The Shared Origins of Modern Comics with Eike Exner

Presented by Eike Exner, a historian and translator of Japanese comics. His book Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History received the 2022 Will Eisner Comics Industry Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work. Exner’s book will be available for purchase in the Gallery Store and a book signing will follow the lecture!

The phrase ‘Asian comics’ is sometimes used in opposition to ‘Western comics.’ But are comics from different parts of the world fundamentally different from each other? Using ample visual evidence from Japan, China, and Korea, this lecture will show how in the 1920s comics swept the globe more or less simultaneously. The modern comic strip, in which characters are able to use speech balloons to converse across scenes consisting of multiple, sequential images, had appeared in the United States around 1900 in close connection with new audiovisual technologies such as motion pictures and sound recording. Alongside Hollywood movies, Columbia records, and other consumer products such as Quaker Oats, Kodak cameras, and Johnny Walker whiskey, comics then spread to East Asian metropolises like Tokyo, Shanghai, and Seoul, where the form was enthusiastically received and adopted by local artists.