The boys love (BL) genre was created for girls and women by
young female manga (comic) artists in early 1970s Japan to
challenge oppressive gender and sexual norms. Over the years, BL
has seen almost ...irrepressible growth in popularity and since the
2000s has become a global media phenomenon, weaving its way into
anime, prose fiction, live-action dramas, video games, audio
dramas, and fan works. BL's male-male romantic and sexual
relationships have found a particularly receptive home in other
parts of Asia, where strong local fan communities and locally
produced BL works have garnered a following throughout the region,
taking on new meanings and engendering widespread cultural effects.
Queer Transfigurations is the first detailed examination of the BL
media explosion across Asia. The book brings together twenty-one
scholars exploring BL media, its fans, and its sociocultural
impacts in a dozen countries in East, Southeast, and South Asia-and
beyond. Contributors draw on their expertise in an array of
disciplines and fields, including anthropology, fan studies, gender
and sexuality studies, history, literature, media studies,
political science, and sociology to shed light on BL media and its
fandoms. Queer Transfigurations reveals the far-reaching influences
of the BL genre, demonstrating that it is truly transnational and
transcultural in diverse cultural contexts. It has also helped
bring about positive changes in the status of LGBT(Q) people and
communities as well as enlighten local understandings of gender and
sexuality throughout Asia. In short, Queer Transfigurations shows
that, some fifty years after the first BL manga appeared in print,
the genre is continuing to reverberate and transform lives.
El objetivo de este trabajo es el análisis del cómic japonés Great Teacher Onizuka, creado por Tohru Fujisawa y publicado en México por Editorial Vid. El primer tomo se publicó 11 de enero de 2006 y ...el último el 20 de septiembre del 2007. A través del análisis de la imagen y el texto, pretendemos estudiar la manera en la que se construye al protagonista, Onizuka, como un héroe de acuerdo a la teoría de la aventura heroica, el ciclo mitológico y a las características que le asigna Joseph Campbell al héroe mítico. Por otro lado, nos interesa examinar la manera en la que el protagonista transgrede los estereotipos de masculinidad basados en figuras de aspecto físico potente, que encarnan una serie de valores morales y que, a través diversos atributos y acciones, contribuyen a la conformación de la identidad masculina vinculada a la violencia en el esquema patriarcal. Pretendemos visibilizar cómo el personaje de Onizuka pese a que encarna a un héroe mítico, representa una ruptura en los esquemas de masculinidad al mostrar un modelo alterno de “ser hombre”.
The article is an attempt to analyse the methods and critical arguments against the manga and anime expressed by the people who, in the polemical discourse of their opponents, are treated as experts. ...The analysis focuses mostly on articles by Małgorzata Więczkowska, highlighting the constant crypto-self-quotations and the repeating of factual errors and steoreotypical biases. In these texts, one can notice i.e. the generalisation of accusations based on opinions on particular titles, describing the entire phenomenon through the characteristics of selected types and genres, the lack of any distinction being made between manga and anime, and lastly, a superficial understanding of the works in question, whose content and message the author often extrapolates from an overview, without taking the specifics of each work into account.
The objective of this contribution is to create a first, ideal mapping of a “category” of manga that has experienced and is still experiencing a very successful season. Although they are generically ...identified with the term “horror manga” or “horror comics,” these manga should be placed within a narrative universe so magmatic as to escape, however, any univocal representation. When we speak of Japanese horror, in fact, we tend to imagine well-defined scenarios and stereotypes, often conveyed by some novels, manga and, perhaps even more so, some films that have bewitched the West, such as The Ring (1998) and Ju-on (2000). Despite the success in Italy, too, of authors such as Umezu Kazuo (楳図かずお, b. 1936), Hino Hideshi (日野日出志, b. 1946) and Itō Junji (伊藤潤二, b. 1963), knowledge of horror manga is limited to a number of works and authors who represent, however, only a small percentage of a far more polychrome and multifaceted narrative universe. In other words, the tip of an iceberg just waiting to be brought to light. This preliminary contribution is intended to trace a path, thematic/narrative in nature, from which the route of “horror” manga can emerge in a diachronic, dynamic and evolutionary perspective. It goes without saying that, dealing with nearly seventy years of horror comic book publications, it will be impossible to make an exhaustive examination that takes into account all publishing realities, large and small. That is why the field of investigation will be narrowed down and focus exclusively on a specific historical period, from its beginnings in 1958 to the boom of the 1980s, examining the most recurrent themes and stylistic features of this time segment.
