Manga has given
the opportunity for more violent scenes when it comes to illustrating the story
compared to comics such as Spiderman and Batman. With Manga there seems to be
no real limit to what you can do when it comes to how graphic the violence is,
all the way to graphic torture scenes and also pornography drawn in the book.
An example of this is Devilman, which was written and drawn by Go Nagai, which
ran from 11th June 1972 to 24th June 1973 in Shonen
Magazine. Below is a page from the series, which shows the level of violence
and nudity that can be seen.
Another example
is Hellsing, which is a series about an organisation called Hellsing who defend
England against supernatural undead with the help of a Vampire. They end up
having to stop a Nazi group called Millennium from creating an army of the
undead. Below is a spread from the series, which shows the violent scenes that
can be seen.
These two
examples of manga show the use of off the limit subjects, ultra violence and
pornography. Because of this some people tend to stay away from Manga books and
not even try reading them. But, Manga has a wide target audience ranging from
children to adults and this is because there are a wide range of different
styles and story subjects. So for younger people there are less graphic and less
off the wall subjects with toned down violence, compared to an older audience the
more these aspects are increased. This shows that not all manga is violent and erotic
and that a lot is light hearted and easy going like western comic books.
Some people say
that the origins of this Japanese style of drawing come from Hokusai Katsushika
because it is the term he used to call a collection of his less serious work.
When in actual fact there are drawings found before him in a similar style, but
there is dispute whether or not they are drawn in a style that resembles that
of manga. However what we do know is that the images were produced using
woodblock technology.
Above are two
examples of early manga produced from using the woodblock technique. In the
first one we can see that even a few hundred years ago there was still a
section of prints used to make pornography. Why this is acceptable in their
culture and still is today I do not know, but it appears to be deep rooted
rather than a modern phenomenon. The second is a more recent piece from late
1800s to the early 1900s and you can see that it more closely resembles the
style of what is being produced and sold worldwide today.
