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Producing comics culture: a sociological
approach to the study of comics
Casey Brienza
a
a
Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, UK
Available online: 15 Dec 2010
To cite this article: Casey Brienza (2010): Producing comics culture: a sociological approach to the
study of comics, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 1:2, 105-119
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Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics
Vol. 1, No. 2, December 2010, 105119
Producing comics culture: a sociological approach to the study
of comics
Casey Brienza*
Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, UK
(Received 20 May 2010; nal version received 11 September 2010)
This paper introduces a sociological approach to the study of art and literature and
demonstrates its value as a methodological intervention in the eld of comics studies.
Known as the production of culture perspective, this approach argues that all artistic
work including comics is the product of collective, often routinized, human activity.
Therefore, it is not sufcient merely to study the text and/or the artist to whom the
work is directly attributed. Rather, to fully understand any artistic work, one must also
study the larger social and organizational context of its production and dissemination.
In the rst part of the paper, I will provide an overview of the production of culture
approach, discussing some of its foundational theorists and their respective intellectual
contributions. Sociologists covered will include Howard Becker, Pierre Bourdieu, and
Richard A. Peterson. In the second part of the paper, I will present an example of how
this approach may be applied in scholarly practice. Using the transnational comics pub-
lishing industry in Japan and the United States as a case study, I will show how the
conditions and mode of production help to determine the particular sorts of texts that
are actually created. Finally, I will conclude with a discussion of the limitations of the
production of culture approach and possible directions for future research.
Keywords: cultural production; methodology; manga; trasnationalism; JapanUS rela-
tions; Pierre Bourdieu; Richard A. Peterson
Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga! proclaims and promises the title of the popular
satirical how-to guide by veteran Japanese comic book artists Koji Aihara and Kentaro
Takekuma (2002).
1
The guide purports to teach its readers a super-simple series of tech-
niques for taking the art world by storm. But what do these two men actually mean? Are
not creative works of art such as manga, after all, a uniquely human craft which requires a
considerable and concerted investment of time and effort in order to master it? How could
they dare even to suggest that drawing manga is so easy even a monkey can do it?
Manga, which literally means irresponsible pictures, is the Japanese word for the
medium of the comic strip, and in the English language has come to refer both to Japanese
and Japanese-inuenced comic books.
2
Contemporary titles famous worldwide include
Naruto, Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, and Fruits Basket. The manga publishing industry
in Japan dates back to the beginnings of Japanese modernity and is now mature, large, and
lucrative, accounting for approximately 25% of all book sales and 20% of all magazine
sales in 2006 according to the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO 2006 cited in
*Email: cb607@cm.ac.uk
ISSN 2150-4857 print/ISSN 2150-4865 online
2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/21504857.2010.528638
http://www.informaworld.com
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106 C. Brienza
Lee 2009). Manga is also becoming an increasingly important category in North American
publishing, with the research rm ICv2 estimating that US manga sales grew an unprece-
dented 350% from 2002 to 2007 (Brienza 2009b). Annual sales in the United States now
stand at approximately $150 million, with well over 1000 new volumes released each year.
Given numbers like these, it comes as no surprise that the publication of how-to-draw-
manga guides has itself become a booming global business as well in recent years, with
dozens currently in print on both sides of the Pacic. Combining step-by-step instructions
for drawing basic stock gures and sage advice from established manga masters, these
guides typically emphasize the individualistic development of raw artistic talent into reli-
able technique. Enough time alone in ones room practicing putting pencil to paper and
following the instructions given, these guides promise, and you too can surely become a
manga artist.
Aihara and Takekuma, however, take a very different tack in their contribution to the
how-to genre: Becoming a great manga artist does not require honing ones draftsmanship
skills to a razor-sharp edge. One does not need to live up to the legend of Osamu Tezuka,
the so-called God of Manga, though perhaps imitating his signature eyeglasses and beret
might not hurt. It simply means learning and conforming to the expected standards and
practices of the manga publishing industry. One does not, they argue, need some ill-dened,
mystical talent or creative inspiration to make manga. One does not, in fact, need to be able
to drawwell at all, and they do not provide any art lessons. Instead, the duo devotes chapters
to subjects like choosing the right pen name, comparing different magazines editorial
policies, and working effectively around Japans arcane censorship laws. What you need to
become a great manga artist is to learn how to t in to wear the beret with condence,
in short and anyone, even the hapless wannabe cursed with the artistic sensibilities of a
monkey, ought to be able to do that.
Obviously, Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga is satirical, deliberately humorous in
the overstatement of its case. Nevertheless, beneath its silliness lies a fundamental truth
about all artistic work, including comics they are products of collective, often routinized,
human activity. Therefore, I argue in this paper, it is not sufcient merely to study the text
and/or the artist to whom the work is directly attributed; to fully understand any artistic
work, one must also study the larger social and organizational context of its production and
dissemination.
