Welcome back to Mangasplaining, the podcast for people who are curious about manga but don’t know where to start! This week we choose a work from one of our favorite authors with potentially broad appeal—Jiro Taniguchi’s Guardians of the Louvre. But will this title live up to the love we have for the rest of his catalogue? Listen in and read on to find out!

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Guardians of the Louvre
By Jiro Taniguchi

Translated by: Kumar Sivasubramanian
Lettering by: Ill Wind Tidings
Published by: NBM Graphic Novels
Out of print (put not completely impossible to find). Was available digitally but is no longer so? If you google the title and “Archive.org” though…

Audio editing by David Brothers. Show notes by Christopher Woodrow-Butcher and Deb Aoki

Recorded in February 2024. Yes, a year ago. It’s been a tough year.

BEFORE WE GET STARTED

Hey y’all, Christopher here. Nice to be back. Best laid plans, yadda yadda yadda. I hate sharing with the public these days, but long story short, lotta tragedy in my family last year and man it made it hard to focus on creative pursuits like this incredible podcast! What a hard time it is now to make things. But still, we’re recording and editing episodes and hopefully, hopefully, we’re about to start posting those episodes regularly again. We’re a year behind, but we’ll catch up soon. Thanks for sticking with us.

So we covered Jiro Taniguchi way back in Season 1 with one of our favourite picks of all time, A Journal of My Father. He’s easily one of my favorite cartoonists of all time, and I share a bit of a story about that at the end of this episode. In fact we all really dig his work now, and I kind of want to see about recommending another of his books next season. Hopefully something in print, next time? Because, and I’m SO SORRY, but this was available digitally when we recorded this, but has subsequently disappeared from digital services. It’s still in my Kindle account, but you can’t buy it anymore.

[DEB] Stephen Robson, the UK-based publisher at Fanfare Ponent Mon has assured us that he’s working on his next Taniguchi release, Solitary Gourmet and hopefully will have it out sometime soon. It’s a book that’s right up our alley, as it’s about an older office worker who finds pleasure in finding diners where he can enjoy tasty and inexpensive meals alone.

It’s been adapted into a very successful live-action TV series that is unfortunately, not yet available subtitled in English on Netflix, etc. Maybe someday soon. I watched it on a recent flight on Japan Airlines, and hope more people in the English-speaking world get to enjoy this little gem. (Note: They released the first Solitary Gourmet movie in January of this year, too!

[Christopher:] Taniguchi is a bit strange, in that he’s the rare manga creator that we’ve covered who, while he is successful and respected in Japan, is perhaps even more successful and respected in France and throughout Europe. He has a career that is marked not only by a vast amount of work across a variety of genres, but also that work is almost entirely also available in French, usually in quite lush and impressive editions. That makes this particular work, his first to be produced initially for the European market and then translated back into Japanese, again a true rarity in manga publishing. There are even some purists out there who might not consider this manga, as Japan wasn’t its country of first production… It’s an interesting episode and an interesting discussion!

[DEB] Right now, there are two exhibits about manga in the US featuring Jiro Taniguchi manga planned for 2025. The Asian Comics exhibit, curated by Paul Gravett and the Barbican is now up at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, after a 2024 stint at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California.

In late September 2025, Jiro Taniguchi will be one of eight featured manga artists in The Art of Manga exhibit at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. I hope these two shows will help build appreciation of Jiro Taniguchi’s manga.

ABOUT JIRO TANIGUCHI

Jiro Taniguchi (1947-2017) is the author of dozens of manga, and is somewhat surprisingly extensively translated into English. His work is all technically classified as “seinen” (adult male) manga, but his work tended to be serialized in older seinen manga magazines (sometimes ‘salaryman’ manga magazines), with the protagonists typically in their 30s, or older. This makes his work a little different than what usually gets translated here in North America.

Taniguchi’s manga spans genres, from manly-man stories of survival on the frontier, to historical fiction, to gentle meditations on life, family, and the world around us. Taniguchi-sensei is even more popular in France, where everything he’s made (give or take) has been translated into French for that market.

Taniguchi made his debut in Japan in 1979 with the work Lindo 3!. He continued working through the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. His work in English is primarily translated and published by the UK-based publisher Fanfare/Ponent-Mon, a true passion project on their part. They are a bit smaller as publishers go, and their output doesn’t get quite as widely distributed as some of the major pubs. Maybe folks won’t be quite as familiar with his work because of that. These books are all available though, on ‘online booksellers’ if not from actual great stores. It’s worth noting that Taniguchi’s lead characters tend to look sort of similar, sort of an everyman/salaryman for the reader to project themselves onto.

Now I’m not gonna lie, we went DEEP on Jiro Taniguchi during our first episode featuring his work, and we also recorded one of our best episodes there too. I highly recommend going and reading the show notes for that episode if you haven’t already, and give it a listen too! It’s a good episode, before we started the Substack here, a great book, and some of my best show notes.

