As we close out 2024 and move into 2025, content providers everywhere online, from Vox to A.V. Club to Anime News Network are publishing year-end summary articles and Best-Of lists. (…and worst-of lists). Here at animemangastudies.com, I do not have either hopes or ambitions to compete with those kinds of content providers – but you know what, maybe I can also take a bit of time to point out just some of the highlights of 2024 when it comes to – anime and manga studies!

Granted, many of the year’s highlights will be based on the full list of English-language scholarly publications on anime/manga that appeared throughout the year. But even a cursory look at this list can bring up some really interesting

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From what I can tell, 2024 saw the publication of at least 6 scholarly monographs that discuss different aspects of Japanese animation and comics either primarily or at least extensively alongside other related topics:

In The Flesh of Animation: Bodily Sensations in Film and Digital Media, Sandra Annett (Wilfried Laurier University) explores the ways that animation can specifically “provoke” or evoke different sensory experiences – using examples from anime such as Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle and Hiroyuki Okiura’s A Letter to Momo – as well as a variety of American, European, Korean, and other animated films.

Jinying Li (Brown University) is the author of Anime’s Knowledge Cultures: Geek, Otaku, Zhai – an in-depth exploration of what exactly makes “anime” broadly defined particularly appealing to a certain kind of viewer regardless of what country they are from or what culture they themselves are grounded in.

With The Tale of Genji through Contemporary Manga: Challenging Gender and Sexuality in Japan Lynne K. Miyake (Pomona College) specifically sets out to make a lasting contributing to manga studies by analyzing approximately 40 different manga titles published between 1974 and 2019 that each are somehow based on aspects of the classic story.

The subject of Rediscovered Classics of Japanese Animation: The Adaptation of Children’s Novels into the World Masterpiece Theater (Maria Chiara Oltolini) is both the overall role of Western children’s fiction as the source material for Japanese animated television series, the specific production history of the various World’s Masterpiece Theater series, and comprehensive studies of two of the most well-known titles under the label – Anne of Green Gables (directed by Isao Takahata) and A Little Princess Sara.

James Welker (Kanagawa University) has been publishing research on Japanese comics since at least 2006. Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls‘ Comics Artists and Fans makes the argument that these three “spheres” had a significant influence on the broader Japanese society, in particular with regard to expanding the meaning and understanding of “women”.

Neil Cohn (Tilburg University) is a leading scholar of the structure of drawings and other visual narratives. The Patterns of Comics: Visual Languages of Comics from Asia, Europe, and North America is an analysis of over 36,000 individual panels, from over 350 different comics, including many manga titles, to support arguments Cohn has made about an overall “visual language of comics” – that, however, varies significantly between different “kinds” of comics.

In addition to these 6 titles, the list of book-length publications on anime/manga that appeared in 2024 also included 2 collections of edited essays:

The Cambridge Companion to Manga and Anime – a new entry in a series that now includes almost 900 different titles – may very well end up being one of the first examples of scholarly writing on anime/manga that students may encounter. And, between its compact format, attractive pricing, and of course the Cambridge University Press brand, it can definitely be easy to recommend and to add to class reading lists.

At the same time, and interestingly, the goal of the Companion is not to introduce readers to the most “common” topics or approaches in anime and manga studies – there is nothing, for example, on Studio Ghibli or Hayao Miyazaki. Rather, its goal seems to be to offer a foundation for further exploration and analysis, such as by presenting key definitions (“fans and scholars agree that manga and anime are to be understood as media forms rather that genres….”) and outlining ways of exploring elements that are foundational for understanding anime/manga, or common to anime and manga in general – graphic style, character acting, how manga represents sounds and voices, the impact of 3D animation on the classic anime style, the role of editors and production studios, and the concept of the Media Mix. This, though, does lead to one criticism – for some of the topics – as extensive as “manga genres”, or “anime fandom in Japan and beyond”, the ten pages that are allocated to them is simply not enough for a discussion that does not feel like it is missing important details.

The Palgrave Handbook of Music and Sound in Japanese Animation, in the Palgrave Studies in Sound series, is an almost overwhelming volume – 35 main chapters, as well as an array of interviews, short biographical notes for several dozen composers and performers, and a general glossary.