In the following sections, I will provide an overview of the production of culture
approach, discussing some of its foundational theorists and their respective intellectual
contributions. Then I will present a sample case study of how this approach may be applied
in scholarly practice, using the transnational manga publishing industry in Japan and the
United States. Finally, I will conclude with a discussion of the limitations of the produc-
tion of culture approach and suggest that, even with its limitations, it remains an important
methodological intervention opening up new avenues of inquiry that ought to be more
widely deployed by comics researchers.
The production of culture perspective
There are, broadly speaking, three methodological approaches to the study of any cul-
tural object: (1) the study of its production and transmission, or diffusion, (2) the study
of the construction of its message, and (3) the study of its reception and appropriation.
Thompson (1990, p. 303) calls this the Tripartite Approach, arguing that each of the
three are discrete areas of inquiry. Indeed, in practice these three methodologies tend to
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Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 107
map onto discrete areas of disciplinary expertise: literary studies, particularly in the tradi-
tion of New Criticism, connes itself to number two, whereas social science approaches,
i.e. audience studies, ethnography, and network analysis, tend to emphasize numbers one
and three. To best understand comics, I would argue, the medium must be subjected to all
of them in turn. Indeed, in his recent account of the history of comics studies, Lent (2010,
p. 11) notes the potential for a diversity of perspectives, including sociology, psychology,
philosophy, art and aesthetics, and history. Unfortunately, most of his actual examples of
texts formative to the discipline are either historical or textual, whereas social science trea-
tises were and presumably still are a distinct minority. There is undoubtedly more than
one reason for this imbalance, but the single most important reason that social sciences
approaches are less common than literary approaches is that they are often more difcult
to execute. Whereas a comics scholar who wishes only to write a close analysis or his-
tory of the text might be able hole up in a study, buried in books and archival materials, a
social scientist must go out into the world and locate people willing to be inconvenienced
by interviews, surveys, and/or being followed about by the researcher for extended peri-
ods. The more ethnographic the research, the more time-consuming and nancially costly
it becomes. The study of the production of comics is arguably the most difcult of all,
because it requires a high level of access to a particular set of people, the producers them-
selves. So although comics research is particularly underfunded (Lent 2010), it comes as
no surprise that the rst of Thompsons approaches is also the rarest in the study of every
medium lm, news, music, television, new media, and books not only comics.
There is thus an especially urgent need to research comics in the context of their
production. Gabilliet (2010), for example, underscores this need and devotes two chap-
ters in Of Comics and Men to it, but he provides no theoretically-informed, translatable
methodological framework. Nor is he entirely clear about whether or not creation, i.e. the
structures and processes that are articulated around writers and artists, are entirely separate
from business, i.e. the activities of publication and circulation that constitute the domain
of publishers and publishing houses; after noting that the two sectors can never be consid-
ered separately, he goes on to claim that underground and alternative production at least
are individual productions, denitely not a product of collective labour (Gabilliet 2010,
p. 111). These two assertions are in obvious contradiction, and this contradiction could
have been avoided had a framework grounded in theory not been absent. Such a clarifying
framework is crucial to the development of any ongoing project of comics scholarship and
its eventual maturation in the future.
Fortunately, all one need to do to nd one is look back to the latter half of the twenti-
eth century and the so-called production of culture or cultural production scholarship
of such sociologists as Howard Becker, Richard A. Peterson, and Pierre Bourdieu. In his
classic sociological monograph Art Worlds, Becker (1982, p. 1) writes, All artistic work,
like all human activity, involves the joint activity of a number, often a large number, of
people. Through their cooperation, the art work we eventually see or hear comes to be and
continues to be. In other words, the production of cultural objects such as art and literature
and, of course, comics are fundamentally social activities. To dispel Gabilliets ambigu-
ity, then, this goes for all creative endeavour, not just some of it. Forget the romantic ideal
of the heroic artist sitting alone in a studio and bringing works of the imagination to life;
even when ostensibly attributed to a single creator, works of art are in reality the products
of a complex, and often formally organized, network of social interactions. Furthermore,
these interactions may be structured by relations of power and domination interpenetrating
all levels of society. Some scholars, such as Mukerji and Schudson (1991), view the socio-
logical study of cultural production as a unied whole to be contrasted against practices in
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108 C. Brienza
the anthropological and literary elds, while others, such as Hesmondhalgh (2006, 2007),
view it as a series of complementary scholarly traditions crossing discrete disciplines and
with separate yet parallel intellectual histories. However, although there are important dis-
tinctions to be made and I will elaborate upon those distinctions in some detail below
the works of all of these scholars share as a starting point the same insight elucidated so
succinctly by Becker (1982) and therefore ought to be taken together. Indeed, a theory of
the production of culture is one of sociologys most important contributions to the study of
comics.
For the purposes of this paper, I will conne myself to the explication of those scholarly
traditions of cultural production which are sociological by self-denition.
