Mangatopia

Autorentext
MARTHA CORNOG has written a wide range of articles on information science, librarianship, and sex, and coauthored, with Timothy Perper, teaching guides on human sexuality. She was on the board of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex and is manager of Membership Services for the American College of Physicians.

Klappentext
This book provides fascinating insights on what Japanese manga and anime mean to artists, audiences, and fans in the United States and elsewhere, covering topics that range from fantasy to sex to politics.

Zusammenfassung
Fascinating insights on what Japanese manga and anime mean to artists, audiences, and fans in the United States and elsewhere, covering topics that range from fantasy to sex to politics. Within the last decade, anime and manga have become extremely popular in the United States.

Inhalt
When Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Sailor Moon arrived in the United States from Japan in the 1990s, manga and anime entered a transnational flow of cultural goods that spiraled outwards into ever more complex loops of influence, fandom, and marketing (Matsui 2009). By then, manga and anime had already crossed the horizons of European popular art and culture (Pellitteri 2010 and Marco Pellitteri, , this volume) and had likewise reached Southeast Asian audiences and markets (Wong 2006). In one direction of the arrow, none of this was new; Raoul Walsh's 1924 silent film The Thief of Baghdad, which starred Douglas Fairbanks, had within two years been adapted and remade as an animated film in Japan: Noburo O fuji's 1926 Bagadajo no tozoku (The Thief of Baghdad Castle; see Miyao 2007). But what has made the manga and anime explosion of recent years different is that now Japan, and increasingly Korea and China, are exporting cultural goods to the Eurocentric Western world-and with extravagant aesthetic, cultural, and commercial success. For at least some U.S. critics, journalists, and commercial commentators, manga and anime have constituted a bewildering intrusion or even challenge to the unquestioned (although parochial) view that U.S. production values embody the worldwide standard for comics and for animation. How could anyone else excel at cartoons when Superman and Batman define the comics, or when Fantasia and 101 Dalmatians define animation? If Who Framed Roger Rabbit was the 1988 ne plus ultra of innovative filmmaking, what was this Akira thing all about? The college students who formed the first definable fanbase for anime in the United States had it right when they said that they'd never seen anything like this before (Napier 2005). But they loved it-together with Robotech, Ninja Scroll, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. But more astonishments lay ahead. The hero-worshipping boys who were Robotech's and Gundam's first fans had sisters. And the sisters and their female friends adored Sailor Moon-and then Cardcaptor Sakura, Fruits Basket, and FAKE. By today, girls and young women form a large percentage of the manga/anime fanbase, a striking change from a three-decades historical predominance of young males in U.S. comics fandom (Robbins 2009). Because European experience with manga and anime predated U.S. familiarity, older continental women have maintained their enthusiasm for these Japanese art-forms, leading to extensive translation and publication in France, Italy, Spain, and Germany of manga originally written by adult women for adult women-the genres called josei and rediisu (see Kinko Ito, , this volume, for a biographical discussion of Chikae Ide, a major josei manga artist). Simultaneously, a shift occurred in cartoon and comics criticism both in the United States and in Europe. Moving from an outlaw child of establishment print and publishing, comics and cartooning criticism renewed itself, a process greatly helped by the Internet and by blogging. It was difficult for alert critics to ignore the simply stunning beauty of animated films such as Hayao Miyazaki's 1997 Princess Mononoke and Mamoru Oshii's 2004 Innocence-or, more recently, Kenji Kamiyama's 2007 Seirei no moribito (see Paul Jackson, , this volume). Some earlier commentators, such as Ivan Stang (1988, 257-58), had foreseen the potential impact of anime such as Yoshiaki Kawajiri's 1984 Lensman, a masterpiece of over-the-top swashbuckling romance, adventure, and comedy, including a scene unequalled in animation of a riot in a discotheque. Part of this shift in comics criticism produced theories about how cartooning works and achieves its effects, including writing by Scott McCloud, Neil Cohn (http://www.webcomicsnation.com/NeilCohn), and Alan Cholodenko, among others (Cholodenko 1991, 2007; McCloud 1993). In turn, their work stimulated further theoretical analysis, for example, by Thomas LaMarre and by Deborah Shamoon (some in this volume; see also LaMarre 2009). Much work of this kind is being published in Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and the Fan Arts (http://www.mechademia.org), several of whose editors are represented in this collection: Frenchy Lunning, herself the editor of Mechademia, Thomas LaMarre, Patrick Drazen, and ourselves. So manga and anime did more than entertain an increasing number of ardent fans in the United States and Europe. Manga and anime also forced Western viewers and critics to revision the nature of cartooning, comics, and animation. In part, the revisioning has occurred because manga and anime overtly combine political, social, and emotional issues into narrative entireties, in stark contrast to the kiddie fare of Saturday morning cartoons on U.S. television. But this combination has characterized manga from the early post-World War II days of Osamu Tezuka (see Ada Palmer, , and William Benzon, , in this volume) and is central to both right-wing and left-wing views of manga (see Matthew Penney, , this volume). No one can ignore the politics of emotionality when the subject matter of manga is the bombing of Hiroshima (see Thomas LaMarre, , this volume). Nor can one ignore the history of Japanese art when looking at manga and anime. Transnational flows of influence may have arrived in Japan from the United States and Europe, but, equally, Japanese art has, since the 19th century, influenced Eurocentric art-for example, as Japonisme in France (Wichmann 1999). But manga and anime have been, if not immune, then relatively indifferent, to two of the cornerstones of modern Eurocentric art. One is abstractionism, dating roughly from 1900 to 1910 in Europe, central to work by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. But far more than drawing on European models of abstract art, manga and anime depend on recognizably Japanese forms of minimalism and abstraction-which Westerners may recognize only at a distance when gazing uncertainly at flower arranging and wondering what it means. Many viewers, we imagine, do not make complex aesthetic assessments when they watch giant robots stomping through the landscape or when they watch some poor high school lad torn between the seductions of two equally pretty heroines. But the minimalism is there, in a succinct focus on the image, on its symmetry, and on an elegance of line and coloring that wastes no space or effort. So we are grateful when scholars such as Deborah Shamoon and Thomas LaMarre ( and , respectively, in this volume) explicate the origins and nature of some of these techniques. But above all, manga and anime have not abandoned realism with the enthusiasm with which Eurocentric art surrendered to the blandishments of abstractionism. Of course, abstract, even surreal, manga and anime exist, some of them masterpieces, such as Kazuya Tsurumaki's 2000 FLCL and Ku…

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