Gekiga: Alternative Manga from Japan

Interesting exhibition at the Cartoon Museum looking at gekiga, an alternative manga from Japan.

I had no idea what this was when I went to it, but you know me, I’ll go and see anything. I found the social side of this fascinating. In the post war period in Japan there was a demand for all sorts of entertainment but manga cartoons were seen as juvenile so gekiga grew up as a more adult form created by the children of the war years. Originally people couldn’t afford to buy the books so they were rented.

I preferred the early sparser images many of which were very similar to the earlier Japanese print style.  I liked “The Story of the West” with a smoking cowboy. I found some of the later images a bit confused and fussy.

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