translator, and learn to read manga with (if the expression is pardonable) a Japanese eye. The translated dialogue and other textual effects may lend us a hand in this visual reading process, but they cannot stand in for it, because the images do not simply illustrate the text – they operate in dialogue with it. What is more, the ratio of image to text in manga is often much higher even than in American or European comics. As you can see from this same image [refer to current PowerPoint], whole pages or even episodes can go by with little or no written content beyond perhaps some sound effects. 11 One question I don’t feel remotely qualified to address is to what extent problems arise in translating comics out of a writing system whose symbols are more overtly pictorial than our own. Properly to address this question for Japanese manga would entail familiarity with not one but two, or (if one includes manga for children) three, systems of pictograms. On the one hand – and again I stress that I have all this at second-hand – we have kanji, of which more than five thousand are in use in Japan. Kanji are true pictograms: stylised graphic depictions of the things they refer to. On the other hand, we have two phonetic alphabets, one for adults and one for children, collectively called hiragana. Hiragana originated as a graphically streamlined subset of the kanji, but these simplified pictograms are used to indicate particular vocal sounds rather than things (Thompson 487-9). Just like any written text in Japanese, the dialogue and other textual content of manga routinely combines kanji and hiragana in the same sentence – cartoons that stand in for whole things, mixed in with cartoons that stand in for bits of pronunciation. This is potentially a large theoretical and practical issue, adding particular complication to the translation of Japanese comics in their capacity as mixed-media narratives. In comics, text and image interact in a way that simply isn’t true for either a written text or a purely graphical story. So what happens when the textual half of the story is itself already made of images, and might even be said (because of the mixture of kanji and hiragana) to constitute a mixed-media narrative in and of itself? Retreating in methodological terror to the nitty-gritty of known practice... manga authors have seen particular problems in how translators adapt their sound effects [SLIDE 21], which are more heavily used in manga than in Western comics. In the original they are very much part of the visual design of the comics panel, and thus of its iconographic meaning – and by a peculiar convention they are read from left to right, the opposite of the direction in which dialogue and action are read, an effect which of course it’s impossible to replicate in translation (see briefly Thompson 493; Petersen unpacks some of the issues.) Some mangaka have also been dissatisfied by the re-drawing of characters’ thoughts in American-style ‘thought balloons’, making them easier for Western comics fans to identify as thoughts, but also disrupting the original intention and ‘flow’ of the page. 5. Californimanga Translation of manga acquires an additional level of interest once we pull back from thinking of the English-language Appleseed as an American comic, and consider it as Californian. The State of California, home both to Studio Proteus and to Eclipse Comics, is self-consciously part of the Pacific Rim. Its economy and culture look outwards to those of Australia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Hong Kong, as well as to Japan. As a highly portable expression of literary and visual culture, comics, and ways of writing and reading them, circulate among these Pacific neighbours – often more freely 12 than their copyright holders would wish. Already in the 19th century, satirical cartoonists in Japanese magazines were taking influence from a resident Australian commercial artist, Frank Nankivell, who then moved on to Vancouver and San Francisco (see the article by Stewart). Bootlegs of Japanese manga are still huge in Indonesia, as for a time they were in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand and elsewhere. (Gravett 154; on their diffusion in the Philippines see Fondevilla.) Hollywood’s cartoons initially helped shape manga, to a debatable degree; in turn, manga inspired Taiwanese and, within China, especially Hong Kong manhua, and South Korean manhwa (on manga and manhua in China see Lee and Shaw, and briefly Gravett 154). This influence will have been accelerated by the fact that many kanji mean the same thing in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean – that is to say, they refer to the same objects in each culture, even if they correspond to entirely different words in each of the three languages, so Japanese manga are partially legible in these cultures already. Completing the circle, the stylistic innovations of Japanese manga have trickled upwards from the American small press ‘scene’, which has always been more international in outlook than the major publishers (see Rifas), to influence generations of superhero comics from the 1990s onwards. Fans sometimes refer the style of titles such as Spyboy and Gen-13 as ‘manga fusion’, and some comics authors look forward to a future in which manga hybridises with other traditions and becomes a truly global comics style (Gravett 157). However, adopting a neighbour’s graphic and narrative styles does not entail finding space for its perceived values. We might think that translators of manga for other kanjiusing cultures only have half the work to do, but their role as adapters is often harder. South Korea’s manhwa culture exists in a problematic relation of influence with what local practitioners see as the excessive sexual and violent content of their Japanese formal models. Hong Kong editions, too, are carefully censored to adjust the original narrative to Chinese cultural taboos. Lee and Shaw talk the reader through several examples which illustrate a particular local sensitivity to humour involving bodily functions. [The S. Korean government’s response to comics industry pressure was not to censor or block Japanese manga imports, but to promote the local manhwa aggressively in overseas markets (Gravett 154).] In California, meanwhile, the locally-based company TokyoPop [SLIDE 22] has emerged as one of the world’s biggest publishers of manga outside Japan, selling English-language versions of Korean manhwa, as well as ‘original English-language manga’ by American authors, on which I briefly touched earlier. The examples shown here include a teenage CSI spinoff – pretty young interns with big eyes. By developing a new market in comics which looked identical to Japanese manga but which reflected non-Japanese cultural values, TokyoPop made itself into a serious competitor to the longestablished commercial giant of manga in the West – Viz Media, also California-based but Japanese-owned. It’s a sign of how much things have changed that 70% of TokyoPop’s readers are girls aged eleven to 17 (Gravett 156). The company’s name is also indicative. Manga are now 13 packaged not as part of comics culture, with all the geek-loser associations that come with that identity; but as pop culture, to be skimmed and disposed of like Cosmo Girl. Or like manga back in Japan, if teenage girls were the only ones reading them there. 