The Role of American Comic Strips in Creating Japanese Manga
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[Early American comics] themselves showed a wide range of diversity, detail, and creativity … For example, something like Thomas Aolysius’ Johnny Wise Gets the Double Cross would never be published in today’s papers (shown below). That said, there were fantasy strips, strips pulling from cubism and surrealist art, strips that experimented with panel length, perspective, and more.
With comics having such a significant status in the United States, and with the United States itself often being a birthplace of equally consequential cultural movements, it is no surprise that these comics were well received in other countries.
Japan’s own tradition of manga was also heavily influenced by American comics, something which has not been acknowledged until recently when Eike Exner wrote a book in 2021 arguing for the connection between Japanese and American comics, which seems to be the first book with such a perspective George McManus’ Bringing Up Father was, as a matter of fact, the most popular comic in Japan up until the end of World War II.
Julian Jefko for Anime Herald writes of “American Comic Strips: The First Manga.”
The first instance of a comic being referred to as “manga” in Japan was actually an American comic imported by Ippyo Imaizumi in 1891. It was an adaptation of John L. Hercules and His Pet, published in 1890 for the American magazine Judge. The comic is about a man lifting what appears to be a heavy ball; however, the last panel shows his dog lifting it with ease, exposing him as a fraud.
further reading: Comics and the Origins of Manga A Revisionist History by Eike Exner
further reading: Origins of the Sunday Comics by Peter Maresca
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