Matt Thorn shares another stunning example of pre-WWII manga:
The Adventures of Little Shô is a sort of Art Nouveau/Japanesque fantasy about a boy of indeterminate age who rescues and befriends a large talking squirrel (who apparently has no name other than “Squirrel”), with whom he has a stunning range of adventures. Each adventure is quite short, most running between 10 and 16 pages, and range from the mundane (a trip to Osaka) to the bizarre (one adventure has Shô flying an airplane, battling a dinosaur, being rescued by a mammoth, and dancing with fairies who look like flappers with butterfly wings). If these strips had been published in English, they would have seemed perfectly at home on the Sunday supplement of an American newspaper of the day, except for one striking characteristic. Mixed in with characters in modern dress, Kewpies, centaurs, pith helmets, steam locomotives, and Western fairies are characters in kimono and creatures from Japanese folklore and legend. Kabashima manages to pull off this melange in the most natural way, probably because a hodgepodge of Japanese and Western, traditional and modern, was simply everyday reality for Japanese in the Taisho Period (1912-1926) and early Showa Period (1926 – 1989).
October 14th, 2010 at 11:18 pm
Only want to say your article is awesome. The clearness in your post is simply impressive and i can take for granted you are an expert on this subject. Well with your permission allow me to grab your rss feed to keep up to date with succeeding post. Thanks a million and please keep up the a uthentic work.