context: comics > why so successful?

Highest artistic accomplishments

This is another simple one, but I think it's important. For much of Japan's history there have been three artforms valued above all other: calligraphy, poetry and painting. To be a cultivated man of the highest kind, you would do all three at a high level - and not separately, but all at once. Write a poem, inscribe it with beautiful calligraphy and illustrate it with a painting. This was particularly prevalent in Zen art, but by no means starting with or restricted to that.

I don't suppose I have to labour the links to writing a comic script, drawing the art to tell the story, and lettering it, so I will leave it there, but this is another reason, lacking in most of the world, that the Japanese might find it easier to take comics seriously as art.

backwards: Narrative art

forwards: Buddhist/Zen art