The Samurai Reimagined: From Ukiyo-e to Anime
The Samurai Re-Imagined explores the roots of the popular Japanese art forms of manga (graphic novels) and anime (animation) in the traditional arts of Japan by examining images of the iconic warrior, the samurai. By juxtaposing depictions of samurai in Edo era woodblock prints, ink paintings, historical photographs, animation cels and drawings, original manga panels, and toys, the exhibition will demonstrate the ongoing links between fine art and popular culture in Japan.
- Blurb from the Pacific Asia Museum Website

( nitpicky Art Historic-y babbling )

x-posted to my private journal

This community has been awfully quiet lately. Where has everyone gone?

I know where I've been (graduate school), but over the holidays I have been able to update my journal with ideas that have been percolating in my head for awhile. Perhaps they will be of interest to people here:

• Thoughts about the moé genre and related issues of quality. It's a structural analysis of sorts; I talk about musicals and porn too, if you can believe it.
• Manga and anime aren't the same thing. And I gots data from Google Trends to prove it. ^^;
• Actually, this data raises some interesting questions about online media consolidation. For all of us who get our manga news from the web, this is a serious issue.
• And lastly, a bit about what it's like to write about manga professionally when you know people who work in the manga publishing industry. (This builds on an earlier post about objectivity and reviews that doesn't explicitly talk about manga but is nevertheless written based upon my own experiences writing about manga.)

Your thoughts and feedback are, of course, much-appreciated! All of these entries are very much works in progress.

Anybody else have links to manga-related essays that they've written? Or links to manga-related essays that they really like written by other people? I'm looking to expand my horizons, so send 'em my way!

Donkey's years ago, I wrote two essays on Death Note. A friend recently suggested I should link to them in this community - I hope she was right about that and that this is appropriate to the comm! My apologies if it is not.

Death Note Notes is a look at some of the central narrative themes in the manga.

Death Note - A Queer Reading is exactly what it says it is.

Happy reading!

octopedingenue is asking for titles of anime and manga that pass the Bechdel test. The test, if you're not familiar with it, is as octopedingenue describes it:

For a media work to pass the test:
1. It has to have at least two women in it,
2. Who talk to each other,
3. About something other than a man.

She's compiling a list of titles that pass (or fail, or are still up for debate) based on the responses, and the comments, which give more detail on why titles qualify or fail, are pretty interesting reading.

She's still collecting titles, so if you have any input, leave a comment at the post; duplicates are fine, so don't worry about listing something someone else has already mentioned.

Japan Times' Eric Johnston wrote:

In Japan and other parts of Asia, "manga" comic books are not only escapist entertainment but also a powerful and effective medium to educate a broad range of people on important topics like environmental conservation and food safety.

... "The power of manga makes it easy for people around the world to understand complex issues like the environment and food safety," said Machiko Satonaka, whose manga often focus on issues of concern to women.

Ki Joun Park, a South Korean artist, said manga are used to educate people on subjects like how to reduce environmental damage when mountain climbing, and there are now some artists who focus entirely on environmental themes.

To read all of 'Manga' viewed as vibrant info conduit, go here.

Matt Thorn, professional translator, scholar, and all-around aficionado of shoujo manga, now has a blog featuring all sorts of manga and Japanese culture-related content. Matt Thorn is one of the more knowledgeable people around in the English-language manga culture, with an accessible writing style and a friendly attitude; I always perk up when I see his name turn up in one of these manga blogosphere conversations (like David Welsh, his name always seems to indicate worthwhile reading). I really recommend bookmarking this for regular reading.

Hello all,

I just published an article on my blog Myth and Manga about the Hero's Journey story structure when applied to Yaoi/Shonen Ai manga.

The full article is about 3 pages long and I didn't want to post it in full here and take up all the screen space. :D So below is an excerpt. It uses the manga Wild Rock as an example and therefore there are spoilers.

##

My curiosity about the validity of the Hero's Journey when placed in another culture's setting prompted me to apply it to a tightly focused sub-genre that is mainly written by Japanese women for women.