3
Within sociol-
ogy, the two most prominent originate from the United States (Becker 1982, DiMaggio
1977, Hirsch 1972, 2000, Peterson 1982, 1985, Peterson and Anand 2004, Peterson and
Berger 1975) and from France (Bourdieu 1993, 1996), the two countries where the dis-
cipline is most professionalized. Both are highly inuential and representative of the
differences in emphasis dividing scholars who study cultural production. The following
two subsections of the paper begin by discussing the production of culture in the context of
Bourdieus social theory
4
and then discuss the American tradition, focusing in particular
upon Richard A. Petersons constraints upon the production of culture.
1. Bourdieu and the eld of cultural production
At its most basic, Bourdieus social theory requires an understanding of three concepts, that
of eld, capital, and habitus. The eld is a structured space with its own laws of function
and its own relations of force (Johnson 1993, p. 6). Any social formation is composed
of a series of overlapping elds, and within them social actors compete for different sets
of resources, called capital. Forms of capital include economic capital (money), cultural
capital (knowledge and technical know-how), and symbolic capital (prestige).
5
Habitus is
a set of dispositions which generates practices and perceptions (Johnson 1993, p. 5) it is
why, in other words, people know unconsciously how to get on when faced with different
social situations. When the marketing director of a publishing company decides how to
promote new releases, for example, she is using habitus.
The eld of cultural production, or cultural eld, then, is that social space in which
culture broadly understood to include art and literature, as well as science, religion, law,
and so forth is produced (Bourdieu 1993). The cultural eld is characterized by high
levels of cultural capital and low levels of economic capital and may be further divided
into subelds of small-scale or restricted production and of large-scale or mass produc-
tion. Thus, in a hypothetical eld of comics production, an indie or alternative press would
be part of the small-scale production subeld, whereas a large, multinational media cor-
poration with a comics publishing subsidiary would be part of the large-scale production
subeld.
Furthermore, the eld of small-scale production has a high degree of autonomy from
other elds and is sometimes called an autonomous eld, while the eld of large-scale
production has an especially low degree of autonomy from other elds and is sometimes
called a heteronomous eld. From a normative standpoint, autonomy is valued because
it helps insulate elds from the workings of ideology and other systems of domination
(Benson 1999). However, this distinction between autonomous and heteronomous elds
may not be universal across all media and cultural spaces. Certainly, researchers work-
ing from this perspective disagree. So while Hesmondhalgh (2006) values its usefulness
in the context of the music industry in the UK and considers it one of Bourdieus most
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Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 109
important theoretical interventions in the subject, Thompson (2005, 2010) categorically
rejects it in both of his studies of the US and UK book publishing industry. Given that
comics culture arguably shares traits in common with both music and book publishing,
researchers studying comics production will have to arrive at their own conclusions about
autonomy versus heteronomy, and different researchers studying different elds might well
justiably reach different ones. In fact, even the sparse comics scholarship incorporating a
Bourdieuian framework does not agree on this issue. In Demanding Respect, Lopes (2009)
describes two successive ages of American comics production, one heteronomous and the
other autonomous. Brienza (2009b), on the other hand, ignores autonomy and heteronomy
in her account of the rise of manga publishing in the United States.
The advantages to using Bourdieus work on the cultural eld as a methodological
framework are two-fold. First, as demonstrated by the above discussion of autonomy versus
heteronomy, he is attentive to the working of power and gives it plenty of analytical space.
Since the relationship between ideology and comics has been oft-discussed in the past using
a number of different frameworks (Barker 1989, Gabilliet 2010, Lopes 2009), this space
is especially important. Secondly, he attempts to synthesize his work into a comprehensive
social theory of everything, and for some researchers it may be useful to think about the
production of comics both on a grand scale and in their broader social contexts. The work
of Brienza (2009b) and Lopes (2009), both of which strive to make sense of organizational
transformations that occur over a period of years or decades and involve thousands or tens
of thousands of people, underscore the utility of a methodology informed by Bourdieus
social theory for such large-scale comics research.
However, Bourdieus writings also have their shortcomings. His theory is perhaps less
effective as a framework for researching smaller-scale social phenomena and processes.
How, for example, would one understand the effect of the proliferation of offset print-
ing upon comics? The concepts of eld, capital, and habitus seem ill-prepared to answer
that particular question, and there are others that are equally vexing. Therefore, for a sec-
ond source of methodological guidance, I turn to American sociology of culture and the
writings of Richard A. Peterson.
2. Peterson and the constraints upon the production of culture
Peterson (1982) identies ve factors
6
which constrain or facilitate the production of cul-
ture: law, technology, the market, organizational structure, and occupational careers. There
are, in other words, ve specic factors which inuence how a cultural object comes to
be and continues to be (Becker 1982, p. 1). While not all apply to the creation of every-
thing, nor is this assumed to be an exhaustive list, it is an excellent framework to apply
when beginning to think about the production of culture in modern societies. Furthermore,
unlike Bourdieus, Petersons terms also have the advantage of being presented in the lan-
guage of the layperson the way in which he intends them is the way in which sociologists
and non-sociologists alike would be wont to understand them. This two-pronged pragma-
tism, linguistic and programmatic, makes his approach especially valuable to researchers
working in interdisciplinary subjects like comics studies, where common concepts are less
abundant than in other elds. A sociologist who discusses habitus might well be talking
past an art historian, but both are likely to come to agreement quickly about what, say,
law or occupational careers signify. Such clarity is invaluable.