Ep. 22: A Journal of My Father by Jiro Taniguchi

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3:40 Shout out to library apps like Hoopla! They have all kinds of manga you can read for free with a library card. For real! You just login with your library card to your local library site, and they’ve got digital lending options. Almost all digital lenders have some amount of comics and manga to read, and it’s all legit and above board. Other digital lenders include ComicsPlus and Overdrive. Getting your digital manga fix from these services feels a hell of a lot better than supporting Amazon these days.

4:20 [DEB] Here’s a photo from our trip to the Louvre that Christopher mentioned, and here’s the line to see the Mona Lisa up close. It’s behind a glass enclosure because it’s been targeted by activists and thieves over the years.

And even once you get to the front of the line, you can’t get very close to this famous painting, as there are barriers to keep the crowds a safe distance from it.

Why are these measures in place? Lots of reasons. For one, in 2024, environmental activists rushed up and splattered the Mona Lisa with pumpkin soup. Guh? Vanity Fair has more on this particular incident. It was just the latest of many incidents that use the iconic status of this painting to make headlines.

5:30: [Christopher:] Before starting this episode, I thought of Guardians of the Louvre as Taniguchi’s weakest work, and maybe the least favorite of the Louvre books that I’ve read. I’ll spoil the episode and say that the book has grown on me quite a bit for what it does really well, like the gorgeous artwork and some of the history, but I still just do not like the story.

6:45 I want to talk about Jiro Taniguchi’s Venice book for a moment…

Venice, a travelogue sponsored and published by Louis Vuitton’s extensive high-end publishing arm (I am serious) is Jiro Taniguchi going to Venice and painting the scenery, showing the beauty of the city. It is a beautiful, stunning book, and it features the loosest possible story, where the gentleman you see on the cover sort of meanders through the city. There are pages with panels and those with full-page illustrations, and the occasional caption. It’s amazing, I love it. I’d strongly recommend it (might be out of print…).

For a preview to see what I’m talking about, check out this guy Parka Blogs, he’s probably the best art book reviewer guy out there.

10:09

“This might be the greatest sponsored comic of all time.”
-Chip Zdarsky

10:15 Chip went HARDCORE Canadian with that reference to Spider-Man Visits the Calgary Stampede. I can’t imagine that most non-Canadian listeners have ever heard of this incredibly-popular-in-Canada Spider-Man comic book, the fourth in a series of freebie comics featuring the wallcrawler that were distributed to schools, from cops, and sort of public services.

And DC Comics’s Subway “Famous Fans” comics, featuring criminal sandwich spokesman, Jared.

And then Marvel one-upped them with a sponsored comic with Northrop Grumman, a defense contractor.

[DEB] This did not go very far, as some fans were not keen to have their favorite costumed heroes associated with a company that creates weapons and technology for war, uhr… “defense purposes.” Variety has the low-down on this whole kerfuffle.

[Christopher:] It’d be like if DC did that Jared comic, but now instead of before the shoe dropped, y’know? Unreal.

13:46 The Monuments Men, a 2014 film with Matt Damon and George Clooney as part of a band of scholars and soldiers who worked to retrieve stolen works of art from the Nazis.

GQ has this overview of the real paintings that were the subject of this WWII movie, and The Smithsonian has photos and the story of the real art heroes that inspired this movie.

[Christopher:] FWIW I never did check out this movie in the last year, but the trailer looks great, if this sounded interesting to you:

15:00 This bit of foreshadowing which has Vincent Van Gogh drop his gun is pretty good.

17:50 One of the most interesting publishing projects from any manga publisher, honestly, is Pepita: Inoue meets Gaudi (VIZ Media, 2013). Slam Dunk and Real and Vagabond creator Takehiko Inoue heads to Spain and draws his way through the creations of architect Antonio Gaudi. It’s a stunning book, but very strange for most manga fans and even, I’d argue, most Inoue fans. It didn’t do very well! You can usually find it in discount bins across the country, and it’s absolutely worth a flip.

19:10 It isn’t widely discussed, but Jiro Taniguchi died after his travel to France where he was the guest of honor at the Angouleme Festival in 2017. Knowing how difficult travel is on people, especially people of advanced years (Taniguchi was 69), it’s a tough thing. He received one of the highest honors of his career at the show, and the exhibition of his work there was truly tremendous. I know he felt really honored and good, there’s lots of news stories about his appearance there. Yeah, it makes me feel really… complicated… about shows these days. That and you know, the unsolved pandemic situation.

[Deb:] Here’s Zack Davission’s obituary for Jiro Taniguchi from The Comics Journal.

20:30 Wow, that’s one of Chip’s worst color corners, in my ever-humble opinion. So what say you folks, is this not painted? Sound off in the comments.