In the last few decades, Japanese popular culture productions have been consolidated as one of the most influential and profitable global industries. As a creative industry, Japanese Media-Mixes ...generate multimillion-dollar revenues, being a product of international synergies and the natural appeal of the characters and stories. The transnationalization of investment capital, diversification of themes and (sub)genres, underlying threat in the proliferation of illegal audiences, development of internet streaming technologies, and other new transformations in media-mix-based production models make the study of these products even more relevant today. In this way, manga (Japanese comics), anime (Japanese animation), and video games are not necessarily products designed for the national market. More than ever, it is necessary to reconcile national and transnational positions for the study of this cultural production.The present volume includes contributions aligned to the analysis of Japanese popular culture flow from many perspectives (cultural studies, film, comic studies, sociology, etc.), although we have emphasized the relationships between manga, anime, and international audiences. The selected works include the following topics:• Studies on audiences—national and transnational case studies;• Fandom production and Otaku culture;• Cross-media and transmedia perspectives;• Theoretical perspectives on manga, anime, and media-mixes.
Taking an arguably minor character from Tezuka Osamu's oeuvre, Natsume Fusanosuke argues how the Pig Gourd's cameos even in the artist's most serious works demonstrate a bifurcated sense of play and ...high-brow artistry in his manga. Natsume employs an early version of his 'manga-expression theory' (manga hyōgen-ron) manga-analysis approach, which he began to develop in this, his first manga-studies monograph and seminal study of the 'god of manga' Tezuka Osamu. This translation of a chapter essay from Where Is Tezuka Osamu? (
1992
) demonstrates Natsume's versatility in isolating thematic patterns or formal experimentations in an artist's style, including character design and page layouts. Natsume's 'manga-expression theory' approach, which focuses on three basic elements of manga (words, pictures, and frames), can be seen in this essay on Tezuka's trademark Pig Gourd character, who will pop up or even decimate panel borders to show not only Tezuka's embarrassment at being unable to resist a sight gag but also his bold desire to play with panel possibilities. The larger picture that Natsume describes here is how this ubiquitous cameo character became a litmus test of readers' tastes as the manga master's target demographic became older and wise to his stylistic idiosyncrasies.
"This edited collection explores how graphic art and in particular Japanese manga represent Japanese history. The articles explore the representation of history in manga from disciplines that include ...such diverse fields as literary studies, politics, history, cultural studies, linguistics, narratology, and semiotics. Despite this diversity of approaches all academics from these respective fields of study agree that manga pose a peculiarly contemporary appeal that transcends the limitation imposed by traditional approaches to the study and teaching of history. The representation of history via manga in Japan has a long and controversial historiographical dimension. Thereby manga and by extension graphic art in Japanese culture has become one of the world's most powerful modes of expressing contemporary historical verisimilitude. The strategy of combining the narrative elements of writing with graphic art, the extensive narrative story-manga and its Western equivalent of the graphic novel, reflects the relatively new soft power of 'global' media, which have the potential to display history in previously unimagined ways. Boundaries of space and time in manga become as permeable as societies and cultures across the world. Each of the articles in this book investigates the authorship of history by looking at various different attempts to render Japanese history through the popular cultural media of the story-manga. As Carol Gluck, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Susan Napier and others have shown, it has never been easy to encapsulate the complex narrative of emperor-based cyclical Japanese historical periods. The contributors to this volume elaborate how manga and by extension graphic art rewrites, reinvents and re-imagines the historicity and dialectic of bygone epochs in postwar/contemporary Japan. "--