However, the approach, an outgrowth of the symbolic interactionist Chicago School of
sociology, does have its weaknesses. Inuential empirical case studies by Becker (1982),
Peterson and Berger (1975), and DiMaggio and Powell (1983), which focus upon systems
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110 C. Brienza
of cultural production such as the (high) art world, the music industry, and the publishing
industry respectively and were produced at roughly the same time as Petersons theoretical
work on the ve constraints, underscore by example both its strengths and weaknesses. On
the one hand, it encourages detail-oriented research projects which pay careful attention
to the interaction between specic entities and individuals and their environments. And as
discussed above, it is accessible and programmatic, supplying concrete suggestions about
particular arenas of social life and interaction which might be important. But on the other,
it may become too prescriptive, and researchers run the risk of overlooking an important
social interaction which does not t neatly into Petersons framework. Also, because of its
empirical orientation, Peterson and his ilk have been much criticized for not being atten-
tive enough to the macro-workings of power (e.g. Grindstaff 2008, Hesmondhalgh 2006,
Zolberg 1990).
Nevertheless, the advantages of this approach remain considerable. Unfortunately,
Petersons methodological contribution has been largely ignored by studies of the produc-
tion of comics culture. Although a handful of previously published comics research (e.g.
Kinsella 2000, Pagliassotti 2009) employ elements of Petersons framework for analysis,
the respective authors apparently do so unwittingly, given that his work is not cited by any
of them. In fact, despite Peterson sprinkling passing references to comic books through-
out the many articles he has written over the years about constraints on the production of
culture, comics scholars, practically to a one, have never even attempted to take up his
methodology.
7
This neglect must change, for in its communicative clarity and pragmatic
sensibility resides a smart programme of research for comic studies. In the next section,
I will demonstrate how a Peterson-informed approach may be employed to begin under-
standing why a particular category of comic books that of Japanese manga in the United
States has come to exist and persist across national boundaries in the particular manner
that it does.
Producing manga culture in the United States: a sample case study
The English-language editions of Japanese manga that show up on the bookstore shelves
in the United States are the nal product of a vast, transnational network of production.
To gain a clearer understanding of how and why these manga came to exist in the par-
ticular form that they do, I will examine various nodes of this network, using each of
Petersons ve constraints on the production of culture in turn. I begin by considering how
(1) occupational careers and (2) law inuence the manga publishing industry in Japan.
1. Occupational careers (Japan)
The work always shows signs of that cooperation, writes Becker (1982, p. 1). In the
case of manga, these signs of cooperation begin from the very moment the work comes
into material being evidenced by the telltale signs of a dozen or more different artistic
hands having all contributed to the drawing of a single chapter. Thus, the creation of each
volume of the current bestselling manga series Naruto is attributed strictly to Masashi
Kishimoto, its sole copyright holder, but his name deployed in this context refers not merely
to the man born in the rural Japanese prefecture of Okayama. Instead, the artists name
on the mangas cover is most appropriately understood as an author-function (Foucault
1969). In developing the concept, Foucault (1969, p. 329) points to the vast legal and
institutional systems that circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realm of discourses
that the more prosaic term author effectively elides. Kishimoto, like most even modestly
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Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 111
successful manga artists, is actually supported by a veritable army of artistic assistants who
work shoulder-to-shoulder with him, contributing to every imaginable creative task short
of adding their own names to the title page. They do this in the hope that they, too, will
acquire the skills necessary and curry favour with the right people so as to one day advance
to the status of independent manga artist. Politicking amongst artists can therefore be erce.
Even the legendary and now deceased Osamu Tezuka, whose name is synonymous in Japan
with modern manga production, had 10 assistants in the 1980s and mentored artists famed
in their own right such as Shotaro Ishinomori (Cyborg 009) (Schodt 1983). And in many
cases, the assistants do much more than assist. Takao Saito, for example, whose manga
series about an assassin for hire Golgo 13 has been published continuously since 1969,
often does no drawing of his own save quickly pencilling in the faces of the main characters
(Schodt 1983).
