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The manuscripts that are currently seen at many manga exhibitions are illustrations drawn by artists with phototypesetting pasted on them. When people think of manga originals, they often picture these illustrations with text pasted onto the speech bubbles. But before the invention and popularization of phototypesetting, the manga typesetting and printing process was done differently.
The old-fashioned method was to etch the manga illustration into a metal (zinc) plate, carve out the speech bubbles with a thread saw, and embed the "type-picked" text in the space created. Type-picking refers to the task of selecting and arranging each letter of type according to the original. It sounds like something out of the days of Gutenberg, but until the late 1970s, this was a common practice. The first chapter of Osamu Akimoto's KochiKame: Tokyo Beat Cops, which was serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1976, was also typeset using movable type.
However, although this information has been passed down, the zinc plates and type that were actually used were melted down and reused at the workshops. As far as we know, none of the actual plates or type still exist, and we were not even able to find any photographs of them. In 2022, with the help of the Kazui Press (Shinjuku, Tokyo), we found a company that can still produce zinc plates of manga manuscripts, so we launched a project to recreate the process of printing manga using metal plates and moveable type. We recorded the following processes in a video: the production of etched zinc plates, type casting, integrating typesetting, and letterpress printing.
The monochrome original artwork on the pages of the manga was scanned using a dedicated scanner and saved as two-tone data consisting of black and white only. This resulted in a clear image with no halftones. Marks left by pasted phototypesetting, editorial instructions, and stains were retouched to produce data ready for printing. At this stage, the data was output to negative film. The plate was brought into contact with a zinc alloy plate covered with a blue photosensitive film and irradiated with ultraviolet light. When the plate was developed, the coating in the unexposed areas dissolved away, leaving the exposed areas protected by a blue film. The plate was then placed in an etching machine, where the zinc was etched with nitric acid. The result was a plate where the blue image areas remained, while all the other areas were etched away, creating recessed areas. The plate was washed, and then finished by removing the unnecessary areas with a router.
The type was produced at Sasaki Katsuji (Tokyo). It was cast using a casting machine manufactured by Hakko Type Caster.
Type is produced by melting the base metal (an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony) in the furnace of a typecasting machine and casting it into molds. A brass matrix is placed at the end of the mold, and the metal is pressed against it, forming individual pieces of metal type one by one.
At the Kazui Press, the speech balloon sections of the etched zinc plates are cut out using a fretsaw and processed to allow the type to be inserted. Holes were first made with an awl, after which the fretsaw blade was passed through, cutting the metal plate. The type was set, and its position was adjusted using metal blocks and leading for line spacing. Since pressure needs to be applied equally on the entire printing surface, fine adjustments were repeatedly made, such as by pasting paper onto points with low printing pressure.
Even today, manga manuscript paper is marked with reference grids, and artists are instructed to keep important text elements within these lines. This shows that, in the era when manga was typeset using physical type, text could only be set within those boundaries.
In earlier manga printing practices, the completed metal plates were pressed into paper to form molds, and the resulting paper molds served as the base molds for printing. Lead was then poured into these molds to produce printing plates. The metal plates and type are said to have been melted and reused after the paper molds were made.
In this case, the finished metal plates were used directly, and printing was performed on the printing presses at the Kazui Press. Manufactured by the German company Heidelberg, the machine known as the “platen press” has been in operation since 1963. To ensure that sufficient ink is supplied to the plate, the timing of paper insertion is controlled manually during the printing process.
