NACAE of Comics Art Educators National Association Kyoto Seika…

NACAE of Comics Art Educators
National Association
        Kyoto Seika University's Department of Comic Art is the first (and, as of
this writing, only) program of it's kind in a Japanese four-year university. It
began operation in April of 2000 after two years of planning and struggle. Now
in it's fourth year, the program is preparing to send out its first class of
graduates. One of our seniors has just made her professional debut, and I
believe perhaps a dozen other of her forty-one classmates may be able to do the
same within a year of graduating.
        The Department of Comic Art was apparently first proposed by veteran
political cartoonist Kei-ichi Makino. Makino had been teaching in Seika's old
cartooning program (at the time located within the School of Design) for several
years, but felt that program's strict focus on single-panel editorial cartoons and
caricature was out of step with the times. Although he himself had never
worked in multi-panel "story manga," he felt that any cartooning program that
ignored this field was an anachronism. Others in the cartooning program
strongly opposed the introduction of "commercial" cartooning, but the President
of the university, Hajime Nakao, liked the idea.
        I was brought into the proposed project, as I recall, sometime in mid-1998.
At the time, I was teaching a course at Seika on popular culture on an adjunct
basis, but Nakao knew that I had been studying the culture of manga and also
translating manga professionally for nearly a decade. He called me into his
office one day and asked me, if I could create a department of comic art, how
would I do it? I asked, "Are you serious?" He said the chances of the proposal
passing are slim, but, yes, he was very serious.
        For me, this was an incredible opportunity, and I threw myself into the
project body and soul. There were two major obstacles: the faculty senate, and
the Ministry of Education and Science. There was little that I, as an adjunct and
outsider, could do about the former. Nakao and Makino handled the faculty
politics, and to this day I don't know how they managed to get the approval of
the Faculty of Arts, considering how much opposition and skepticism there
apparently was.
        My primary job was to come up with a curriculum that would impress the
Ministry of Education and Science, which exercises an enormous amount of


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NACAE of Comics Art Educators
National Association
control over private universities. The president and I both agreed that our
program would have to be very different from the kind offered in many technical
schools around the country. The theme we came up with (I suppose I said it
first) was "the thinking cartoonist." Although studio courses would be the core of
our program, we would encourage students to challenge themselves and expand
their horizons by teaching them the history of sequential art, exposing them to
comics from other countries, and examining the place of comics in society. We
would expose them to such concepts as semiotics, the economics of publishing,
freedom of speech, and social responsibility. Many of our students simply want
to create action comics, romance comics, or humorous comics, and that is of
course fine. But no one will leave our program without first being made to think
about why they want to do what they do, and about the possible implications--
personal, social, and artistic--of their choices.
        This was (and remains) the basic concept behind the program, but this
concept had to be adapted to the requirements of the university and the Ministry
of Education and Science. So many studio credits, so many practicum credits, so
many lecture credits, et cetera et cetera. Thus we ended up with a couple of
courses (e.g., "Contemporary Media Culture Practicum") that we weren't sure
what to do with in practice, but which must have seemed like a good idea at the
time we were preparing our documents for the Ministry.
        Unfortunately, Japanese universities are set up in such a way that it is
very difficult for different departments to share common courses. So even
though each department in the Faculty of Arts requires some kind of drawing
class, each has to re-invent the wheel from scratch. And while most cartoonists
can draw, few are trained to teach others to draw, so this aspect of our program
was spotty for the first couple of years until we realized there was a problem.
Next year (2004) will be the first year in which we can legally make changes to
our curriculum, and we will be adding new electives in drawing and dropping
some of our more awkward courses.
        One challenge unique to a program in sequential art--perhaps particularly
in Japan, where the single-creator model predominates--is finding a good balance
between courses on writing and storytelling, and courses on drawing. Our


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NACAE of Comics Art Educators
National Association
faculty has generally stressed the former, because so many would-be cartoonists
focus almost exclusively on drawing. On the other hand, we have found that
those who cannot draw reasonably well when they are first admitted still can't
draw well enough four years later, in spite of our best efforts. There are of
course exceptions (we have one or two students who blossomed quite suddenly in
their second or third year), but we tend to be cautious about admitting
applicants who do not draw well, unless they demonstrate extraordinary promise
as storytellers. Of course, it is also true that some people who draw very well
and have a wonderful sense of composition and layout never learn to tell a decent
story, but in Japan these people have more alternatives (illustrator, character
designer, animator, etc.) than do those with the reverse problem.
        Although we do have a lecture course on scripting, and a couple of studio
courses that focus entirely on visual technique, the core courses for second- and
third-year students are holistic, in the sense that students are usually assigned
to do a complete work, from concept to finished product (including editing and
preparation for printing).
        Although the first four years have often been awkward, we have been able
to improve our program with each new year of experience, and the program has
been a massive success from the standpoint of the university. We have three
entrance examinations each year, with approximately 400 applicants vying for
40 positions. The number of applicants reflects the popularity of comics in Japan
today, but it also reflects the fact that no other four-year college or university
offers such a program. This will change very soon, however, as several colleges
are preparing competing programs. Seika is now exploring ways to maintain its
position of leadership in teaching the art of comics. One possibility under
consideration is the creation of entire Faculty of Comic Art, with would include a
School of Animation, and might also include game design and other related
branches of study.


-- Matt Thorn




                                    This document is free for non-commercial educational use.
                        See http://www.teachingcomics.org/copy.php for complete copyright information.