Or, How shonen manga are like superhero comics

Guest commentary by Jason Thompson

Jason Thompson is a former editor at Viz Media and the first editor of Shonen Jump. His new book, Manga: The Complete Guide, was released this week by Del Rey Manga.

In both American and Japanese comics, there is one question that never gets old: “Do you think character X could beat character Y?” Despite the relative popularity of Japanese girls’ comics and increasingly fluid gender demographics, shonen manga is still the #1 demographic category, and within shonen manga the #1 genre is “battle manga.”

I love battle manga — as the former editor of the American Shonen Jump, how could I not? In the hearts of Japanese boys (and those who read stuff aimed at them), the fight between Goku and Vegeta, or the fight between Kenshiro and Raoh, cast a shadow as long as the Fantastic Four vs. Galactus, or Superman vs. Batman in The Dark Knight Returns. Of course battle manga draws comparison with superhero comics. Incredible powers — good vs. evil — fight scenes — basically aimed at children — umm, hello? There is a major difference, however. By the time the Direct Market developed in the late ’70s, superheroes had been the dominant species in American comics for so long, they evolved into new genres like finches isolated on an island. Science-fiction superheroes. Comedy superheroes. Occult superheroes. Battle manga, on the other hand, is a formula. It may involve sports (Eyeshield 21, Slam Dunk). Board games (Hikaru no Go). Cooking (Iron Wok Jan). If superheroes are ultimately a trapping of the story, battle manga dictates the very structure of that story. In some ways this is more flexible, in other ways more limiting.

This is not to say that a manga is a battle manga just because it has fights in it. “Monster of the week” manga like Ogre Slayer and Muhyo & Roji may involve heroes beating monsters in every episode, but the focus is on the monster, not the battle; the hero just shows up and provides closure. Manga like Rozen Maiden and Sailor Moon may be built around a string of fights, but the fight scenes are over so quickly and involve so little strategy and choreography that they are only marginally part of the genre. No, a real battle manga has to have LONG fights, such as the heroes’ fight with Freeza in Dragon Ball Z, which spans more than 400 pages. A real battle manga is not just about the characters and creatures, it’s about the competition itself. Battle manga have three main elements:

(1) The Hero Gets in Fights.

Scott McCloud rightly points out in Making Comics that manga have become more fantastical over the past 25 years. Compared to American comics, manga still dominates in the field of sports stories, high school tales, and realistic martial arts; but realistic stories are increasingly outnumbered by tales with science fiction/fantasy elements. (And there’s little separation between those two; “hard” science fiction is as out of fashion in Japan as it is in America.) In this way, American comics and Japanese comics have grown closer together, in a common realm of fantastic battles.

A common misperception of people who haven’t read much manga (or have read bad manga) is that manga is full of chaotic and splashy page layouts. In fact, shonen manga is designed first and foremost with clarity in mind. When asked how he came up with visual ways to express action in YuYu Hakusho, Yoshihiro Togashi replied “No matter what, I try to make it easy for the reader to understand what’s happening.” Speed lines and other action effects may be common, but the panels are composed for maximum clarity. Panel progressions are always clear. Objects rarely break out of the boxes. Manga has far less text than traditional American comics, but characters do comment on the action, and these comments are sometimes redundant. (Often the hero’s friends and sidekicks do this, which seems marginally more plausible than the hero himself explaining what he’s doing — although shouting the name of your technique as you perform it is a manga and anime tradition.) I think that, if they don’t mind reading right to left, a complete comics newbie would have a far easier time understanding an average manga battle than an average superhero battle. Of course, there are more flashy manga, such as the superhero-influenced Trigun.

Apart from visuals, the biggest difference between shonen battle manga and superhero comics is the ritualistic nature of the fighting. To put it simply, superheroes are descended from crime comics and battle manga are descended from sports. Superheroes are usually part detective, busting in on villains just as they are about to carry out some nefarious scheme, or being ambushed while they’re walking down the street. (”Spider-Man is attending a press event, when suddenly, he sees the Lizard and the Scorpion…”) In shonen manga, although there are some series where the fights come naturally from the story (such as One Piece and the marginal battle manga Inuyasha), the archetypal plot structure is the tournament. A tournament to save the earth (Dragon Ball Z). A tournament to conquer the earth (MÄR). A tournament to see who’s the best (Shaman King, Iron Wok Jan, Flame of Recca, YuYu Hakusho, Naruto, ad infinitum). The villains may cheat and exploit the technicalities, but neither villains nor heroes think to operate outside this essential structure. My friend Andrew Farago, director of the Cartoon Art Museum, comments that this makes Secret Wars the most manga-like of all classic American comics.

