From the Making Comics podcast:
We’re constantly trying to find ways to make our comics a tool for something … we want to find our place amongst people in general, and fit in with the social fabric somewhere. And that’s really what comics need to do to become mainstream.
In Japan it makes sense because … someone like Osamu Tezuka had arrived … he was a doctor who made comics for the people. He was a doctor, he had a degree in medicine. And then he went into comics because it’s what he had been doing for so much of his life. And if you read his comics, they do feel like little medicine tablets for the people. And I think that’s the way they saw it, especially in post-war Japan. There was this pessimism of having lost the war … and you have something like Astroboy, and in some ways, he’s kind of like their Mickey Mouse. He’s kind of this icon for post-war Japan, and he’s servicing the country in that way. And they really of put him on that pedestal and said, “He is our man.” And then comics became so important to them and so ingrained in their culture, and then it became ubiquitous, and it was everywhere, over time. And that’s how comics become mainstream.
So we need more people to think about themselves more like doctors or engineers, the people who build our culture, in a very serious manner, and use comics as their tool.
–Kazu Kibuishi
This is fascinating. Comics in Japan as an outworking of postwar depression. I’d say what Kazu says here in the last paragraph is not only true of comics, but of the arts in general.
//UPDATE: In the same breath, he relates modern Marvel artists as guild-ruled icon craftsmen in the Middle Ages. This man’s brain is on fire.