Picture's worth a

So went off to very yummy vegan yum cha followed by a trip to the art gallery on the weekend with some buddies, as a belated birthday kind of get together and also just to enjoy the warm weather and do some things I like doing. The exhibition was interesting - Osamu Tezuka, maybe best known in the west for inventing Astro Boy, and also Kimba the White Lion, but what was really amazing about him I learnt as I trailed around in the semi dark with friends' small children struggling to see the images far above theri heads, was the sheer variety and volume of comics he produced, as well as the quality.

"Foreign visitors to Japan often find it difficult to understand why Japanese people like comics so much. For example, they often reportedly find it odd to see grown men and women engrossed in weekly comic magazines on the trains during commute hours. One explanation for the popularity of comics in Japan, however, is that Japan had Osamu Tezuka, whereas other nations did not. Without Dr. Tezuka, the post war explosion in comics in Japan would have been inconceivable." (Asahi newspaper, 10 February 1989, See the Art Gallery of NSW's website at left, for more info).

Apparently he produced some 700 titles of comic in his lifetime. 700!! That is just incredible. And lots of interesting themes and subjects tackled, redoing things like Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment in graphic novel format, the life of Beethoven, the life of the Buddha, and exploring all the very human stuff like power, bitterness, hope, sex, gender and identity, redemption and transformation. I loved seeing the actual cells he worked on, with their smooth and clean freehand lines and the remnants of a prephotoshop era where the stippled shading to fill large areas in a uniform coloured grey was created using a decal which he carefully cut out to fit the required shape and then pasted on to the image. Wow - so low fi, I just love that kind of manual, tactile, process driven art work.

It was also a greast introduction to manga for me, because my love affair with comics has been periodic through my life (over the last 5 years shyly started to reacquaint myself with this childhood sweetheart), but very anglo-centric. It's funny because as a kid I loved, loved loved my 'comic collection'. I always called it that although I suspect it was someone else's words that I was using, because I never had that collector's fervour - back catalogues, matching series, all the numbers in order. No, mine was a motley crew of disney characters, heckle and jeckle the crows, little lotta, even ritchie the ritch that strange kid with wide ankles and too high pulled up socks. I read them again and again and again. Packed them carefully up into my little carry case, and unpacked them again. I can still see images from the comics when I think about them - the strange bunch of fruit that Little Lotta had on her head and the yellow background on that cover; the strange button up clothes and shoes that Donald Duck's Uncle wore; the very plump plum looking noses on the Goofy-like characters, tales of kidnapping and empty swimming pools and swapping things with other things and general high jinx. I thought they were very funny at the time. I read them along side a vast array of 'serious books' and did not suffer from self doubt about these different interests being incompatible, or about these interests speaking of - or creating - a self which was inconsistent or unpalatable to the world.

Then I went through a comic drought, stopped being interested. Discovered the idea of zines in Uni but never really read or made any. Later, after I'd moved to Sydney I knew I hadn't quite kicked the habit but felt intimidated by my image of what a proper comic fan was like. You know, someone who can reel off all the authors side projects; someone who picks one or two things and knows them inside out; someone who doesn't get nervous or overwhelmed going into one of thoser cramped little comic shops; someone who skateboards. I wasn't one of those people. And where to start? And how to browse with all those lank haired young men staking out territory near the racks?

Well, somehow I got over that, one tentative little visit to random music and comic shop / visit to a zine fair / exploration of the artier book shop at a time, and have slowly and tenatively rebuilt my relationship with books that are mostly pictures. Given outlet to those feelings of fondness and curiosity that never really went away. Found again that delight in skipping through knowing that it will end too soon and you will need to go back and reread. Discovering the web comic was a revelation for me - handy, wry, accessible, and such variety. Of course, I do worry that it is juvenille, that any properly developed 31 year old should have more sophisticated tastes (like collecting antique china??? bonsai?? investing??), and in all seriousness do think that maybe this is some symptom of arrested development, maybe an acting out of a teenage phase of self-indulgence and self determination which didn't quite complete then. Or as Freud would probably say, an infantile regression of some kind related to sexual repression? Either way I think maybe I'm just an incurable pleasure seeker who is easily amused by pretty pictures and delighted by tight dialogue.