The assistant is not the only occupational career that constrains or facilitates in
this case primarily facilitates the production of manga. Editors also play an important
role, vetting and vetoing material as it is being created, often taking the lead in the cre-
ation of a title before the drawing even begins. However, the occupation of manga artist
itself, and its availability to both genders, is arguably most important of all. Japans rich-
est woman, Rumiko Takahashi (Ranma
1
/
2
, Inuyasha), is a manga artist by trade, and an
increasing number of prominent creators since the 1960s have been women. In patriar-
chal, sex-stratied Japan, becoming a manga artist is now one of the few careers available
to unmarried women without higher education that theoretically could, for a lucky few,
translate into independence, respectability, and a living wage. Successive cohorts of these
women have transformed the manga publishing industry in Japan, pioneering new genres,
types of stories, and styles of illustration that have subsequently become dening features
of mainstream Japanese manga. The most important cohort of female manga artists is
known as The Year 24 Group, born in or around 1949. These artists, whose ranks include
Keiko Takemiya (To Terra, Kaze to Ki no Uta), Moto Hagio (A, A
1
, Drunken Dream),
and Riyoko Ikeda (Rose of Versailles), pioneered radical stories which challenged socially
prescribed boundaries of gender and sexuality especially homosexuality (see Ito 2005,
Schodt 1983, Schodt 1996). Their works are now considered classics of the medium, and
the asymmetrical, heavily stylized page layouts and progressive narrative possibilities they
developed in the 1970s have become industry standard.
2(a). Law (Japan)
Unfortunately, the production of manga, while providing new opportunities to women, also
has a darker, less progressive side. Although the Japanese Constitution guarantees freedom
of speech and expression, Article 175 of the Criminal Code, which outlaws obscenity, is
typically interpreted such that any uncensored depiction, even a hand-drawn illustration, of
human genitalia is illegal (Kinsella 2000, Schodt 1983). Offenders are rarely prosecuted,
but it does happen occasionally, and the most recent case in 2004 involved a manga artist
named Yuuji Suwa accused and convicted of having produced indecent material under
the pen name Beauty Hair (Gravett 2004). Some publishers and artists, however, are wont
to out the law, and doing this simultaneously makes their work seem cutting-edge and
sells books to those readers who cannot resist irting with the forbidden. In fact, until
his conviction, Suwas publisher Shoubunkan printed dozens of explicitly pornographic
manga every month which were quite deliberately left uncensored. Thus it was, arguably,
Shoubunkan and not Suwa per se who was most responsible for breaking the law, since
proactive self-censorship usually falls to editors, not artists.
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112 C. Brienza
Furthermore, as long as human genitalia are not entirely visible, graphic and disturb-
ing depictions of rape, bestiality, and sexual activity with minors are entirely permissible,
ubiquitous, and readily available. Entire genres of manga have been developed within the
specicities of Japans national legal framework which seem to out the spirit of anti-
obscenity legislation. For example, lolicon, short for Lolita Complex, an allusion to the
novel by Vladimir Nabokov, is the name of a genre that involves the sexual objectication
of pre-pubescent girls. Needless to say, genres like lolicon have become infamous in the
West and given Japanese comics a bad reputation in many circles. They have also got some
Westerners in serious legal trouble.
2(b). Law (United States)
Just because a title passes legal muster in one country does not mean that it will also do so
in another, even when both countries are democracies which purport to guarantee freedom
of expression in principle. In May 2006, US Post Ofce ofcials opened up a package of
imported manga with sexually explicit content shipped directly from Japan to US citizen
and Iowa state resident Christopher Handley. He was subsequently charged with possession
of obscene materials and in February 2010, after pleading guilty, sentenced to six months
in prison (Anon. 2010).
For American companies licensing Japanese manga for English-language publication,
the news of Handleys arrest was chilling. In the multi-year run up to Handleys trial, Ali
Kokmen, Marketing Director for Del Rey Manga (a division of the worlds largest trade
book publisher Random House) issued a Special Alert about the case in an issue of the
publishers own e-newsletter. Unabashedly sympathetic to Handley, he invoked the liber-
tarian mandate of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF), a US-based non-prot
organization dedicated to protecting the First Amendment rights of the comics publish-
ing, retailing, and reading community and spearheading Handleys legal defence. Then he
concluded, with both sincerity and faux levity,
Regardless of the extent of ones involvement in the manga hobby, Christopher Handleys
situation is obviously a point of interest if not outright concern. I encourage I implore
anybody with any affection for manga to make the effort to learn more about the case. [. . .]
And should you wind up donating to the CBLDF monies that you might otherwise have used
to purchase a Del Rey Manga well, Ill forgive you. This time (Kokmen 2008).
However one might be inclined to interpret Del Rey Mangas position on the Handley
case, whether ethically or selshly motivated, the publishers reaction, despite not publish-
ing sexually explicit material themselves, makes one thing abundantly clear: No American
manga publisher would dare release a title from Japan without having thoroughly vetted or
edited perhaps even censored anything remotely questionable just to be on the safe side
rst. After all, if the proverbial shoe were on the other foot, any of these organizations
could nd themselves in Handleys unenviable position.
In other words, US licensees of Japanese manga are also implicated in forms of cul-
tural production, and the manga that their customers purchase and read also, by necessity,
shows signs of their cooperation. Yet this further transformation of the cultural object is not
conned solely to matters of content and textual translation from Japanese into English,
but rather upon the entire social context within which manga is produced and ultimately
received. Specically, I wish to focus upon the remaining three of Petersons ve factors,
(3) organizational structure, (4) the market and (5) technology, for they are key to under-
standing why, exactly, manga in America came to be in the rst place and how it continues
to be today.
