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a14 people & arts
Friday 11 March 2022
Made-in-Japan manga goes global with Webtoon, Deadpool
By YURI KAGEYAMA nese “Deadpool: Samurai”
Associated Press was the best-selling Marvel
TOKYO (AP) — Deadpool, comic last year, surpassing
meet All Might. more than 1 million views
Perhaps nothing highlights online. It marks the first
how the world of manga, partnership between Mar-
the comics and cartoons vel and Japanese comics
originating in Japan, has publisher Shonen Jump.
gone global better than Sanshiro Kasama, the au-
that coming together of su- thor of “Deadpool: Samu-
perheroes, American and rai,” said he was thrilled to
Japanese. take on the job because
In “Deadpool: Samurai,” he has always loved Mar-
Marvel’s Deadpool gets vel heroes and wanted
help in his battle against more Japanese people to
evil from All Might, the mus- love Deadpool.
cular hero in “My Hero Ac- “I said, yes, yes, yes, yes! I
ademia,” a hit Japanese really want to do it. It’s un-
manga that’s sold 65 mil- believable the guy who
lion copies worldwide. always wanted to create
“Deadpool: Samurai,” pub- a manga like Deadpool re-
lished in Japanese last year, ally gets to do Deadpool.
came out in English transla- I was so excited,” he told
tion this month. The Japa- The Associated Press.
Aciman, Toibin among
contributors to book on
Sigmund Freud
Jewish psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud appears at his
Hampstead home in London on June 6, 1938.
Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — Andre Aciman, Colm Toibin and
Rick Moody are among the authors contributing to
an essay collection on the legacy of Sigmund Freud.
“On the Couch: Writers Analyze Sigmund Freud,”
conceived and edited by the literary agent Andrew
Blauner, is scheduled for release in 2023 by Princeton
University Press.
“Freud is a complicated and controversial figure,
and this anthology will present a wealth of diverse
and engaging perspectives on his legacy,” Princeton
University Press Executive Editor Anne Savarese said in
a statement Thursday.
Other writers featured in the book include Jenni-
fer Finney Boylan, Gerald Early, Siri Hustvedt and Es- by “My Hero Academia” War II.
ther Freud, great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud.
Blauner previously edited “Now Comes Good Sailing:
On Henry David Thoreau and the Meaning of Life,”
which included essays by Joyce Carol Oates, Lauren
Groff and John McPhee.q
“I was educated that
peace is the most impor-
tant thing in the world.
Peace and life. And that
sounds like a cliche, but,
looking at the world, that’s
actually really difficult to
achieve.”
Mechler believes the
boundaries between Japa-
nese manga and works by
non-Japanese are blurring,
with the world of manga in-
creasingly going global.
Japanese animation,
known as anime, is popular
on Netflix. Shows like “De-
mon Slayer” and “Attack
on Titan” were first pub-
lished as manga. Netflix is
promising more anime this
year, as are other stream-
ing services like Hulu and
Disney+.
Manga is also behind hit
Netflix series that star hu-
man actors like “Fishbowl
Wives,” which focuses on
marital infidelity in a middle-
class Tokyo neighborhood.
Such shows are drawing
not only Japanese but also
American and other global
viewers.
The image is from Sanshiro Kasama’s “Deadpool: Samurai,” Another hit Neftlix show,
published in Japanese in 2021, and in English in February 2022. “All of Us Are Dead,” in
Associated Press which zombies overrun a
One challenge was that Japan still makes up for high school, is based on a
Marvel was protective of the world’s biggest manga Webtoon, a form of manga
its characters and would market at 45% in 2020, but that started in South Korea.
often insist what he had the rest of the global mar- Although manga has
Deadpool doing was out ket combined is quickly long been available on-
of character. In one scene, catching up, according to line through Kindle, Apple
where he had Deadpool Grand View Research, a Books, Google Play and
shooting someone, a gun researcher and consultant other platforms, Webt-
had to be changed to a based in San Francisco. The oon caters its products
paint gun, said Kasama. global manga market, val- for cellphone reading by
“Deadpool: Samurai” fea- ued at $23.5 billion in 2020, rearranging the boxes to
tures drawings by Hikaru is expected to balloon to line up vertically, allowing
Uesugi, Kasama’s collabo- $48 billion in 2028, it said. readers to scroll from panel
rator, but the scenes with Julia Mechler, creator of to panel with a flip of the
All Might had drawings by the manga “Hymn of the finger.
its original manga artist Ko- Teada,” found that an When manga is read on
hei Horikoshi. “Deadpool: American publisher was paper pages, the story
more interested in her work, moves across from one box
Samurai” is the first collab-
oration between Marvel which stars a woman from image to the other. Some
Japanese manga fans still
and U.S. manga publisher Okinawa, than were Japa-
and anime distributor VIZ nese publishers, who saw it prefer reading the old way,
even online, but newcom-
Media.
as niche and political.
Manga has quickly be- Mechler wants her works to ers appear to be rapidly
come the top adult fiction give a voice to Okinawa, adapting to enjoying man-
category in the U.S. Sales a southwestern Japanese ga Webtoon-style.
island where a gruesome Webtoon Worldwide Ser-
in the graphic novel cat-
egory — which includes land battle was fought in vice, which includes Naver
manga and is exemplified the closing years of World Webtoon in South Korea,
founded in 2004; Line Man-
— jumped 160% in 2021 “I thought the beauty of ga in Japan; and services
in the U.S., Europe and
on-year, growing 15 times Okinawa is that they re-
faster than the total adult ally value peace,” said other nations, recently hit
book market, according Mechler, whose mother is 82 million users a month.
to The NPD Group, which Okinawan and her father Growth is especially strong
tracks such trends. American. in the U.S.q