This feature appeared in Comic Heroes magazine in June 2016
There comes a point early on in Attack on Titan, the wildly successful manga series from Japan, where a child watches his mother being eaten alive. It happens just after his city is breached by ‘titans’: grotesque, man-eating giants who bumble around – naked – like toddlers, mindlessly devouring whoever they can. His mother, trapped beneath rubble, is helpless as one approaches from the distance, the dust clearing to reveal the stuff of nightmares – a huge, perverse creep, whose face is fixed in a freakish rictus grin. He doesn’t stop smiling when he picks the woman up off the ground. He doesn’t stop smiling when he dangles her, like a mouse, into his mouth. And he definitely doesn’t stop smiling when chomps her in two.
As of July last year, Attack on Titan was confirmed to have published 2.5 million copies – spread over 11 volumes – in the English language, with nearly 45 million in Japanese. For context, Star Wars #1 – with all the hype in the world – shipped over a million copies last year and became the first direct market series to do so since 1993. It might not receive the same amount of coverage, but there’s no denying that Attack on Titan is a stone cold phenomenon; a series that owes its global appeal to scenes like the one above. No fuss. No nonsense. Just a world where man must survive against gross, people-eating giants. Never underestimate the power of simple elevator pitch.
But of course there is more to it than that. Created by Hajime Isayama, the manga is set in a future where, thanks to the mysterious arrival of titans a century earlier, humanity has been pushed to the brink of extinction. Desperate, they have retreated into medieval-looking cities protected by huge, 164ft walls: more than enough to protect them against the titans, who typically range from ten to 50ft, but nothing against the sudden appearance of a colossus; a special, intelligent titan who looks like a skinned human, and towers over the wall. As our three young protagonists (Eren, Armin and Mikasa) watch in horror,watch in horror, the giant punctures a hole in the only thing standing between them and a whole host of unwelcome guests.
You’d think that scenes like this would be inspired by Japan’s history with Kaiju, the giant monster genre that gave us Godzilla or Pacific Rim. Or, perhaps, El Coloso (The Colossus), the painting by 18th century Spanish artist Francisco de Goya, which depicts a giant, naked man striding across a gloomy landscape, while people flee in terror at his feet. But it was actually an incident that occurred soon after Isayama’s move to Tokyo at 20 that would start it all: where the young, struggling artist, working a night job in an internet cafe, would be roughed up and dwarfed by an angry, drunk customer. In that moment, he says, he “felt the fear of meeting a person I can’t communicate with,” of being made to feel overwhelmed and small.
Isayama, now 29, would go on to refine the idea into a rough, 65-page one-shot that he pitched to various publishers, including Shintaro Kawakubo at Weekly Shōnen Magazine, a manga weekly (published by Kodansha) that agreed to serialise a cleaned-up version of the idea in 2009.
“At the time,” recalls Kawakubo, “it had only been only one or two months since I was placed in the Weekly Shonen Magazine editorial department, so I was basically a manga-loving college student who was just starting to cut his teeth. Even so, I could definitely feel the power coming from [that one-shot]. It was full of zeal, as if Mr. Isayama was saying, ‘This is something I have to draw to make it to tomorrow.’ I remember praising him for that at the time, and also giving him advice by saying that his art was messy and that he needed to work on it.”
Isayama is notoriously self-deprecating about his artwork. In one interview, he says that, “I’ve come to feel worse and worse about my art as I’ve gradually noticed how awkward it looks,” while in another he refers to Attack on Titan as being “one of the worst drawn artworks [in Japanese manga].” Yet while it is true that Attack on Titan is not the most technically impressive of work, to do down Isayama’s style is a disservice to his imagination – especially when it comes to the idiosyncratic ugliness of the titans, abominations like no other.
The titans are unnerving on multiple levels. First there’s the way they look: a cruel, deformed take on human anatomy, with each one special in their own appalling way (Isayama bases many of them on people he knows). But then there’s also the way they act: giant man-babies who bounce around the world with glee; pulling off heads, snapping bones and flinging people around like ragdolls. It’s later revealed that they don’t even need to eat humans, as they have no digestive system. They just gorge for the hell of it, puking us up when they get full – their vomit a congealed mass of body parts.