6. Conclusion Against this picture of diversification and multiple hybridity, Appleseed begins to look very old-fashioned, as befits its cultural moment at a very early stage in this commercial translation history. Big guns and mecha seem so 1980s now. Back then, with only a trickle of material coming through, a classicist with a comics hobby could hope to keep on top of receptions in translated manga. Today, although my impression is that there’s still very little of it happening, I wouldn’t know where to start. I leave it for you to decide whether Shirow’s Olympian cyberpunk is more than a historical curiosity – or perhaps a folly, given the grandeur of its ambitions in mythic allusion. Appleseed came out of a cultural moment in which – for no readily identifiable reason – Japan’s popular media suddenly went all Greek on them. In a recent paper, Dunstan Lowe has pointed out that the late 1980s, the period of Appleseed’s inception, is also when Japanese videogame developers decided Olympian mythology was the new big thing. A decade later, their very non-Western choices of theme and emphasis were being copied by numerous American game designers. The 2010 reboot of Clash of the Titans, a film pervasively inspired by videogames, makes clear that the Olympus of youthorientated popular media comes to us by way of Japan’s 1980s flirtation with Typhon, Hades, and Kronos – and here, a very different take on Briareos [SLIDE 23]. Appleseed thus helped begin a much larger story that isn’t just about comics, and it continues to cast light on that story as it unfolds, year by year. I cannot speak to what these classical echoes meant in Japan, in their original reception context. What might interest us instead is these adaptations as adaptations, which (among other things) effectively re-write the classical mythology of the West back into Western popular discourse, following its appropriation by non-Western narrative. This reverse transcultural reinscription around and across the Pacific – as Bilbo Baggins would have it, ‘there and back again’ – gives us back our myths, made new and strange once more. Thank you for listening. 14 Mecha in Olympus: Masamune Shirow’s Appleseed 1. “[V]ery probably in the medium term [manga influence in Italian comics] will be so peacefully grafted onto the brand new generations’ readers, that perhaps no one of the young future readers will have any memory of the complex stages in the absorption of manga in Italy, from the discovery phase to interiorization, from the reproduction [of manga clichés in so-called ‘spaghetti manga’] to the most recent leg, that of an autonomous, hybridized, glocalized [sic] creation. Thus, the hope is that historical-critical works on manga’s expansion in the West can circulate as long as possible. Even in ‘trifles’ like comics a bit of historical memory can only do good to everyone.” (Pellitteri 2006: 71) 2. “The pop cosmopolitan walks a thin line between dilettantism and connoisseurship, between orientalistic fantasies and a desire to honestly connect and understand an alien culture, between assertion of mastery and surrender to cultural difference.” (Jenkins 2006: 164) 3. “Unfinished sci-fi tale of a war-ravaged near future... Appleseed starts out as a fascinating sci-fi exegesis on planned societies, but gradually degenerates into combat porn: volume 4 is little more than a you-are-there gunplay reality show punctuated by obsessive footnotes. Shirow’s screentone-heavy artwork improves even as his storytelling deteriorates... but the squandered potential of the premise is depressing.” (Thompson 2007: 15) Further reading • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Bukatman, S. (2003), Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century (Durham NC). Dinter, M. (forthcoming 2011), ‘Francophone Romes: Antiquity in les bandes dessinées’, 183-94 in Kovacs and Marshall (eds.). Fondevilla, H. L. (2007), ‘Contemplating the identity of manga in the Philippines’, International Journal of Comic Art 9.2: 441-53. Gravett, P. (2004), Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics (London). Groensteen, T., tr. B. Beaty and N. Nyugen (2009), The System of Comics (Jackson MS). Jenkins, H. (2006), Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York and London). Kinsella, S. (2000), Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society (Honolulu). Kovacs, G. and Marshall, C. W. (eds.) (forthcoming 2011), Classics and Comics (New York). Lee, W.-H. and Shaw, Y. (2006), ‘A textual comparison of Japanese and Chinese editions of manga: translation as cultural hybridization’, International Journal of Comic Art 8.2: 34-55. Lowe, D. (2010), ‘“What do we need the gods for?”: Olympian mythology in the 21st century’, research paper delivered at ‘Release the Kraken!: A half-day conference on Clash of the Titans (2010), Leeds. McCloud, S. (1993), Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York). -- (2000), Reinventing Comics (New York). Nisbet, G. (2nd ed. 2008), Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture (Exeter). Pellitteri, M. (2006), ‘Manga in Italy: history of a powerful cultural hybridization’, International Journal of Comic Art 8.2: 56-76. Petersen, R. S. (2007), ‘The acoustics of manga: narrative erotics and the visual presence of sound’, International Journal of Comic Art 9.1: 578-90. 15 • • • • • • • • Pitcher, L. (2009), ‘Saying “Shazam!”: the magic of antiquity in superhero comics’, New Voices in Classical Reception Studies 4. Rifas, L. (2004), ‘Globalizing comic books from below: how manga came to America’, International Journal of Comic Art 6.2: 138-71. Schodt, F. L. (1983), Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics (Tokyo). -- (1996), Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga (Berkeley). Stewart, R. (2006), ‘An Australian cartoonist in 19th century Japan: Frank A. Nankivell and the beginnings of modern Japanese comic art’, International Journal of Comic Art 8.2: 77-97. Thompson, J. (2007), Manga: The Complete Guide (New York). Theisen, N. A. (forthcoming 2011), ‘Declassicizing the classical in Japanese comics’, 59-72 in Kovacs and Marshall (eds.). Wright, B. W. (2001), Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Johns Hopkins). The Wikipedia articles ‘Manga’, ‘Manga outside Japan’, and ‘Tokyopop’ are very good. 16