How does Joseph Campbell’s the Hero’s Journey, a story structure supposedly inherent to all cultures around the world, apply to the yaoi/shonen-ai genre?

As a test I've taken Wild Rock, a yaoi/shonen-ai manga, and applied the structure of the Hero's Journey to it. My results surprise me....click

Hello! New member here. ^^ Just want to say that I love the depth and thought all of you put into your questions and answers, and I love manga and discussing it, so it seems this would be a good place to be.

I've been watching anime for a couple of years now but reading manga for only a number of months. Needless to say, there are some notable storytelling differences between the two media, not the least of which is how sexually explicit a series can be on-paper versus onscreen - so the deeper I delved into manga, the quicker I was sucker-punched by *points to the subject title* that aforementioned notable difference.

( Cut for length and page-eatery, and for disinterested persons )

How do the rest of you react to any conflicting rape cases? Do any of you believe that such a case (in manga) isn't possible? If it fits the listed criteria, is it still counter-feminist or can it be treated just as another instance of gritty psychological exploration? Do you have a different criteria for what might be a conflicting rape case? Am I a terrible female for posting something like this?

And a question for the mods: What's your spoiler policy? I would like to provide the title of the manga I based my questions on (if not here, then in the comments), but it'd result in awful spoilers for anyone still reading the series. Some info: it's an old title, long-finished, but also quite popular, so there's a chance it still has new readers.

Anyway, I look forward to your insights and hope posting something like this isn't too heavy-handed. ^^;; If the whole first-impressions thing is right, then I'm sunk.

Crossposted to my own LJ.

Manga fans and mystery fans, I need your help!


I've been asked to put together some mystery-themed Japanese literature and manga for an event next spring. Despite the fact that I am a huge mystery buff, when I went looking, I realized I only know a few mystery manga titles, and absolutely nothing about Japanese mystery prose. Can anyone recommend some titles to me? English-language translations and U.S. publication are preferred, as is stuff that's still in print.*

I already know about Kindaichi Case Files, Case Closed (aka Detective Conan), Kamen Tantei, and Spiral: The Bonds of Reason. I also am familiar with Phantom Thief-esque titles, thriller titles and mystery/horror/supernatural titles such as Ghost Hunt, Lupin III, Man of Many Faces, Death Note, and Monster. Any additions I can make to this list would be greatly appreciated! Please, tell your friends, hit up that guy you met at the con. Reply here, at the entry in my personal journal, or e-mail me at alicegakuen3 at yahoo dot com.



*However, feel free to suggest untranslated, not-in-the-US, and out-of-print material, as long as it's identified as such--if nothing else, it'll be handy background information for me.

A little pet project of mine that I've been working on for the past few days.  I read a lot of manga but I forget about them quite quickly because shoujo plots are really similar to one another.  However, I don't want to feel like I wasted my time reading it, so I decided to compile a list of all the mangas I've read so far and write up a little review about each one so that I can spread the love ♥~

Feel free to recommend a manga that I haven't read yet :) I'm always open to new reads ;)

( slightly image heavy, and quite lengthy 8D )

Around 22 mini-reviews up so far ^___^

Hi guys, where is the best place to buy mang? are there any LJ communities that are devoted to just selling manga? what are some trusted online stores that sell manga for less than retail? thanks in advance. 

Well, I'm new here and I know it's a strange question. I would like to see manga in color sometimes but some people say it distracts from the manga reading experience. I want your opinions on this. 

I hope I don't sound needy but does anybody support OEL manga because I have an OEL manga support community.

Here's the link  if you want to join: http://community.livejournal.com/oel_manga/profile

A brief summary and discussion from Neil Cohn of an article on eye-movements reading comic pages, for those interested in that sort of thing. One thing noted: participants in the study were more likely to skip past a panel if the next panel contained a block of text; modifying the page so that the text was farther away from the skipped panel resulted in less skipping. Cohn wonders what level of "comic fluency" the participants possessed, since it's not discussed in the article, and comments, "The desire to jump towards panels with dense text insinuates a focus more on text than on the visuals, which was characteristic of a naive comic reader's eye-movements compared with an expert reader in Nakazawa's eye-tracking study." It's a nifty discussion, if a bit short.

