Tag: manga
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17. Otaku vs. Geeks vs. the World
I know that last week I had said that I would be writing about the similarities and differences between talking about manga at cons and academic conferences, but something that I ended on last week, the stifling prerogatives of masculinity, has been nibbling at my brain all week long and won’t let up. Given that…
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16. Who is reading shōjo manga?
To continue somewhat from last week’s consideration of Yoshizaki Seimu’s Kingyoya koshoten and the idea that the people who read comics aren’t always what you think they are, I want to think somewhat broadly about shōjo manga and whether, as a demographically oriented comic type, it should be meaningfully construed as “for girls.” I have already…
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15. Between Nostalgia and Progress – Yoshizaki Seimu’s Kingyoya koshoten
I can imagine how over the past few [dozen] weeks, you, dear reader, have come to be more than a little irritated with my raving about how everyone is wrong and I am so right, people should just listen to me, and other egomaniacal claptrap. I’ve expressed my displeasure on several occasions with how critics…
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14d. The Anonymous Mangaka, Don’t Expect Us
Alright, the last of this four part kerfuffle, and I can imagine you, dear reader, breathing a gale force sigh of relief that my month long digression through ancient history is coming to an end. The four parts of this series have delved into the roughly four levels of pre-war manga notoriety: legend, notable, who?,…
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14c. Framing the Manga Landscape – Kawamori Hisao
Given how spectacularly unread last week’s post was, I can only imagine this week’s post’s plumbing the possibility of negative pageviews. Nevertheless, I care about these things, so, for the time being, dear reader, I suppose you have to [not] care about these things. I promise to at some point return to manga that may…
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14b. The Legend[s] of Ogawa Jihei
I left off last week somewhere verging on unfamiliar territory, or, if you will, right at the boundary between the known and not-so-known. In many ways, the posts in this series will reflect that movement into ever greater degrees of unknown-y-ness. Our first stop was a well-known but, to my mind, grossly misunderstood artist, Kitazawa…
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14a. Two Nations – Kitazawa Rakuten and the Problem of Kindai Manga
It seems every time I sit down to write one of these things I have to apologize for treating a particular topic at short shrift, even when going on about it at great length. This week–rather the next several weeks are no exception. Kindai manga (i.e. manga from 1868, the beginning of the Meiji period, to…
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13b. ICAF Retrospective and the Place of [Manga] Studies
As I noted last week, I spent several days in Portland surrounding the 2013 International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF), where I discovered two important things: the city’s official tourist maps border on useless and the actual city of Portland is not, much to my chagrin, to be identified with the Portlandia of comic imagination. Nevertheless,…
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13a. The Problematic Gendering of Shōnen Manga
Over the weekend I was at ICAF, and so I am still recovering from excessive travel. I’ve decided to post the text of the paper I gave (or rather how I wrote it up–I tend not to actually read papers at conferences), and next week I’ll give some thoughts on the panel as well as…
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12. Are Yon-koma manga comic strips?
Before I get into today’s topic, I want to note that I will be traveling to Portland later this week to present at ICAF (International Comic Arts Forum) on Saturday. This means I may not have a post up right away Sunday evening, as I will have to drive back to Iowa from Chicago after…