Manga Maniacs Marauding while Mommy Mingles

guest post by Darrin

Little dudes with plenty of vacation days, but adults with a different situation. So, boys' day out.

Headed to the Kyoto International Manga Museum, a mere 10 blocks(ish) south on Karasuma from our house.

And a mere 100 Yen/kid to get in!

People spend entire careers studying manga and manga history. In short, Japanese comics. This place had a L-O-T.

Decades of Manga, mostly in Japanese but also in pretty much every other major language in the world. Fun reading rooms in which to dive in and make yourself at home (after taking off your shoes, of course).

The quite cool building was a public school from 1867 (!) till 1995. This guy was the first principle. I don't think he put up with much jive from the students.

Cute class pic-just like Avon Grove.

A certain Tezuka Osamu was discussed much in the museum-one of the more influential manga artists of the 20th century. One of his prevalent characters was Hi No Tori (the Phoenix). This bird is now immortalized in a very large way on the wall of the museum.

One thing I did learn was something that cleared up a personally held misconception since my Speed Racer Days. Don't know about you, but I've always thought, "Man, that Japanese animation kind of stinks." Kind of choppy, repeated backgrounds, unnatural facial expressions/speaaking, etc. Well, genius. It's on purpose!

Turns out, much of Japanese animation is created with manga in mind. That is, the animated film is meant to capture the spirit of static manga with repeated backgrounds, images repeated many times in sequence, etc in order to give the audience a feel of reading a manga book. "Real-time"animation can have up to 24 frames/sec. Manga has, at most, 8, with many of those frames repeats of the same image.

I feel more complete now.

A couple more mags before hitting the road.

And on the way out, why not have a race on the full-length astroturf field that is the front yard of the museum. Beats having a parking lot.

("Yes, we can stop at a vending machine on the way home.")