You've arrived in GIGA TOWN!
The third MSX: Mangasplaining Extra book is out this week, GIGA TOWN: A Guide to Manga Iconography.
Good news, everyone! The third book from MSX: Mangasplaining Extra is here! We couldn’t have done it without your support as readers here, so thank you! Now please let us tell you a little bit about Giga Town: A Guide to Manga Iconography!
“Giga Town is the Rosetta Stone of Manga iconography; a delightful gift to comic scholars everywhere!”
- Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics, Making Comics
Giga Town: A Guide to Manga Iconography is a 132 page manga expertly created by Fumiyo Kouno that mangasplains manga, specifically “manpu” or the iconographic symbols that work their way into manga to communicate additional thoughts and ideas in the work. It features the animal characters from the mid-12th-century Japanese picture scroll (emakimono) “Choju-jinbutsu-giga” to explain the visual iconography of manga. A lightbulb over your head, angry veins popping, a spiral of confusion, all of these and 100+ more manpu are explained inside!
What’s inside Giga Town:
The table of contents features a chart listing all of the different symbols contained within (this is just one of three pages!)
Individual pages include a 4 panel comic featuring the choju-giga characters in gently funny situations, using that page’s featured manpu. A copy of the manpu and a description accompanies the comic.
Some pages have additional cultural information that illuminates the symbols and text, too!
This volume also includes a short omake autobiographical comic by Fumiyo Kouno-sensei including her thoughts on manga, making manga, and more!
Fumiyo Kouno is a favourite creator of the Mangasplaining team, as she is the creator of the powerful Hiroshima memoir Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms (Last Gasp), and the longer WWII story In This Corner of the World (Seven Seas Entertainment). She’s a legend, and we’re so excited and grateful to be co-publishing her work in English with our partners at UDON Entertainment and Manga Classics.
About the Chojo-jinbutsu-giga
The Choju-jinbutsu-giga is a National Treasure from Japan that’s often cited as one of the “roots” of manga. Manga artist Fumiyo Kouno takes these frolicking frogs, bunnies, and other animals from the Choju-giga through gently humorous situations manga to demonstrate the usage of “manpu” or visual symbols in manga that express actions, emotions and more.
For this edition of Giga Town, we’ve commissioned an original introduction by Japanese cultural commentator and author Matt Alt about the Choju-jinbutsu-giga and comics culture, to provide additional cultural context to this work:
Scrolls sound like ancient history, but they’re actually a form of what we now call interactive entertainment -- they had to be physically unrolled to reveal the story, after all! And despite its age, the first of the Choju Giga scrolls feels particularly timeless. As the story begins, anthropomorphic rabbits and monkeys ford a river. Some swim; another prefers to ride a deer. One bunny even does a backflip into the stream. Across the waters, frogs and rabbits compete in archery competitions while foxes judge the results. Then the assembled prepare a sumptuous picnic meal. Afterwards, rabbits and frogs wrestle for fun. Finally a monkey dressed in monk’s robes offers prayers of thanks to a frog cos-playing as Buddha. It’s an eight hundred year old fantasy, yet the sequence of events wouldn’t feel out of place in a modern-day comic or cartoon.
Matt Alt, from the introduction to Giga Town
The team that brought it together
MSX’s involvement in Giga Town started when Deb Aoki discovered this series as part of the British Museum’s awesome MANGA exhibit and book, and wondered “Why hasn’t anyone translated this into English?” The answer is depressingly simple: It’s just a very different type of manga to what the bestsellers are these days, and publishers want to bet on a sure thing.
That doesn’t really stop us though, as we realize that important books like this, or Okinawa by Susumu Higa, or Search and Destroy by Atsushi Kaneko, have something important to say, and its exactly their differences from the mainstream of successful manga in North America that could make them a surefire success. Luckily in the case of Giga Town, Deb and Christopher made an impassioned plea to UDON Entertainment, and chief Erik Ko agreed with us, and was able to license the project for print (with the MSX team handling production duties).
Editor Andrew Woodrow-Butcher stepped in and worked with translator Ko Ransom to research, translate, and localize a somewhat difficult and more unique script than usual, owing to its layers of nonfiction, fiction, and instructional text. Andworld Lettering was brought in to letter a somewhat complicated series of pages, and UDON’s Marshal Dillon worked with Christopher to redesign the book cover for a cleaner shelf presence closer to the prevailing standard in North America (one or two characters max, large on the cover, if possible staring at the reader). Matt Alt agreed to write a great introduction, Scott McCloud gave us an amazing pull-quote, and the good folks at UDON turned it into a book and shipped it all over the world, where it has begun arriving in readers’ hands!
Giga Town is Available Everywhere, now!
As of today, September 4th, Giga Town is now available in better book stores, online book shops, and anywhere you get cool books! Here are all the details, and links to a bunch of different places where you can find it.
Giga Town: A Guide to Manga Iconography
By Fumiyo Kouno
$12.99, 132 Pages, B&W, 6x8
ISBN: 978-1772943085
Diamond: JUL242212
Buy it:
UDON Store | Amazon.com | Barnes and Noble | The Beguiling (Toronto)
Or Find a Comic Shop Near You
We’re also really hoping Giga Town finds its way into school and public libraries and reference collections, but that might take a little longer. But support your local library!
Oh, and we don’t have digital rights for this title, which is why it is not here on the MSX newsletter, and why there is no ebook edition.
Hoo-ray for Giga Town!
So that’s Giga Town! We’re so happy to bring it to all of you so long after announcing it, and we hope you love this edition as much as we enjoyed putting it all together.
Our immense thanks to Kouno-sensei and the folks at Asahi Publishing for working with us, to the whole team at UDON for turning out a gorgeous book (it feels amazing in the hand due to the matte cover treatments), the Mangasplaining team for their support, and to you the readers for your support. More to say at a future date (maybe we can even get Andrew and Ko to write a little something about the process of putting it together).
We’d love to hear what you think! Comment below or drop us an email at mangasplaining@gmail.com.
All the best,
Christopher Woodrow-Butcher, on behalf of the MSX and UDON teams.
I need this! Also, I just started Search and Destroy Vol. 1 and I'm diggin' it.