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3. Organizational structure (United States)
The United States actually has more than one publishing industry, with books, comics, and
magazines, for example, each produced by discrete sets of social actors and organizations
linked together through different networks. So although they share an ostensible focus
upon printed matter, the comics industry and the book industry remain quite separate.
Brienza (2009b) argues that manga became popular in the United States in the rst decade
of the twenty-rst century as noted earlier, sales increased 350% from 2002 to 2007,
with gures prior to 2002 too negligible for anyone to have bothered to measure because
a series of decisions taken by different people at specic historical moments shifted its
production from comics publishing and into book publishing. Lopes (2009), though less
analytically precise, likewise states that what he calls the manga revolution took place
outside of the comic book eld. Thus did the organizational structure of the book industry
facilitate mangas production in America, and in the case of manga, how the respective two
publishing industries were plugged into the market was key.
4. Markets (United States)
Until the late 1990s, manga licensed from Japan were published as American comics and
sold primarily through small, independent comic book shops catering to a limited and con-
servative clientele (Gabilliet 2010, Lopes 2009, Wright 2001). But when Stu Levy founded
Mixx Entertainment and began publishing manga in English in 1997, his startup enterprise
took unprecedented pains to distance itself from the creative practices of comics pub-
lishing. Instead of publishing manga in thin, American-style pamphlet instalments, Mixx
experimented with different formats, including compact, pocket-sized paperback bound
volumes. These small volumes did not mesh well with the expected norms of comics
retailing. Luckily, chain bookstores were more accommodating. The power to decide what
gets stocked in these stores is concentrated at the top with people called buyers. One
of these buyers, at the mall chain Waldenbooks (now subsumed into Borders), was Kurt
Hassler, and he was interested in manga. The trade book market became critical to mangas
American commercial success. When Hassler later became the national-level buyer for
the entire Borders Group, he also bought manga for the Borders superstores, allowing US
manga publishers to reach markets, particularly women and young people, that in comics
retailing it had never been able to before (Brienza 2009b). This was no small thing because
the market for trade books is many orders larger than the market for comics.
5. Technology (United States)
Changes to manga as a printed object its technology, in other words became the nal
component of the success of mangas establishment in the United States. I will highlight
one of the most important of these changes for this section of the paper, which relates to
how the comics are meant to be read. Japanese books, including manga, read right-to-left,
the opposite of Western texts. Prior to 2002, US manga publishers would mirror-image
the pages of Japanese manga so that they would read, in Western fashion, left-to-right.
Needless to say, this was a labour-intensive process, and it required substantial editorial
oversight. In April 2002, Levys company, now called Tokyopop, began publishing all of
its new titles unipped. By cutting out much of the labour of Stateside production, the
publisher was able to release new manga faster and meet heretofore unmet demand from
the market (Brienza 2009a, 2009b). Other manga publishers such as Viz and Dark Horse
quickly followed suit and stopped ipping pages, also speeding up their production and
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114 C. Brienza
Figure 1. Technology in action at the manga section of a North American bookstore. 2007 Casey
Brienza.
thus releasing even more content. Finally, multinational book publishers such as Random
House and Hachette, drawn like moths to a ame by double digit growth in an industry
otherwise famed for decades of expansion at the rate of ination, also began licensing
and publishing Japanese manga in the American book market. The total number of manga
in print increased rapidly in only a few years, expanding a stock of comics into a proper
category of books with its own dedicated section in the retail environment (Figure 1).
Thus, changing organizational structure, markets, and technology help make manga the
mature and visible category of books that it is today. Likewise, occupational careers, and
law in both countries, inuence the sorts of manga made visible in the rst place. Taken
together, these ve factors contribute to how manga is understood to exist to and persist
across national boundaries a fuller picture than could be gleaned by looking at the panels
of these comic strips alone.
Limitations of the production of culture perspective
Despite its demonstrated utility, the production of culture perspective comes under fre-
quent criticism for not paying sufcient attention to the communicative meaning of artistic
content and its aesthetic value. Variations of this particular critique can be found in Wolff
(1993), Zolberg (1990), Eyerman and Ring (1998), and Harrington and Bielby (2001),
to name just a few. In production of culture research, these critics argue, any resulting
meaning is taken as an epiphenomenal outcome of the process of production itself, not
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Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 115
something internal to an artwork or to any communication between the work and its audi-
ence (Eyerman and Ring 1998, p. 277). Production, and in the case of mass forms of
popular culture, rationalized industrial production, becomes all that there is. Researchers,
they admonish, must not ignore the irreducibility of the aesthetic to the social (Wolff
1993, p. 109). It is as if the art object itself is invisible; sociologists look straight through
it and see only a collective mode of production and the various constraints upon it.
