Cartoons for grown-ups
Hey, kids! Decades before Miyazaki and Spiegelman, Osamu Tezuka and R. Crumb brought complexity and candor to the comics.
Jonathon Keats
In early 20th-century America, a comic book superhero could have a respectable career delivering justice in a cape and tights. A cartoon princess could expect to live happily ever after in a magic kingdom. The world of comics and cartoons, though sometimes enjoyed by adults,
wallowed in the innocence of childhood.
Today things couldn’t be more different. While Superman still presides in Metropolis, and Disney still profits on the good fortune of Sleeping Beauty, a category of adult fiction known as the graphic novel has become a more than $300 million industry in the United States, and an all-ages animated movie called Spirited Away remains the highest-grossing film of all time in Japan. Directed by Hayao Miyazaki, Spirited Away also won the Japanese version of an Oscar for best film in 2002, while a decade earlier Art Spiegelman was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Maus, a graphic memoir of his father’s experience in Auschwitz in which the Germans are depicted as cats and the Jews as mice.
More complicated times called for more sophisticated cartoons: any certainties about good and evil were wiped out by the horrors of World War II, Hitler, and Hiroshima, and after the war the beat and hippie countercultures questioned every social convention. The first artists to give comics some much-needed relevance were Osamu Tezuka and Robert Crumb. Concurrent exhibitions of their work, at the Asian Art Museum and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, respectively, will provide an unprecedented, never-to-be-repeated opportunity to explore the Japanese-American co-invention of an essential contemporary art form.
Tezuka is commonly called the father of manga and anime—the names given to comic books and animations in Japan—though the practice of telling tales via pictures was already established when he began cartooning as a pastime while studying medicine. Initially his influences were unequivocally Western. His first commercial success, in 1947, was a manga version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, an adventure story that Tezuka framed and paced like a Hollywood movie. The first eight pages, depicting the protagonist traveling down to the ship that will take him treasure hunting, are a textbook study in montage and narrative suspense. The sheer virtuosity of Tezuka’s drawing, which seemed to pulse with activity, made New Treasure Island a 400,000-copy best seller and began a trend in Japan toward a more American vernacular.
The book’s success allowed Tezuka to begin cartooning full time, which demanded a whole new level of creativity, as Tezuka learned when a Japanese boys’ magazine, eager to cash in on his popularity, asked for an original comic book serial. At first he came up with only a title, Astro Boy Plays the Part of Ambassador. On the day before he had to turn in the first episode, he sketched out a character more powerful than Superman and more adorable than Mickey Mouse, whom he threw into a situation that would have daunted Talleyrand. After their own planet is destroyed, aliens identical to
earthlings except for the size of their ears attempt to take refuge on Earth, causing an altercation that can be resolved only by a being that belongs to neither race. Astro Boy, a nuclear-fueled robot created by Earth’s minister of science to replace his dead child, takes on that role and shows himself to be more humane than any human.
With his 100,000-horsepower strength and rocket-powered feet, Astro Boy easily outdistanced the conventional characters of New Treasure Island. Serialized in manga for 17 years beginning in 1951, Astro Boy became, in 1963, a 193-episode black-and-white television show: the first animated series produced in Japan. The same year, 104 episodes were translated and rebroadcast in the United States: the first mainstream American exposure to either anime or manga.
Over the years, Astro Boy’s allure has become mainly nostalgic. Manga and anime’s signature big-eyed cuteness originated with Astro Boy, who stands as the unaging icon of the days before Japanese comic books and animation became massive moneymaking industries. But this does not do the character justice. Improvising a peace between beings caught in reflexive hatred, Astro Boy compromised the dichotomy between good and bad characters that had always animated cartoons, from the bravado of Marvel to the sentimentality of Disney.
This generous vision played out as well in his other great manga and anime creations for children, such as Jungle Emperor—in which a human-raised cub must play environmental ambassador between animals and humankind—and made possible the morally nuanced adult genre known as gekiga. (Tezuka started drawing his first gekiga series, Phoenix, in 1954; he first published it in 1967 and still wasn’t finished at his death in 1989, perhaps appropriately since the story concerned the human quest for immortality.) In the estimated 150,000 pages he drew and the 55 animated films he created, Tezuka established that graphic art could, with graphic dynamism, tackle every facet of the human condition. It could even, as in the vaguely historical anime Cleopatra: Queen of Sex, be rated X.