They’re also surprisingly difficult to kill, with their only weak spot located on the back of the neck. It’s a kill-stroke that can only be reached by the Survey Corps, an elite band of titan killers who are able to fly around the giants using a high-speed grappling device. It’s through this unit that we follow Armin, Mikasa and Eren, who join the squad after the attack by the colossal titan. (All of which is made a bit more complicated when – in a shock twist – Eren is revealed to be something more than human.)
For all of its violence, its horror, its gore, it’s these (mainly teenage) characters that elevate Attack on Titan above novelty – a well-developed ensemble who leave us in little doubt as to the hell they are living through. For this world is a cruel, nihilistic one, and the people living in it are either terrified or traumatised. You won’t find heroes here – many snap under the pressure, or discover that they’re cowards – and there is certainly no dignity in death, which is frequent. Even the most treasured of characters are killed off in the most savage of ways, and their loss is felt. In fact, Attack on Titan – a silly-sounding story about man vs giants – is pretty much defined by death. The fear of it. The reality. The exhausting, never-ending grief of war.
As Kawakubo, now Isayama’s editor, says: “Mr. Isayama feels strongly about the idea that death comes to us all equally, and he seems to dislike the idea that some characters should have spectacular deaths simply because they are important while others die in the margins because they are not.”
It’s little wonder, then, that many have read into Attack on Titan’s world – a society that lives in constant fear of invading forces – as a metaphor for something more serious. A nationalistic call to arms for the young of Japan? An allegory for post-nuclear disaster? The anxiety of living in a country prone to devastating earthquakes? All of which have been denied.
“I do find these kinds of hypotheses interesting,” says Kawakubo, “as they are proof that Mr. Isayama has been able to capture the true hearts of readers around the world. I think it’s very interesting that people around the world from all walks of life are able to relate to the characters in a manga title after some deep thought.”
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One of the important things to understand about Attack on Titan’s Western success is that – catchy premise or not – it would never have happened without the anime series: the rich and thrilling adaptation that began airing in the Spring of 2013.
“The difference in sales before and after the anime was like night and day,” says Ben Applegate, who edits the English edition of Attack on Titan. “We started releasing the comic in the summer of 2012. At first it didn’t really strike a chord. It was doing OK, but we were getting a lot of returns. Then the anime hit in the Spring of 2013 and that’s when when it really took off. Since then it’s been sales record after sales record. Definitely a once-in-a-decade kind of hit in the US, as well as Japan.
“The anime got people to discover it and once they did, they kept picking it up and telling their friends, and word of mouth was a big help. It’s one of the rare manga/anime properties that’s got into the mainstream and I’m really very grateful for that. I think if you ask other manga publishers they’d say the same thing: it’s been part of the revitalisation of the manga market overall in the United States. It’s bringing people back into book stores, into manga sections, and that has helped not just us, but other publishers as well.”
In general, manga has always inhabited a strange place in the English-speaking west; with hits such as One Piece or Naruto commonly othered as something beneath comics books, something separate, despite their industries being largely intertwined. Writing for Paste Magazine last year, journalist Shea Hennum summed this up well in an article titled What Our Failure to Cover Attack on Titan Says About the Comic Industry:
‘The comics industry is growing, expanding and becoming more inclusive… But the discourse surrounding the comics industry has only grown marginally in the last 30 years. Two parallel mainstreams seem to have developed. One mainstream includes Marvel, DC (and very soon Image) and the other entails books [like Attack on Titan] that actually dominate the sales charts; in other words, the comics considered mainstream by comic readers and comics considered mainstream by statistics.’
Applegate believes, however, that Attack on Titan might just be what it takes to bring the two industries closer together, with Kodansha US even planning a crossover later year with the Attack on Titan Anthology: a 250 page chance for Western comic creators such as Scott Snyder, Brenden Fletcher, Babs Tarr and Gail Simon to create original stories set in the Attack on Titan universe.
“I think that the demographics have changed,” says Applegate. “Right now, in Western comics, even from Marvel and DC, there is a generation of people who’ve grown up reading manga who are now coming into comics. Brendan Fletcher, Cameron Stuart, the team working on Batgirl right now, there’s definite manga influence in their story-telling. And if you ask them to name their comics influences, they’ll name manga as well as graphic novels and comics from the West. I think a similar transition is happening to readership as well, which is beginning to crossover more with comics. Manga is not just this thing to be put in a separate box, that’s not for them. They just see manga as comics.”