This Image Comic from Marvel’s Best Writer and DC’s Bestselling Artist Is Actually a Manga

Jonathan Hickman is widely considered the best writer at Marvel (you can tell because his books cost more than everyone else’s), while over at DC Comics, Nick Dragotta has been killing it on Absolute Batman, which is the bestselling book of the month whenever it comes out. They’re amazing creators, but what if I told you that they had already teamed up in the past? The two of them did work at Marvel together a few times, but their best known collaboration was at Image Comics, for a little book called East of West. This 45-issue story was part of that golden time in Image history when almost all of Marvel’s A-list writing corps left the publisher in the mid ’10s (most of them never came back to the House of Ideas) to make their own comics.

East of West is, without a doubt, one of the best Image Comics ever. Hickman and Dragotta make for a brilliant team, giving readers some of the most wild stories out there. It’s a book that I got obsessed with in 2016, buying all of the trades and then getting it in floppies until it ended. At the time, barely any issues a year where coming out, and they took so long that I would forget what came before. However, I recently just re-read the series and I realized something very important about it. This isn’t a “Western” comic. It’s a manga. There were clues all along, but reading it again proved to me that Hickman and Dragotta set out to do something unique in American comics.

East of West Uses Numerous Aspects of Manga to Tell Its Story

East of West, at first glance, doesn’t really seem like a manga. It’s set in the 2060s in the United States. The country had been torn asunder by the Civil War, but instead of being a two-sided affair, it became a seven-sided war, before the Message was brought to the people. The Message was the apocalyptic prophecies of the end of days, and this ended the war, as the seven nations sat back and prepared for the end of the world, gathering their power, and entering a Cold War-like phase that lasted two hundred years. The book follows the Horseman of the Apocalypse Death, as he searches for his son, all while the final war begins in the background, introducing readers to an amazing cast of characters.

The book feels like a slice of Image sci-fi perfection with a healthy dose of Americana, but, right from the beginning, there’s a Trigun vibe to the whole thing. A big part of the story is Death and other characters traveling across the United States on their missions, battling each other in beautifully rendered, bloody battles. Dragotta uses the language of manga action — motion lines, sparse backgrounds, and over the top physicality — to give the action scenes a little something extra that you don’t always get from American comics. His art style at the time wasn’t as obviously manga-influenced as someone like Joe Madureira’s was, but the more you look at East of West, the more you can see that Dragotta was using manga as his inspiration (after East of West, he and Caleb Goellner did a straight up manga called Ghost Cage where his art goes even more in the Japanese direction; you should a hundred percent check it out).

However, the visuals aren’t the only thing that make it a manga. One thing you notice if you read manga is that the Japanese love to use the iconography and language of Christianity without actually using the religion. Trigun has that sort of thing, but so do classics like Devilman and the like. Neon Genesis Evnagelion does the same thing, and honestly it feels like Hickman was channeling that for this story as well. The Message is ostensibly Christian, but there’s no particulars ever, nothing that would explain how it’s Christian; it just uses the language as set-dressing.

There’s the way that Hickman uses Americana as well also feels like a manga. Despite being set in the future, the book feels like a Western throwback in a lot of ways, but a high tech one, which is an idea that could come right from Japan. There’s this sense of America without anything that is the reality of the country, which is something that many manga and anime do. Finally, there’s the character. They’re the best fighters, the legends that changed the world, and they go big. There’s no one that isn’t dialed all the way up past ten in the series, and it gives readers that over the top feel that manga does so well. Archibald Chamberlain, the book’s main villain, is one hundred percent a manga villain. All of these elements blend together to give the comic a very manga feel.

Hickman and Dragotta Looked East to Tell a Story of the West

I’ll be honest, I never would have put two and two together if wasn’t for Nick Dragotta talking about an Absolute Batman adaptation, and how he thought that the anime animation studio Studio Trigger should do one in the future. I hadn’t thought about Ghost Cages since I was reviewing it five or six years ago, and kind of forgot how much Dragotta seems inspired by manga and anime until the mini-firestorm started by fans (yes, for some reason, some fans did not want to see Studio Trigger do an AbBats adaptation, which makes no sense to me). However, I went into my East of West re-read with all of that in mind, and it all clicked together.

Sure, there were all of the trappings of Hickman comics — the politics, the big ideas, the way all of the characters interplayed — but there also was a lot of trappings of manga as well. It honestly feels like both creators wanted to pay homage to manga classics like Trigun, as well as numerous anime, taking the ideas of what a “Western” comic would be and filtering it through a more Japanese sensibility. The idea that this book is a Western manga made me appreciate it more, and made a lot of the things that I couldn’t figure out right away make sense.

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