Cleopatra’s X rating was, in fact, self-imposed by the anime’s American distributor in an attempt to capitalize on the success of the world’s first X-rated cartoon, Fritz the Cat, released in 1972. Though Robert Crumb had nothing to do with the film, Fritz was his earliest enduring creation, in his words “a sophisticated, up-to-the-minute young feline college student who lives in a modern ‘supercity’ of millions of animals...yes, not unlike people in their manners and morals.”
Fritz was born thousands of miles away from Astro Boy, geographically and culturally, in mid-1950s Philadelphia. Pressed to create comics by his domineering older brother, whose hopes of owning a cartoon empire would soon sink into suicidal depression, teenage Robert decided to draw Fred, the family cat. Given a frisky new name and a natty suit, Fritz swiftly developed the exaggerated qualities of a satirical figure, embodying
the hipster hypocrite whose moral compass is needled by his penis. A typical episode might begin with Fritz preaching free love and end with him locked in a bathroom with a whole harem of devoted femmes, all drawn with Crumb’s typical attentiveness to revealing female anatomy.
Crumb’s ensuing career as the cartoonist who put the x in underground comix is memorably captured in Terry Zwigoff’s 1994 documentary Crumb, and still more so in Crumb’s autobiographical comics chronicling his flight from burned-out Philadelphia to bohemian San Francisco in 1966. Once he got here, he almost
single-handedly convinced the hippie set that cartoons were groovy. How? By way of mockery, courtesy of Fritz the Cat and a menagerie of other sordid, cynical figures, including the long-bearded false prophet Mr. Natural. Reading Crumb, who essentially considered them scum, hippies could laugh half-knowingly at their prejudices and pretensions.
The only person he loathed more was himself, and especially after he slew Fritz with an ice pick in 1972, resenting the cat’s movie stardom, R. Crumb became his most important subject. He framed his own bespectacled face in panel after panel, often for pages at a time, telling readers about every humiliating thing that had ever happened to him. Or he illustrated those tales, depicting his sorry self chasing women built like Amazons or showing himself masturbating to his own cartoons. In his meticulously crosshatched drawings, Crumb underwent a caricaturist’s metamorphosis equivalent to Fred’s transformation into Fritz, though the results were considerably richer. By applying that cartoon sharpness to his own neuroses, particularly his politically incorrect sexual fantasies, Crumb discovered an autobiographical candor more penetrating than satire and more direct than memoir or portraiture. If Tezuka revealed that cartoons could be singularly universal, Crumb demonstrated they could be singularly personal.
Undeniable artistic accomplishments, these innovations provided a foundation for the more sophisticated work of Miyazaki, Spiegelman, and a host of others. In Japan, there’s Katsuhiro Otomo, for one, whose animated fables of a future in which humans are beholden to the malfunctioning machines they’ve made politicizes the seriousness that Tezuka brought to anime. In America, Chris Ware’s graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan chronicles the life of a man eternally reliving his wretched childhood in his imagination, giving the honesty Crumb brought to comics the psychological depth of fiction.
Tezuka and Crumb defined the terms of contemporary graphic engagement. Nevertheless, their pen-and-ink drawings, conceived for print and broadcast, can be challenging to carry off in a museum. And peering into glass cases at old issues of magazines, the other major element in both exhibitions, can be downright tedious. Tezuka worried about this, never exhibiting in his lifetime because he couldn’t find the time needed to make suitably scaled paintings. While Crumb has had several spectacular
shows at San Francisco’s Modernism gallery, he also has had misgivings about the context, in one cartoon drawing himself in a sagging beret muttering, “Broigul I ain’t.”
Nobody wants to stand for hours reading comics frame by frame under halogen lights. The cartoons need first to be savored in private. The R. Crumb Handbook provides an excellent selection. While much of Tezuka’s work in manga has been translated, there’s no anthology, though a volume of Phoenix will provide a fair introduction.
A little preparation counts for a lot. When viewed with a sense of these two cartoonists’ storytelling, the original drawings, as crisp as on the day they were made, reveal the radical imaginings underlying their flawless draftsmanship.