In a tournament it is ideal that everyone fights fairly and at full strength. In superhero comics, the fights are often won or lost by luck or environmental circumstances — Captain America flings his shield at a cliff and it causes an avalanche! A construction worker sees the Spider Slayer fighting Spider-Man, and blindsides Spider Slayer with his construction equipment! But with a few exceptions (such as the improbable coincidences in the superhero-esque JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure) manga heroes do not need chance or clever tricks. (Ideally, at least the writer needs some cleverness, though: for a bad example, take the scene in Samurai Deeper Kyo when the villain calculates the maximum speed at which a human can draw their sword and attack and Kyo draws and attacks even faster! Yawn.) By and large, manga heroes love a fair fight (even risking the fate of the world in order to give the bad guys a fighting chance, as in Dragon Ball Z) and overpower their opponents by guts and determination. When they do have a trump card, it is usually the inner strength provided by some strong emotion — “I won’t forgive you for this!” “I want to protect the ones I love!” “I just want to be friends!” Strategy is nice, but it’s secondary. The famous Ditko scene when Spider-Man remembers his family and friends and summons the power to lift himself out of the wreckage is one of the most manga-esque scenes of the Silver Age.

(2) The Hero Trains to Be Stronger.

There is one area where guts and determination vaguely intersects with real-world pragmatism, and that’s training. When shonen manga heroes are not fighting, they’re toughening themselves up: carrying heavy weights, doing odd jobs, dodging bees while tied to a tree, running from dinosaurs, running for hundreds of miles at a time, doing handstands on the back of a rickety chair, doing finger-stands on the edge of a knife, fighting blindfolded, using gravity machines to exercise under 100 times Earth’s gravity, and so on. Manga operates on the rule that “what does not kill you, makes you stronger.” The Japanese Work Ethic, though not as unconditionally unquestioned as it was in the ’80s, still blazes in shonen manga. On the contrary, while the American comics reader is aware that Batman is always lifting weights and the X-Men have the Danger Room, the writers generally gloss over this boring stuff. When training is a story element at all, it’s usually in a character’s background, such as when Daredevil trained under Stick. And Stick, after all, was inspired by Frank Miller’s love of Asian martial arts and ninja.

This is why shonen manga heroes win fights: they’ve earned it. According to an old story related in Frederik Schodt’s Dreamland Japan, the bestselling magazine Shonen Jump identifies its three core elements as yûjô, doryoku, shôri (”friendship, perseverance, victory”). Training is the perseverance. Shonen heroes are tough as nails, however teeny-weeny and chibi they might be. One of the most immediately obvious differences between shonen heroes and superheroes is the body types of the characters. From Superman and Li’l Abner onward, American comic heroes have always been tall and brawny (or in the case of the women, tall and busty), while shonen manga heroes are short, young, and no matter what their awesome powers, rarely have visible muscle mass. Of course, American comics have the occasional boyish heroes, like Robin or Impulse, but as Andrew Farago points out, they have a disturbing tendency to get killed. Popeye may look goofy, but he’s got biceps like hams. (To go to Europe for a second — Asterix is small, yes, but it can’t be a battle comic when the fights are always over in one blow.) Contrarily, if you are a big tough-looking guy in a manga, you probably won’t live through your first fight.

It wasn’t always this way; in the 1970s Ryoichi Ikegami (who was influenced by Neal Adams) drew the most realistically rendered macho-men ever seen in Japanese boys’ comics, and in the 1980s artists like Tetsuo Hara and Tsukasa Hojo specialized in big pecs and square jaws. But the cute heroes of Saint Seiya and Dragon Ball, which ran at the same time, bore far more progeny. This may be a difference in Japanese vs. American body image (after all, even seinen manga like Tetsuya Sarawatari’s Tough feature short heroes), but it may also reflect the different age groups the work is aimed at. Shonen manga are mostly read by 14-year-olds, the average age of the characters; American comics are mostly read by people in their twenties and older. To a little kid (or a scrawny, adult manga editor) the idea of being able to beat big tough guys with your little stick-figure arms is incredibly appealing. To an adult, it might be easier to imagine turning fat into muscles.

Perhaps it strains credulity to see a four-foot-tall kid throw around giant tough guys, but it might be more believable (if alarming to American parents — but hey, they can read their own darn manga!) to see a four-foot-tall kid endure incredible pain. Toughness, even more than strength, is the core trait of all manga heroes. Even an ordinary schlub, if he endures repeated blows and still stagger to his feet covered in blood, can earn the respect of his enemies. Whether due to the Comics Code or aspirations of realism, American comics were rarely willing to let their heroes endure such graphic violence; but the gore of shonen battle manga is more symbolic than literal. Manga’s blood is another culture’s sweat and tears, a sign of sincerity and dedication. Zatch Bell and One Piece regularly put their heroes through the wringer, but death is all but absent in these manga. “It’s important what impression people will take away after reading the manga. Even if peace is attained after a battle, if there are dead people, it doesn’t feel good,” says One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda. An obvious fantasy element makes the potential suspension of disbelief even greater, as does the more explicit gore of seinen (men’s) manga. The award for the ultimate “it was just a flesh wound” scene goes to volume 22 of Bastard!!, in which Dark Schneider and the angel Uriel explode one another’s brains with simultaneous punches to the head … and then regenerate and keep on fighting. The scene was consciously or unconsciously imitated in Hellsing volume 8, one of the few evenly matched fights in the series.