Some are even more critical still, detecting not just a wilful blindness in the production
of culture perspective but also outright malice rooted in a longstanding rivalry between
the humanities and the social sciences. Inglis (2005, p. 101) calls it a skepticism veering
into cynicism. Since sociologists believe that what counts as art, he argues, is decided by
powerful economic and political interests with more cultural authority than the discipline of
sociology itself, sociologists are often unbecomingly keen to expose and debunk the truth
claims of those interests. They are marginalized outsiders nipping at the heels of power,
in other words. He concludes that sociologists ought to be more reexive in interrogating
their own assumptions and actions.
Is there any merit to these two related criticisms? I will address the second rst because
jokes about monkeys aside Inglis dramatically overstates his case. While it is virtually
impossible to know for certain whether or not sociologists of culture are secretly and en
masse nursing a grudge against art and artists and who would blame them for vehe-
mently denying it in any case? it is certain that many of the leading gures in culture
of production research are respected producers of culture themselves. Howard Becker, for
example, is also a professional jazz musician who has written about the production of jazz
culture (see Faulkner and Becker 2009). John Thompson heads Polity Press while also
having produced two monographs on contemporary book publishing (see Thompson 2005,
2010). And of course, Aihara and Takekuma, who send up the Japanese manga industry,
are also skilled artists able to produce a satire about manga as manga. Clearly, it is possible
to write from a production of culture perspective while embedded in the very world one
is researching, and nowhere does Inglis suggest that this approach to research is an act of
self-loathing. Besides, even if it were, he provides no pragmatic, programmatic alternatives.
The rst criticism, however, that the production of culture perspective tends to ignore
the object itself, does have somewhat more merit. There is no question that this approach is
a reaction to scholarship in the humanities which ignores the social context of production
and that it sometimes overcompensates. However, to fully understand the communicative
meaning and aesthetic value of a cultural object, one must also study reception, i.e. audi-
ences and consumers, and sociologists are right to argue that to simply look at art and draw
analytical conclusions is not to provide a sufcient account of it. Ultimately, a methodology
informed by the production of culture perspective is but one approach to research of many,
and it both complements and is complemented by others. Comics scholarship has not even
begun to exhaust the methodological possibilities available yet does a full appreciation
of the sequential art medium itself demand anything less than every conceivable way of
knowing it? Surely it cannot be otherwise.
Toward a sociological methodology for comics studies
The production of culture approach represents a valuable addition to the comics
researchers methodological toolkit. Future directions for research in this vein would de-
emphasize the primacy of the creator in the analysis of comics and refocus attention instead
upon the various social contexts and conditions of comics production. Petersons ve con-
straints upon the production of culture are excellent methodological starting points for any
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116 C. Brienza
comics researcher. Sample questions which could be applied to any number of different
cultural, historical, and national situations include: Howhas technology shaped and/or lim-
ited what sorts of texts can be created? What sorts of inuences has the legal environment
had upon comics production? And what about the career trajectories of people working
with comics? Where and how are comics sold? These sorts of sociological questions and
many, many others beg further research.
Equally if not more important, however, is the way in which the production of cul-
ture approach does not necessitate conning oneself to a single national environment.
Common objects of comics research include the American superhero comic, the French
bande dessine, and the Japanese manga. Yet no cultural object in the contemporary world
is the product of a closed, national system of production comics included. By taking
into account organizational structure, markets, law, and so forth, this approach allows the
researcher to think beyond strict national boundaries and view the object as embedded
simultaneously in a myriad of global, local, and transnational contexts. In my example of
manga in Japan and the United States, I demonstrate how processes of cultural production
in both countries affect the object that reaches American markets. However, it would be
a grievous error to assume that this is a one-way conveyor belt of production the US
context may well, in turn, affect production back in Japan. The methodological accommo-
dation this approach makes to such complex transnational social interactions is its single
greatest strength.
In conclusion, perhaps it is not so outlandish to suggest that a monkey could play some
sort of role in the production of manga and other comics, given that the actual drawing
is only a tiny part of the many tasks and social contexts required to produce a single n-
ished volume. This paper has explicated the production of culture perspective developed by
sociologists such as Howard Becker, Pierre Bourdieu, and Richard A. Peterson and argued
that this sociological methodology can be used to gain a fuller, scholarly understanding of
comics. Then, in a sample case study, I show how the neat rows of printed volumes lining
the shelves labelled Manga in every Barnes & Noble in the United States are in fact the
nished goods of a complex and transnational process of cultural production. Indeed,
the many social groups whose labour contributed to the making of these comics may never
meet face to face, but if it were not for their work, no comic, and indeed no other art object,
would exist in the rst place.
Notes
1. Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga was rst published from 1986 to 1988 in Japan by Shogakukan
as Saru demo Egakeru Manga Kyoushitsu. Literally translated, the title means Manga that Even
a Monkey Can Draw Classroom. Except where otherwise stated, however, this article references
the abridged 2002 English-language edition published by Viz Media.
