Category: Teaching Manga
-
33. Shit You Might Want to Know #1 – Demographics vs. Genres
I had initially intended to title today’s post “Shit You Should Already Know,” but it occurred to me that some may be coming to this post out of simple curiosity and not because their particularly strange assumptions need to be corrected. For I have returned from my indefinite hiatus, wherein I have been detoxing from being irritated…
-
25. The [a]Moral Logic of Shingeki no Kyojin
It surprises me sometimes how little shōnen manga is treated in the academic and pseudo-intellectual literature. Far more attention is paid to shōjo manga and its social function in constructing for young readers a particular conception of girlhood. Moreover, I’m surprised how little the ever recurring themes of shōnen manga are compared with and understood in the context…
-
21. Okamoto Ippei, or Another New Manga
Almost entirely by accident, I seem to be constantly running into “new manga” of late, and not simply new manga in the sense of new titles but entirely new conceptions of manga, be it the Franco-Japanese hybrid of la nouvelle manga or this week’s topic, Okamoto Ippei’s How to Draw the New Manga (Atarashiki manga no kakikata-shū). This “collection” comprises…
-
10b. Invested in [Mecha] Manga – Miyazaki Hayao’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
EDIT: I apologize for the delay, but as I was writing this yesterday, my daughter decided to somersault out of her bedroom window, so her mother and I spent most of the day in the emergency room. She (and we) are more or less fine, but it has resulted in a bit of a delay.…
-
7. From [right] to [left] – Manga Orthography
As someone who tries to take the study of manga both seriously but also with a sense of whimsy, I am nevertheless regularly annoyed by sometimes general and sometimes specific statements about manga (especially the critical fiction that is its seeming otherness to Western comics) that I have encountered in a variety of milieux. If…
-
2c. [Learning] Manga – When “Styles” Collide
Last week I demonstrated how claims for the ubiquity of manga styles, especially in the West, are more often than not predicated upon a complete lack of comparative analysis. As a result, comparative analysis is really the only means for determining what is stylistically distinct between Anglo-American and Japanese comics. However, this is made doubly…
-
2b. Teaching Manga – Instruction and the “Manga Style”
There is [No] Manga Style (only Zuul) When confronting the problem of manga style–and it is a problem, dear reader–it is quite easy to be led astray by the champions of manga in the English-speaking world and their passionate and earnest reassurances that there is no unified “manga style,” that manga can be anything you…
-
2a. Teaching Manga – What You Do[n’t] Know Can[‘t] Hurt You
In Hindsight Not Such a Great Idea When I first thought of teaching a class on manga for the Japanese program at the University of [omitted to protect the guilty], I was extremely excited. I spent more time on that syllabus than I have for any class I’ve ever taught and made a number of…
What is Manga? 