There is only one limit for the powers of a battle manga hero: the shape of the human body, which defines the hero’s identity. Even if you transform into a demon (like the heroes of Naruto and YuYu Hakusho) or one of your arms is a living weapon (like the hero of D. Gray-Man), you’re only so big and you only have so many limbs (unless you’re the thousand-armed, Buddhist-idol-like hero of Hiroyuki Takei’s Butsu Zone). Tentacle-like objects shooting out of your costume blocking bullets for you, as in Kurohime, feels a bit like cheating. Unless you can fly like the heroes of Dragon Ball Z, there is also the question of mobility: Kenshiro in Fist of the North Star is essentially invulnerable and invincible, but with his broad shoulders and stately aura, he’s so slow you wonder why the bad guys don’t just run away from him. Using the human body to its best advantage in fights, actually drawing bodies in motion rather than degenerating into scenes of a bunch of energy bolts and screentone effects and exploding objects, is one of the things that separates the good battle manga from the ugly.

The final reason for training, of course, is that it makes the characters more human and sympathetic. The standard manga hero is not someone who was born with superpowers, but a (seemingly) normal person who must train hard to unlock them. In the original one-shot version of Naruto, Naruto was an actual fox spirit who took the form of a human boy, but Masashi Kishimoto’s editors convinced him that readers would be better able to relate to a human kid who just had a little bit of fox spirit inside him. In a way this is conservative — must every shonen manga hero be a plucky-but-insecure kid with hidden potential? — but such is manga, where Man is the measure of all things. Particularly if “Man” is an amalgam of 14-year-old Japanese male manga readers.

(3) The Hero Gets Stronger, and Faces Successively Stronger Opponents.

This is the key rule, the biggest factor without which all else would be meaningless. Battle manga and superhero comics are both formulaic, but since battle manga have endings, they can follow a path of constant escalation. Over the course of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z, Goku goes from a bulletproof little kid to a hero more powerful than all the gods in the universe. Over the course of Ranma 1/2, Ranma is initially overpowered by Happosai, but trains and learns how to defeat him. Plot progression is expressed by a series of battles, but these battles are not defensive fights to maintain the status quo, as in American comics; rather, they follow the hero’s journey, from inexperience to victory, to victory, and so on to a transcendent ending, or more likely an overdue ending when the franchise gets old and the author can’t come up with new ideas any longer.

(Incidentally, this is where we must part ways with Lone Wolf and Cub, since the hero not only stays at about the same strength level throughout, but fights opponents of varying strengths, with the exception of the very last battle. Ruroni Kenshin, Samurai Deeper Kyo and Fist of the North Star, although the heroes also remain mostly static, may barely slip in under the wire since the opponents, at least, get progressively stronger.)

Like gaining levels in a RPG, the hero’s continually rising strength is the mark of time passing in shonen manga. But since the hero’s actual appearance rarely changes too much, except for some temporary powerup — you can’t mess with the icon — the artist must use different tricks to express their increasing power. In some cases this is achieved with raw numbers, like “Power Level” in Dragon Ball Z. It’s worth noting, however, that Akira Toriyama threw Power Level out the window when the numbers got over a million. Alternately, there’s any number of arbitrary, pulled-out-of-your-hat measurements for strength: “magic plates” in MxO, “sigil dates” in Shiki Tsukai, “ranks” in YuYu Hakusho. These are generally unnecessary since the real proof of strength is not being “stronger” but “stronger than you” — strength exists relative to other characters. Thus the enemies must get stronger and stronger so that the hero’s strength has meaning. Some of the most dramatic scenes are those when the hero actually loses to an opponent, but wins on a rematch. In One Piece volume 6, Roronoa Zolo, using three swords, is outfenced by tbe world’s greatest swordsman Dracule Mihawk, using only a four-inch knife. Mihawk challenges Zolo to seek him out and defeat him when he’s strong enough. Nearly 40 volumes later, the rematch still hasn’t come, but who doesn’t await it? There has to be a limit to this escalation eventually, but Eiichiro Oda has painted himself a sufficiently broad canvas that he has years and years of wiggle room.

