Jason Thompson's House of 1000 Manga: Ippongi Bang

The over-the-top abandon of BANG's artwork may be due to the fact that she worked mostly in the small press rather than in mainstream magazines with their emphasis on speed and clarity. But it also expresses the rough-and-tough feel of her manga, and the way she harkens back to—or, to be more accurate, geekily indulges—the spirit of classic '70s manga. BANG is a huge fan of oldschool manga superstars such as Black Jack later appeared as the main character in BANG's ¡Doctor!, as the only real surgeon left in a RPG fantasy world where everyone has grown dependent on magic to heal their wounds. (I sometimes wonder whether all these references were lost on early '90s American readers, and whether these comics would be funnier today, now that more '70s manga has been published in English. But on the other hand, the '70s were almost 20 years closer then than now, and surely some American fans knew of Black Jack and Gō Nagai from fansubs.)

Basically, BANG's work combines the still-current formula of romance between mismatched aliens/werewolves/shapeshifters/geeks with tributes to the "fiery burning spirit" of oldschool macho manga. In Ippongi Bang's Canvas Diary, an autobiographical one-shot, we see BANG working in the offices of Studio Do-Do, where she and her fellow artists fight over the toilet and geek out about superheroes and science fiction, and where BANG proclaims herself the best of the bunch: "I'm the head keeper of this zoo, the big boss, BANG Ippongi!" Although BANG isn't the only female member of Studio Do-Do, you get the impression that otaku culture of the time was very much a "man's world" and BANG was one of the guys. (Certainly her work, unlike that of her studiomate Mio Odagi, shows almost zero shojo manga influence.) But BANG's work is much more about class, and the special "class" of geekdom, than it is about the superficial concerns of gender. BANG's closest kin among American artists may be Phil Foglio, who also has absolute geek cred, a liberal attitude towards sexuality, and a love of roughneck men and wild-haired, cleavage-baring bad girls. The wildness is the key; BANG's heroes are not the middle-class, "I just want to be a normal high school student" protagonists of the vast majority of manga from the '80s onward. Instead, they are guitar-playing teenage street toughs, bancho punks and bad kids who live in cheap apartments. They may look cute, but they are bad dudes and loners (although they usually find true love, or at least die in a romantic way). As the hero of "Life by Formula," a motorcycle-riding dropout who has just met his future girlfriend, puts it:

"We're forced to go to school, get educated, find a job, get married and have kids, so they can do the exact same thing... it's a formula we can't ever change! Anyone who can't do what everyone else does, or who doesn't want to, has no place in our society! People like us!"

BANG's world is a punk world of romantic rebels, a world in which otakudom is rebellion (as opposed to, say, the hikikomori world in which otakudom is mere withdrawal from reality). Likewise, the way BANG was published in America, in the small press, represents an alternative lifestyle from the idea that manga must be a top-down culture sponsored by giant megapublishers. Her story is an exception to what manga translator/blogger Gottsu-Iiyan recently wrote about the insularity of the manga market and of manga artists. "They are faceless largely by choice," writes Gottsu-Iiyan (http://www.gottsu-iiyan.ca/gib/index.php/2010/05/19/it-s-just-not-about-you). "Making their presence known outside Japan and information accessible to foreigners beyond buyers in the industry is not something most Japanese companies in any industry pay much attention to... The sad truth is that few creators or content publishers care what happens to their work once it leaves Japan's borders, which is one reason you never hear complains about foreign censorship out of Japan." Of course, even BANG was writing first and foremost for a Japanese audience; none of her works were actually created specifically for an international audience or for American fans. (If they were, would they still be "manga"?) But she obviously cared about her fans abroad, and the small press of the '90s gave her the opportunity to interact with them.

But no form of media is immune to economic downturns, and in 1995 and 1996, the American comics industry went into a sharp decline. One trigger was the burst of the comics-collecting bubble of the early 1990s, in which fans threw away money on holographic variant covers and bought 10 or more copies of overhyped books such as Spawn #1 and the "Death of Superman" one-shot. Another trigger was the collapse of most of the comic distributors, leaving only one company, Diamond Comics Distributors, which even today handles almost all comics sold to comics and hobby shops. On the other hand, Diamond *doesn't* have broad distribution in non-comics bookstores, and the 2002-2007 manga boom, being ed by chain bookstores like Borders and Waldenbooks, largely took place over Diamond's head. But in 1996, few manga companies had any significant bookstore distribution. Antarctic Press ceased publishing manga, and its manga-loving employees left the company, founding two new small-press publishers: Radio Comix, which specialized in furry comics and manga, and Studio Ironcat/Sexy Fruit, which specialized in everything else.

BANG's new work, such as Virtual BANG, ¡Doctor! and ADV Manga looked better.) The work was flopped left-to-right and the sound effects were translated, like every other manga at the time, but the crisp B&W printing of the Antarctic comics was replaced by gray, blurry, moire-patterned pages, probably due to cutting costs by scanning directly from the Japanese tankobon rather than using film or original art. (You can get somewhat better results by scanning today, because scanning and Photoshop technology is better, and because manga aren't blown up to 150% of their original size to be printed in the American floppy comic format.) Ironcat's translations were also, uh, budget, although Antarctic's hadn't been the best either.

Nonetheless, BANG continued to appear at conventions as her cheerful self, cosplaying as Pikachu and chilling with other Ironcat artists like Shimpei Itoh (Kuni Kimura was accused of embezzlement by his coworkers. Kimura fled to Japan, never to be heard from in American fandom again. The exact story of what happened to Kimura, BANG and Studio Ironcat is muddled by conflicting s, but it has the signs of a sadly familiar story of small press fans-turned-pro: running a business together isn't the best way to stay friends. In any case, Kimura had been Ironcat's link to BANG, and with the personal connection gone, the translation of BANG manga ended.

BANG's manga career also dwindled in Japan, with little new professionally published work from her in the last 10 years. She has two websites, one personal (http://homepage2.nifty.com/~BANG/) and one hosted on Gainax's homepage (http://www.gainax.co.jp/hills/BANG/index-e.html), although neither have been updated in ages. However, in 2008 she released a new book, Tatakae Disappearance Diary), who's also grounded in a cartoony early '80s style but known for his revealing autobiographical stories.

Although her early work is mostly out of print in Japan, a surprising amount of old BANG back issues are still available in English on comic sites. I wanted to publish some of BANG's art in Manga: The Complete Guide, but sadly I wasn't able to due to rights issues. Writing about her today, at a time when the manga industry is suffering, has made me wonder if an approach like BANG's and Antarctic's isn't a more sustainable way to publish manga in English in the long run. Artists promoting themselves, taking an interest in their English release, working closely with the publisher if they have a publisher of all—it's an appealing idea, and makes me wonder, why aren't more Americans reading work straight from the mangaka? One question is whether the internet promotes such cross-cultural interaction (by removing geographic barriers) or actually makes it more difficult (by eliminating the very idea of a 'mainstream' to 'break into'; by drowning the reader in an ocean of unmoderated, unedited webcomics and web animations, making it harder for any one thing to stand out). Certainly, BANG's work reminds us that manga is about individual artists, not publishers or magazines. And even if it's silly, geeky stuff, it can still be good.

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Jason Thompson is the author of Manga: The Complete Guide and King of RPGs.
Banner designed by Lanny Liu.