Hokusai Manga — a sketchbook plate

Comic faces and exaggerated expression. True to the sense of manga as "whimsical" pictures, Hokusai's sketchbooks brim with humor and physical comedy. Whole sequences explore the human face pushed to extremes — yawning, sneezing, laughing, scowling, gaping in astonishment — and bodies caught in undignified, hilariously truthful postures. Hokusai clearly delighted in the elastic possibilities of expression, treating the face as a landscape of wrinkles, jowls, and squints to be stretched and squashed for effect. This comic exaggeration is not mere clowning; it rests on acute observation of how emotion moves through flesh. In these pages the seed of the cartoon is unmistakable: the willingness to distort reality in order to tell a truth about it, and to make the viewer laugh in recognition. Of all the sketchbooks' facets, this playful attention to human folly and feeling most clearly anticipates the expressive, exaggerated visual language that the modern medium would inherit along with Hokusai's word.