This is not to say that Japanese fans do not enjoy obsessive-compulsive charts listing who is stronger than who. Data-collecting is a legitimate pastime both out-of-character and in-character (a la Sadaharu Inui in Prince of Tennis). Popular series often have official fan books with pie charts comparing the relative strengths and weaknesses of the characters, particularly the B-list characters, whose positions are more ambiguous than the hero. This is why most long-running battle manga have a large supporting cast: they not only increase the number of potential matchups (and take the power-escalation pressure off the artist), but since they’re not the hero, they don’t necessarily have to win. This leads us to a side rule: defeated opponents often become the hero’s friends. Even the seinen political manga Eagle: The Making of an Asian-American President follows this formula; the hero first defeats his Democratic challenger in the primaries, and then makes him his running mate in order to defeat the Republican opponent. From a story standpoint, this leads to heartwarming redemption (more common in Japanese comics than in the more black-and-white morality of American comics) and allows a familiar face to stick around to please the fans. A rival is more interesting than a sidekick, however, and just as redeemed baddies Yamcha and Tenshinhan fade into the background of Dragon Ball, Al Noah hardly gets a line of dialogue from the moment he accepts the vice-presidential nomination.

Fight, train, and fight again — this is the formula of shonen battle manga. The mark of a really great battle manga is not just filling this out with comedy and drama and original imagery, but creating tension within this formula — creating the cliffhanger illusion that the hero might actually lose. Or can they lose? The famous boxing manga Ashita no Jo ends with Jo defeated and seemingly dead; but that was in the tempestuous 1970s, and the creators might have wanted to go out on a sad note since their manga had basically been forced to end due to pressure from censors. The first story arc of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure has a tragic ending, and YuYu Hakusho goes out on a comically self-deflating note. I enjoy an element of tragedy, and I get bored with series where the heroes are too confident and win too easily (Flame of Recca, Fist of the North Star). On the other hand, the rare occasions when the hero loses and must reassess himself are always memorable. Perhaps one of the most satisfying answers to the question “Who can beat the hero?” is “himself.” In Yu-Gi-Oh!, Yugi’s first real loss (never mind the timeout with Pegasus) comes when he voluntarily throws a match, knowing that his opponent Kaiba will commit suicide if he loses the fight. Yami Yugi is actually prepared to let Kaiba die, and his other self has to intervene to throw the fight, an unexpected moment — morality versus invincibility — which is probably the best scene in the series. In Bastard!! at the climax of a fight with his ex-girlfriend in which only one of them can survive, the protagonist rips out his own heart to save her. (Luckily, in Bastard!!, death is almost always temporary.)

Despite their generally formulaic nature and heavy editorial interference, manga are creator-owned, and Japanese comic characters are inseparable from their creators. “Shared universes” and crossovers are almost nonexistent, with the exception of in-jokes like CLAMP’s xxxHOLiC and Tsubasa. When I was at Viz, I asked Shueisha and DC about the possibility of doing a Dragon Ball Z/Superman crossover, and Shueisha’s response was “No one but Akira Toriyama can draw Dragon Ball.” (This may have been simply Shueisha’s insularity speaking, because Eiichiro Oda and Akira Toriyama did collaborate on a one-shot, Cross Epoch.) A more real reason not to have crossovers between different shonen manga, however, is that most shonen manga have essentially the same story. American superheroes generally fulfill different roles within their universe (within a number of basic types: the scientist, the vigilante, the tank, the speedster, etc.); Power Man and Iron Fist fight the C-level villains and the X-Men fight Magneto. But within a shonen manga, the main character is (almost) always the Main Character, the Young Boy Learning How to Be Stronger and Grow Up. If two of these omnipotent heroes appeared in the same story, they would either be redundant or one or both would have to fall into a different role — unthinkable! Ultimately, the world of shonen manga is not relativistic.

As someone who had read relatively few superhero comics before he discovered manga in college, shonen battle manga — with beginnings and endings and lots of bloodshed and drama — are the Joseph Campbell mythology for my inner 14-year-old. I feel it’s important to mention, firstly, that I’ve been speaking of broad stereotypes in this article, and secondly, that battle manga are not all about fights: they are about the passion and melodrama which surround the fights and are expressed through them. They are about bold proclamations and bombastic speeches and crying and laughing and hitting people. Even manga which have a certain amount of sophistication and irony (such as JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and Shaman King) embrace these emotional elements much more than American comics, and when these elements are earned, they’re powerful.

If battle manga don’t engage the reader intellectually as much as the best of American superhero comics (again, Shaman King is perhaps an exception), this is because there is already seinen and josei manga for creators who want to do something more serious. In America, on the other hand, there is a long tradition of creators testing the limits of the one genre — superheroes — which can ensure a steady paycheck and reach more than a few thousand readers. But there’s nothing wrong with drawing comics explicitly for younger readers, or even for enjoying them as an adult. The many formulaic shonen manga are outweighed by the many which experiment with the genre, which exceed expectations, and which show the cartooning skill and individuality which only a creator-owned comic can possess. And I’ll admit it: I just love a good fight.

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