When Manga Was Pop
Ryan Holmberg
Even before the heyday of Pop art in the West, Japnaese comics fused global vernacular influences into a playful hybrid aesthetics. Dr Ryan Holmberg, Academic Associate at the Sainsbury Institute and Hakuho Foundation Japanese Research Fellow at Waseda University in Tokyo writes how images of Popeye, Tarzan, Batman, pistol-packing cowboys, sci-fi heroes and other staples of the Western popular imagination infiltrated Japanese comics long before the official birth of the Pop art movement in Art in America.
