COC Week: Mizuno Hideko, Mother of Manga

[leahandillyana]

While Tezuka Osamu is rightly called the father of manga, being the developer of the medium as well as most genres and popular tropes, Mizuno Hideko is the person who developed manga as a medium of storytelling – where Tezuka and contemporaries initially tried to mimic Western comics of the age, with each chapter being self-contained and possible to be read out of order, Mizuno’s chapters were chapters of a book, with the whole story being revealed only after having read all of them.

Furthermore, Mizuno revolutionized what was acceptable to be included in shoujo (manga for girls). Up until the 70s, manga was a world of men, with beginning authors writing stories for girls before advancing to stories for boys (shounen). The stories they wrote didn’t include romance, as the topic was deemed inappropriate for teen girls. The portrayal of the heroines was also constrained – they had to be good, proper girls, submissively accepting abuse thrown at them by the people around them.

And then in mid-50s enter Mizuno. Her heroines were not proper, they were tomboys with strong personalities who liked to run, laugh, eat and have fun. Even when she wrote about girly girls, the characters were remarkably more independent than in the stories by male contemporaries. What’s more, she frequently included romance in her stories, by the end of 60s leading to normalization of romance as standard theme of shoujo manga. Her two most enduring stories are Honey Honey (1966-7), a historical adventure where a poor girl’s cat swallows a precious gem making the duo a target of multiple people and kicking of a chase around the world, and especially Fire! (1969-71), where a hedonistic teen delinquent starts a rock band in Detroit.

The content of the latter manga was too controversial for any manga magazine, and instead it ran in fashion magazine Seventeen. It was extremely popular among girls and women alike, and inspired a generation of women to enter the career of professional mangaka, out of whom the most prominent names are Riyoko Ikeda, Ryoko Yamagishi, Keiko Takemiya and Hagio Moto, among others. Gorgeous and dramatic Rose of Versailles, tragic story of trauma and coping with abuse The Poem of Wind and Trees and intellectually complex stories like Marginal Planet all can be eventually traced to this manga – basically a morality tale, but damn isn’t Aaron alluring in his bad boyhood. I'd be glad to write more about those authors if the theme allows.

Comments

[blueprintstyles]

This was a great post, more people should know this.

[deh_tommy]

Thanks for introducing me to this author. Her and her work sound really interesting!

[icon_uk]

Please feel free to share as much as you wish, theme week or not.

This sort of post is fascinating, and eye opening as I'd never heard of Mizuno Hideko before.