21:00 Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and how it was depicted in Preacher by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon (Vertigo / DC Comics).

24:11 There are so many Louvre books, actually. Cats of the Louvre, Rohan at the Louvre, and The Museum Vaults: Excerpts from the Journal of an Expert by Marc Antoine Matthieu, to name just a few. Most of these books were published in English by NBM Graphic Novels, except for Cats of the Louvre by Taiyo Matsumoto, and Mujirishi by Naoki Urasawa, which were both published by VIZ Media.

For a complete (I think) list of all of the Louvre books, check out this page on the Futuropolis website, as they are the co-publishers of the Louvre collections alongside the actual… Louvre… museum.

I kinda wanna start a podcast where we just review these particular books. Lol.

26:20 Deb really loved this scene where The Raft of the Medusa was being hidden from the Nazis.

[DEB] How big is The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault? REALLY BIG.

29:00 In the “Amor Fou” episode of The Sopranos, Carmela sees Jusepe de Ribera’s painting “The Holy Family with Saints Anne and Catherine of Alexandria”, a painting of a baby and child at the Brooklyn Museum, and starts crying. FORESHADOWING.

[DEB] Cameron sees A Sunday on La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat at the Chicago Art Institute in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The Art Crimes podcast goes into this movie meets art moment in their insightful post about this scene.

[Christopher:] One of the cool things I’ve learned from doing these show notes is just how many works of art are in the public domain, and feature extremely hi-res scans/photos online. You can download a great scan from the Chicago Art Institute Website, for instance. Archive.org has one too!

How big is Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh? Surprisingly small! See it at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and you’ll see what we mean.

[DEB] Liberty Leading the People (La Liberté guidant le peuple) by Eugène Delacroix is huge. This is in the Louvre and is awe-inspiring to see in person.

31:00 Go to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam! It’s actually awesome, even though it’s full of tourists and is difficult to get tickets. The number of Van Goghs, the history, and getting to see original art! It rules! Visit museums when you travel and see art.

Oh, and the Rjiksmuseum was pretty great too.

32:00 Shintoism is pretty well documented. You really don’t need me to abstract it, heh. Here’s a link to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinto

35:30 I love that Winged Victory is fed up with tourists. It’s hilarious.

I really loved seeing Winged Victory in the Louvre! It’s so powerful, especially where it’s placed. I know it’s dumb, but also, did you know that the Louvre holds a LOT of the artwork that you can get in Animal Crossing? It was kinda… neat… getting to see it all in person.

38:14 David fucking ruled. I mean, both David’s rule, don’t get me wrong, and I look forward to the very large statue of our very own David Brothers one day. But it was awesome to get to see this famous statue in person, it really is better you would imagine, and the actual size of the thing is a big part of it.

[DEB] David by Michelangelo is 17 feet tall. Go to the Opera del Duomo Museum in Florence, Italy and you can see it for yourself!

It’s worth noting, too, that if you’re like, against paying to go into that museum/workshop for whatever reason, there is a near-perfect replica out in the public square that you can see for free, alongside a ton of other amazing statues too.

40:30 Our David’s stand out page 74 with Van Gogh’s sketch of his work.

I really dug the page after, which follows and shows him mentally colouring in the painting…

41:40 In the end, we left this in—maybe there are some lettering errors in this on page 74. The dangers of hiring a designer or letterer who doesn’t have a specific knowledge of how comic books work is there, and this is a problem that runs through the whole book once you see it the first time.

That underlined “you” there… not to mention the kerning on “Afflicted” is a little tight too, almost at a AFFUCTED situation.

43:15 Yeah, no getting around it. The Kindle edition is low-resolution and a little strange all over, and isn’t set up to read in the Japanese reading orientation. The digital version is definitely a lesser experience than the print, and I honestly wonder if that colored Chip’s opinion a little. NBM, it would be great if you could fix the digital edition.

[Christopher in 2025:] Haha, I guess they fixed this by… removing it from all ebook services? Dang, extreme. No seriously it’s probably a licensing issue seeing as how it still seems like NBM has a functioning website and is still publishing comics. I’m just glad Amazon didn’t pull it from all of our libraries. :-/ It kinda sucks that your best bet at buying books while living/traveling abroad is also like… an objectively awful company? Remember, there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism.

44:30 Chip felt that the actual guardians themselves were portrayed in a pretty underwhelming sort of way in Guardians of the Louvre. I think the cover, with the weird green jelly situation, would’ve tipped me off but yeah, I wasn’t exactly awed. It’s a bit more slimer from ghostbusters than majestic spirit, but YMMV.

46:44 I really needed a soda at the Louvre. I am glad I got one, although really water probably woulda been better.

