Fumetti Manga?

Picture books and comics are generally considered close cousins. It often wouldn't take much to change a picture book into comics; the words and images are already there, and they just would need to be integrated a little better. Indeed, many picture books are already seen as comics; Mo Willems' The Pigeon Will Ride the Roller Coaster! won an Eisner Award last year. But of course not all picture books are comics; frequently, the text stands quite well enough on its own and the pictures merely illustrate the text. Often enhancing the narrative, true, but not integrating with it. Recently, I did come across a curious... fad, I suppose you'd call it, in picture books of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I can't really find much information about this, but I did think it's worth documenting somewhere even if this isn't strictly comics.

Historically, picture books -- any books intended for children really -- were considered very secondary and were given little care. Comics famously used cheap paper and poor printing techniques precisely because they basically considered disposable. Picture books began to rise in popularity in the late 1930s and early 1940s, as we see some talented people working on them, notably Dr. Seuss and former Disney animator Gustaf Tenggren, who illustrated several Little Golden Books. These books were all illustrated, though, because the production process for re-producing photographs was far less than ideal. It was certainly do-able, as witnessed by newspapers using photographs as far back as the 1800s, but the half-tone process required at the time was generally of poor quality and largely used for the sake of expediency. Production processes improved over time, not surprisingly, and in the 1960s, we start seeing the technology improve enough that you could start to reproduce photographs in pretty good quality, and in color.

Which leads me to this apparent fad of the late '60s and early '70s -- picture books utilizing photography instead of drawings. It no doubt stemmed from the publishers trying to take advantage of the better printing and reproduction processes. The part that I find particularly curious, though, is that all of the photographers I've been able to identify so far (which, admittedly, hasn't involved all that much research) have been Japanese and the books are noted as being produced in Japan. Their approaches, while unique, seem not radically different from one another but artists like Keiko Osonoe and Akihiko Tsutsumi would arrange a variety of almost-surprisingly-non-descript toys, usually tied around a common theme.

There was also some artists who used more cohesive sets of toys to tell specific stories, often common fairy tales. (Although, weirdly, despite the creators being mostly from Japane, the stories are almost all pulled from European folklore.) Tadasu Izawa and Shigemi Hijikata favored this approach more and, because they're using specifically crafted armature figures for their stories, they're often referred to as puppet books. (Although that could well be largely because of the particular branding the publisher used.) I suspect, since they were aiming at an ever-so-slightly older market, they also frequently took advantage of the displays' inherent dimensionality and use stereoscopic cameras to take book cover photos that could be presented as 3D images using lenticular lens. (I blogged a few years ago about how lenticular lens could be used to create comics but the description there can also apply to creating 3D images like I'm talking about here.)

I don't know why this seems to have been limited -- as far as I can tell -- to Japanese artists. (Many of these books do not offer any creative credit at all and could easily be the work of non-Japanese photographers. They do seem to have some stylistic similarities, though, and are from the same publishers. Also, I can't find any examples where a non-Japanese person is credited.) I can't seem to find even any information on the artists in question besides lists of books they're given credit on, and those seem to be limited to a small window of about two or three years on either side of 1970. What else did they work on? Why didn't this approach continue beyond the early 1970s? Were there any of these books that incoporated the text more readily so that they might be considered comics? And wouldn't that make them manga? And, by American definitions, wouldn't that make them fumetti manga?

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