context: comics > why so successful?

Narrative art

First, it's worth visiting my notes on narrative in painting, as they are extremely pertinent to comics - they cover multiple images against the same background, the combination of images and text, often divided into chronologically distinct unitary pairs of one image and one block of text, and so on. It's also worth a glance at the Choju Giga scrolls, since they may mark the world's first funny animal cartoon strip, around 900 years ago - the artist's name, Toba, lent itself to the term toba-e, used for caricature art ever since. Many, probably most, narrative artworks in those days were adaptations of written works, with the Tale of Genji inevitably the most popular. Note also on the page linked there mention of a certain formalized way of depicting people simply, and a concern for carrying great weight in depiction of gesture. By the late 14th Century, we start to see narrative handscrolls where, instead of alternating blocks of text and image, the words spoken are written on the image next to the speaker - no word balloons at this point, but it's another step towards comic books.

There are later narrative forms too, working in different ways - the sets of images of famous places that became the most popular form of printmaking in Edo in the 19th Century surely amount to travelogues, for instance. (Most earlier landscape handscrolls, which also had a narrative element, generally showing seasonal changes, were of entirely fictitious scenes.)

But it isn't just about this extraordinary, almost dominant strand of Japanese painting that started over 1300 years ago. It's also worth noting two of the four most important styles of Japanese garden design. One is the 'famous scenes' garden, where the garden is designed to be enjoyed in a specified order, as a series of discrete scenes representing (either by symbol or resemblance) famous places - another way of consuming the travelogue without the travel. Even more central to the Japanese artistic psyche may be the Zen tea garden, where a path controls progress and pace, with various significant way stations and mandatory actions along the way, a garden as a forced performance, designed by the tea master to impose a psychological state on his visitors.

I think this is the single most important reason why comics are so enormous in Japan: a culture where narrative has had such a huge and honoured place in much of its greatest visual art, a narrative in space and time, in words and pictures and even physical objects - how could they not be far more receptive to the comics medium than other peoples?

backwards: Calligraphic predisposition

forwards: Highest artistic accomplishments