Hey do you know about Stendhal Sydrome, or Florence Syndrome? Wikipedia calls it “a psychosomatic condition involving rapid heartbeat, confusion, hallucinations, and even fainting, allegedly occurring when individuals become exposed to objects, artworks, or phenomena of great beauty.” My friend experiences this sometimes, when encountering museums or galleries or brilliant works of art, he just breaks down crying, even sobbing sometimes. It’s a real thing! For me it usually manifests itself as extreme exhaustion, like I just ran a marathon or something but it’s like… a mental marathon. I’ve only cried a few times. 🙂

Anyway, I got my Coke™ and then I was okay again. The Louvre: It’s a lot!

48:24 So yeah, I got to see originals for this work and Taniguchi’s Venice more than once, in Anglouleme and at the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo (which was mostly Venice but they had some of his other work under glass I believe, though it’s been 10 years). I don’t have any good photos handy, they’re all one my old backups from before I switched to Google Photos, so nothing to show you except this one shot of the Tokyo exhibition:

50:40 Ah my bad, I could only track down two editions in French: The original graphic album, and then the same work but in Black and White. I had sworn there was a deluxe oversized edition, possibly with a slipcase? But I can’t seem to find it online anymore.

But as an aside: The Black and White edition is INSANE to me. It’s a book that is, despite Chip’s opinion, a fully painted and full color work. The black and white is just those same painted pages, but in black and white. It’s not like they separated the linework out or did heavy half-tones or something:

I… do not understand this choice whatsoever.

51:18 Heist stuff aside, please let me introduce you to Canada’s sketch troupe and their television show, The Kids in the Hall, and their “timeless” sketch “Big in France.”

And no, “Le Poupee” doesn’t exactly mean “The Poupee” although that’s an A+ joke. It sort of means “The Doll” and it’s actually the name of a famous opera. There’s a lot of… layers… to this joke and the more that I talk about it the more I’m like, ruining it, so I’m just gonna shut up now.

56:00 So yeah, I was treated very kindly by someone I just met, and it’s a lesson that has stayed with me since… Especially moving to a new country and meeting so many new people every week. My sincere thanks and admiration to the proprietor of Maison Petit Renard, Thibaud, for his kindness. And the Venice Portfolio book really is gorgeous.

Also, the document I got from Maison Petit Renard is the exhibition catalogue from the show “SGUARDI INCROCIATI A VENEZIA. Jiro Taniguchi Mariano Fortuny.” A website from the show is archived here online. It pairs Taniguchi’s illustrations of Venice with photographs of the city by Mariano Fortuny (1871-1949). I actually can’t find one for sale online if I’ve piqued your interest, I actually feel bad a little bad about mentioning it now that I know they’re somewhat rare. Please don’t harass the owner of Maison Petit Renard?

Here’s an image of the porfolio next to the actual Venice book, for those wondering:

Oh, and the title I bought is Brecht Evens’ Paris Travelogue book, also part of the Louis Vuitton travelogues line, which is, as you might imagine, gorgeous.

I don’t believe there’s a mass-market version of this one like there is for some of the others, but it’s still for sale on the Louis Vuitton site.

If you want to read some of Brecht’s work, he’s primarily published in English by Drawn & Quarterly. I recommend starting with The Wrong Place, it’s the first of his that I read and is maybe his most accessible, but they’re all good and I recommend checking out his stuff.

But this isn’t shout-outs, yet! This is still a podcast about Manga! Let’s head to the break.

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59:32 THE BREAK

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SHOUT OUTS!

Chip Shouts Out The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith.

Deb shouts out Pride and Panels, a newish comics festival at the San Francisco Public Library co-presented by California College of the Arts and indy publisher Silver Sprocket.

And Kyla Aiko, who is lettering No Roses Without Thorns, one of our upcoming MSX-Udon Entertainment co-publishing projects. You can see some of her self-published comics on her website, including this one, “What Could Have Been.”

Christopher has some enlightened-self-interest this episode and shouts out Wandering Cat’s Cage by Akane Torikai. It was also serialized here on Substack and the first chapter is available to read for free! Go check it out now.

David Shouts Out The Oakland Museum of California (OMCA).

He also shouts out the cheap little Taschen “Basic Art” books to learn about a whole artist.

And that’s this week in Mangasplaining! This episode is also available wherever you get your podcasts, so please subscribe and leave a review, so others can discover our show. And consider checking out our Substack and publishing endeavour MangasplainingExtra.com too! There’s a lot of great stuff over there.

Next time on Mangasplaining:

Get ready for us to take on the “just another day at the office… with MONSTERS” manga, Kaiju No. 8 vol. 1 by Naoya Matsumoto from VIZ Media.

Thanks so much for listening! Please support your local comic and manga specialty shop when purchasing these books, and you can find one near you at comicshoplocator.com. You can also check your local library for print and digital lending options, they have TONS of manga! Finally, thanks to D.A.D.S.for their musical accompaniment for this episode.

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