Das Kapital - The Manga

[Mulboyne]

Times: Karl Marx goes manga in a Kapital comic strip
When Karl Marx alerted economists to the “the knell of capitalist private property” he probably didn’t imagine the phrase cropping-up as a speech bubble in a comic strip for Japanese commuters. But across the world’s second biggest economy, bookstores from Hiroshima to Hokkaido are preparing for what they expect to be the publishing phenomenon of the year: Das Kapital – the manga version. The comic, which goes on sale early next month, plays into a growing fascination among Japan’s hard-working labour force with socialist literature and joins a collection of increasingly fierce literary critiques of the global capitalist system...The comic is expected to sell tens of thousands of copies in its first weeks on sale, but is up against stiff competition: anti-capitalist books are the hottest sellers in capitalist Japan at the moment, and it will take something extraordinary to beat the sales of Hideki Mitani’s “Greedy Capitalism and the Self Destructiveness of Wall Street”...the book has become the fastest-selling non-fiction title for many years...more...