Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan (2008)

Continuing a bout of re-reading. Jiro Kuwata was already a well-known figure in Japan when he hired on to adapt America's Batman for a manga audience. In an interview in this book, he says he pretty much read and then discarded with much of Bob Kane's stories, trying to craft something with the domestic readership in mind.

Some four decades later, the work would be re-discovered by Chip Kidd (in a circuitous manner that's a good story unto its own).

The book is a lot of fun, especially because it provides a kind of Rosetta Stone moment for American manga readers. Not exactly the direct translation tool provided by the actual Rosetta Stone, but there's a lesson to be had here in seeing how Japanese creators "see" American comics, giving how long we in America have been gaining a perspective on Japanese comics.

Reviews: Cory Doctorow, NPR, Publisher's WeeklyArticles: "Bat-Manga Ignites Online War Of Words Between Fans And Author" (io9)

http://lampbane.livejournal.com/596256.html

"I've praised the damn thing before based on its graphic design, but how does the thing actually read?

Not very well, I'm afraid. The book collects a forgotten manga series from the 1960's that was not well-preserved, so that presents the first problem: very few of the stories in the collection are actually complete. You can't fault Kidd and company for that, but it does make the book more of an artistic piece than a narrative piece. [...]

Judging the actual stories, they're not bad. There's a few good tales in there (I think I enjoyed the Weather Wizard one, though incomplete) but also a few clunkers. It's funny to note that in the interview with Jiro Kuwata, he mentions how unrealistic some of the American stories are and how the Japanese prefer realism. This is a comic where Batman has a likeness of himself carved into the side of Mt. Gotham, for god's sake.

The art is decent for its time, and the reproductions of each page are photographed well enough that the lines are crisp and clear. The pages sometimes had to be shot from bound volumes, but despite that setback each page looks great. They chose to keep the textures of the paper and the bleed-through, which increases the feel of the book as an art piece rather than reading material." ( )