2. Although examples of humorous artwork fromJapan date back over 1000 years, the rst recorded
use of the word manga is attributed to Hokusai Katsushika, the woodblock print artist best
known for his classic nineteenth-century image of Mt Fuji (Schodt 1983). However, the modern
medium now known as manga is not descended directly from the work of Hokusai. After the
forced opening of Japan in 1853, Western culture including comics soon followed. Political
cartoons and short comic strips were common by the 1920s, and in the 1930s chapter-length
comics called story manga were being pioneered (Gravett 2004, Schodt 1983). Post-World
War II, Osamu Tezuka, nicknamed manga no kamisama [God of Manga], pioneered the cine-
matic visual narrative style of story manga now widely considered synonymous around the world
with the word manga (Gravett 2004, Schodt 1983). Because it is now common in the English
language to refer to comics produced in Japan as manga, I do likewise for the purposes of this
article, but it would be entirely appropriate also simply to call the medium comics, or graphic
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Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 117
novels when published in book form. I use manga here as an example of cultural production, but
manga in and of itself is not a medium separate from comics, nor is cultural production unique
to manga.
3. Other examples of research falling broadly within a production of culture perspective described
by Hesmondhalgh (2007) in The Cultural Industries take the news media as their primary
medium of study. These include what he terms political economy approaches by commu-
nication scholar McChesney (2004) and others, as well as radical media sociology/media
studies approaches by Gans (1979), Gitlin (1983), and Tuchman (1978). Mige (1987), however,
argues that there are fundamental structural differences between media corporations specializ-
ing in broadcasting, such as the news industry, and those specializing in publishing, such as
the book and music industries. As these differences would certainly inuence methodology in
practice and the production of comics clearly falls into the latter publishing category, I have
chosen to focus exclusively upon those examples of production of culture scholarship which are
publishing-oriented.
4. Bourdieu (1984) also introduces the term cultural intermediaries in Distinction, his study of
consumption. According to Bourdieu, the term encompasses all the occupations involving pre-
sentation and representation (sales, marketing, advertising, public relations, fashion, decoration
and so forth) and in all the institutions providing symbolic goods and services. . .in cultural
production and organization which have expanded considerably in recent years (1984, p. 359
quoted in Negus 2002). By implication, the cultural intermediary is understood to exist between
the creator and the consumer. This is not a useful intervention; in the case of comics, for exam-
ple, it draws articial distinctions between the meaning-making of the writer and illustrator on
one hand, and the editor and publisher on the other. Such a schema underestimates the creative
contributions of different sets of occupations toward any nished cultural object and privileges
the ideology of the heroic creative individual which the sociology of culture as an academic
project and Bourdieu (1996) himself works to counter. For these reasons, I will not other-
wise offer a treatment of cultural intermediaries in this paper. Indeed, perhaps troubled by the
implications, Bourdieu seems to have abandoned the concept altogether in his later works about
cultural production (Bourdieu 1993, 1996).
5. The proliferation of new forms of Bourdieuian capital in academic scholarship is of limited use
at best. While I concede that concepts related to the physicality of the human body, such as aes-
thetic capital (e.g. Anderson et al. 2010) and bodily capital (e.g. Wacquant 1995) might be
useful in some elds, others, such as subcultural capital (Thornton 1995), contribute nothing
to eld theory not already covered by the three forms already outlined in the article. In fact, even
Bourdieu (1991) himself, later in his career, succumbed to the temptation to amend his typology,
and likewise his linguistic capital does not add a particularly meaningful analytical distinction.
In the latter two cases it is not clear how such subcultural capital and linguistic capital are
to be distinguished from a mixture of cultural and symbolic capital and the economic capital
used to purchase the other two within the context of specic elds. In the case of subcul-
tural elds, after all, Frank (1997) argues that, fundamentally, subculture is expressed through
capitalist consumption, i.e. the deployment of economic and cultural capital for the purchase of
symbolic capital, in Bourdieus terms.
6. In later articles (Peterson 1985, Peterson and Anand 2004), Peterson revises his thinking and
increases the number of factors constraining or facilitating the production of culture from ve
to six, dividing organizational structure into industry structure and organization structure.
This decision is not an improvement, given that not all cultural production requires either formal
organization or industry structure. The concept of organizational structure encompasses a far
greater range of social congurations, both formal and informal, and in this exibility is more
useful methodologically. Therefore, I discuss ve constraints, not six, in this paper.
7. A partial exception is Dandridge (2008), a graduate student at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute,
whose unpublished MA thesis on Astrix le Gaulois cites one of Petersons early articles on the
production of culture. However, she does not utilize his work on the constraints of the production
of culture specically; instead, she simply cites him for the same reason that I cite Becker (1982)
here in this paper to underscore the necessarily social origin of all cultural objects.
Notes on contributor
Casey Brienza is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge.
She researches manga publishing and the transnational production of culture. Her other academic
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118 C. Brienza
writing may be found in Publishing Research Quarterly, The International Journal of the Book, and
Contexts. Since 2005, Casey has also worked as a freelance journalist, columnist, and critic.
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