She Changed Comics: Moto Hagio
Happy Women’s History Month! All through March, we’ll be celebrating women who changed free expression in comics. Check back here every day for biographical snippets on female creators who have pushed the boundaries of the format and/or seen their work challenged or banned.
Over her 47-year career as a pioneer in shōjo manga, Moto Hagio has helped to expand the boundaries of the genre in several directions. After helping to create the same-sex romance subgenre of shōnen-ai in the 1970s, she set out to prove that manga could also accommodate sci-fi epics.
Hagio was born in 1949 in Omuta, Japan. She showed artistic talent from a young age and set her sights on a career as a mangaka while still in high school. Her first published story “Lulu and Mimi” ran in Nakayoshi magazine in 1969. Editors of that publication rejected much of her other work as too macabre for its target audience of adolescent girls, but competitor Shogakukan Publishing was more receptive. It was in one of their magazines in 1971 that she debuted “The November Gymnasium,” an early example of shōnen-ai. Along with other members of the 24 Nengumi (Year 24 Group), Hagio pioneered the genre focused on romance between young men but created by and for young women. (Shōnen-ai is distinct from yaoi or same-sex erotica.) Three years later she developed “The November Gymnasium” into a longer series, The Heart of Thomas.
A lifelong science fiction buff, Hagio also broke ground by adapting short stories of that genre into manga format, as well as writing her own original works. Her first full-length series was Marginal, a sci-fi tale about a post-apocalyptic future in which only one woman remains on Earth and gives birth to all males. Hagio also touched on the fantasy domain with The Poe Family, a centuries-spanning epic about a vampire eternally trapped at 14 years of age.
Although Hagio is revered in Japan, only a fraction of her work has been translated into English. Fantagraphics notably launched its entire manga line with a career-spanning collection of her stories, A Drunken Dream and Other Stories. That was followed two years later by a collected edition of The Heart of Thomas, and this year will see the first English volume of Otherworld Barbara, about a detective who can enter criminals’ dreams.
In recent years Hagio has continued to innovate, for instance publishing a collection of manga stories inspired by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Asked by About.com’s Deb Aoki in a 2010 interview what advice she could impart to new mangaka today, she replied:
The manga that you can draw in your twenties, the manga you can draw in your thirties, the manga you can draw in your forties, are all different. It doesn’t matter when you debut, but when you have the drive to create, create as much as you can.
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