Wandering off the starting point, in my journal, I probably don't make any original observations about dense text in comics, and how hard it is to go from Japanese to American comics.

Just sharing the project I submitted to the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley as my honors thesis.

Follow this link to my journal.

It deals with gender and representation in manga, specifically examining the dismemberment sequences in CLAMP's manga X. Could be a fun read. :)

Feel free to let me know what you think!

EDIT: If the link expires, just let me know and I'll be happy to put it up again.

I just joined this group while looking for an academic or professional source about the trend toward unflipped manga. If anyone has such a link, could you pass it along?

It's for my thesis project, which is largely a ESL/EFL curriculum design based on using translated manga. My classmate and I did a presentation on a related topic at conference a couple of months ago, and the turnout was huge! There's an online version of our handout here: http://www.sharedwing.net/tesol/manga/
I'm still working on it, so if you have suggestions, please pass them along.

Out of curiosity, are any of you on AMRC-L? (It's a very good, if occasionally contentious, mailing list for academic discussion and research on anime and manga.)

I wrote this awhile back..I don't believe that I've ever posted it...and all those words may be of interest to someone else...


Ever wonder why you see the same anime characters popping up over and over again? No…it’s not stealing. They are just archetypal characters: generic personalities that pop up in every culture.



Dowload the pdf for write-ups of 19 male and female archetypes like the Sullen Bishonen, Perverted Old Man, the Female Prince and others.

It'll be up on my blog Myth and Manga as soon as I figure out my password. *doh*

I got this link from the Anime/Manga scholars group I'm in. I'm not sure if it's been posted before. Mods, if you guys know if someone's already shown it, feel free to delete this post. Check it out if you're interested!

The South Bank Show tackles Manga Mania.

Hi guys, if you're interested, I gave a pretty thorough summaryactual outline and my thoughts about this talk given by Roland Kelts in Berkeley today.

It's over here on my journal.

Greetings everyone, first time poster here.

Mods, let me know if this post isn't allowed. I just thought this would be another great resource to explore.

I'm an art history major focusing on Japanese art in Berkeley but I'm also a big fan of manga which is why I'm excited to be working on my own topic this semester.

( Yes, I am writing my honors thesis on CLAMP and manga. )

If you guys have any thoughts on the subject or potential sources that you think might be useful for my research, I'd really appreciate the help. You will ofcourse be properly acknowledged and credited in the actual paper.

Hello everyone...thought I'd share my lastest article with you. It's my first post. Hope it's interesting to you all. thanks.

I've just finished a long ass article on why the anime/manga Naruto has compelling characters that are larger than life...and why I care.

Warning: there are spoilers. I cover Volume 1 – 19 of the manga and Episodes 1 – 96 of the anime. The characters touched on are Naruto, Haku, Roc Lee, Hinata, Neji, Gaara & Sasuke.

Here's Naruto's write up...my blog MYTH and MANGA has the rest.

Naruto.

Theme: To be acknowledged
Goal: To become Hokage of the Leaf.
Character Intro: Vol 1, Ch1, Pg 3

On the surface is a one dimensional character with the stated purpose, “to become the Hokage of the Leaf.” His personality is brash, bold, daring, loud, and dumb which I don’t care for at all BUT his whole character is driven by the personal theme, to be acknowledged.

Anyone who feels lonely and left out and who is striving to get the attention of their peers or recognition in anything can identify with that character theme. That is why I eventually warmed up to this character because at his core, Naruto is a lonely orphan who has been shunned by his village because a fox-demon was sealed within him at his birth.

Naruto wants to be seen by his village as someone who is valuable to the community and the person who is the most valued is the leader, the Hokage. As Naruto has no family, last in his class, and an outcast, to been seen he’s had to be the loudest one there is. The only thing that sets Naruto apart from the geniuses that surround him (apart from the Fox Demon within him) is that he never gives up.

Ch 166 18 & 19 – Jiraiya acknowledges Naruto as a “spirit that never gives up.”

Ch 98 11 – I may appear strong to you but that’s because I act though because I’m so frustrated of always failing. – Naruto to Hinata