Within the main chapters, the scope is comprehensive both thematically, starting with a “basic overview on the rhetoric of music”, a “key concepts of music in anime” chapter, and an essay on anime voice acting and the voice acting industry, chronologically, from the 1930’s to essentially the present, covering a number of important composers and scores, and geographically, with discussions of “Re-written Songs, Musics, and Dubbing for Anime” – in the U.S., Europe, Latin America, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

I have also identified at least 40 additional chapters on topics related to anime/manga that appeared in edited essay collections published in 2024. Going through all of them would be impossible, but I can at least try to to highlight a few:

  • Julien Bouvard contributes the chapter Turning the page: Reading manga in the Pandemic Age to The Coronavirus Pandemic in Japanese Literature and Popular Culture, analyzing both the appeal of manga in general during 2020 and 2021, the specific appeal of manga in print, and the particular appeal of Demon Slayer.
  • In YA literature, plus ultra: A case study of the shonen anime My Hero Academia, in Alt Kid Lit: What Children’s Literature Might Be, Brandon Murakami points out that so far, scholarship on children’s literature has largely ignored anime and manga, and “suggests how the field of children’s literature might benefit from greater engagement with anime” by pointing out the similarities between it and various examples from “Anglophone young adult literature”. These similarities of course also make the particular distinctions of My Hero Academia readily apparent as well.
  • One of the chapters in The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature is Manga as trans literature (Tara Etherington). Its goal is to introduce Japanese comics in general to Japanese comics, while also outlining the evolution or development of how transgender characters are represented in manga, from 1970’s female-oriented titles such as Rose of Versailles, through the inclusion of transgender characters in male-oriented manga, to manga by transgender authors/artists.

Animate(d) Architecture: A Spatial Investigation of the Moving Image (Liverpool University Press) is an “interdisciplinary approach to survey the role of space in animation”. And across its 13 chapters, 5 address Japanese animation specifically:

– Maciej Stasiowksi, Construction Perseveration Disorder: The Extreme Tectonics of Urban Renewal in Post-Modern Japanese Animation.
– Jason Vigneri-Beane, Radical Transformation: Bodies, Infrastructures, and Mixed Identities.
– Christine Madrid French and Gideon Rey Madrid French, The Architecture of Entrapment: Capturing the Body and the Mind in Anime.
– Kristina Barancovaitė-Skindaravičienė, The Animated Architecture of Intimacy: Fantasy Space and Gender Relations in Japanese Pornographic Anime.
– Vahid Vahdat, The Slave Aesthetics of Suburbia: Animate Architecture in Howl’s Moving Castle and Up.

When people think about a stereotypical “scholarly publication”, the article by a single author (or, less frequently, by several), published in a subject-specific peer-reviewed scholarly journal is what most readily comes to mind. And, based on my work tracking these, as many as 101 articles on topics related to Japanese animation or Japanese comics appeared in English-language scholarly journals with a 2024 volume or issue cover date. Often, the individual articles themselves were first made available online much earlier, but, make year-to-year tracking and comparisons easier, I track “cover” dates and publication dates both. And here too, I can at least highlight several of the articles on anime/manga that were published in 2024 that I think are particularly worth pointing out!

  • Thomas Parr, Georgia. Anime girls embodied: an introduction to British maid cosplay. Feminist Media Studies, 24(2), 224-239.

    “Intended as an introduction to maid cosplay studies in a global context, the paper presents maid cosplay as a topic of interest to girlhood and feminist scholarship that reflects an underlying paradox at play: in spite of the discourses of fetishization underpinning the maid uniform, maid cosplayers feel liberated from the pressures of sexualisation in their presentation and performance as kawaii (cute), fictional shōjo (girl) characters.”

These next two papers can be read as companions to each other – especially in light of the very recent negative publicity surrounding both Crunchyroll and Netflix:

  • Noh, Susan. Global media streams: Netflix and the changing ecosystem of anime production. Television & New Media, 25(3), 234-250.

    “Using the case study of how Netflix is influencing the Japanese anime industry, this research outlines the contradictory ways that the streaming service engages with international media and how local creators are grappling with the specter of globalism that Netflix represents in their own work.”
  • Ristola, Jaqueline. Going Gonzo: Crunchyroll, anime streaming, and unpaid digital labour. Kinephanos: Journal of Media Studies and Popular Culture, 10(1), 145-174.

    “This essay combines Marxist political economy, discursive analysis, and fan studies methodologies to analyze how Crunchyroll capitalized on unpaid fan labour to transform itself from a popular piracy site into a legitimate streaming platform.”

—

  • Ito, Rika. Please take her as your wife: Mediatizing indigenous Ainu in the Japanese anime, Golden Kamuy. Language, Culture & Society, 6(1), 80-104.

    “The article discusses how advanced/backward distinctions that the Japanese elites appropriated from the 19th-century colonial discourse are reinscribed in this anime with a modern twist. It also advocates our need to raise critical questions about language, race, and power for a just society in various contexts, including popular media.”
  • Whaley, Ben. Who let the dogs out? Race as illness in Tezuka Osamu’s Ode to Kirihito. The Journal of Japanese Studies, 50(1), 37-63.

    “Centering on a fictional disease that physically transforms its victims into human-canine hybrids, Kirihito sanka illustrates how easily ethno-racial stereotypes can inform discourses on disease, and how discrimination and racism are illnesses without national or cultural boundaries. As such, the manga is a sterling example of Tezuka’s gekiga-inspired works of the 1970s that evolved to tell more literary and socially resonant stories reflecting the author’s racial politics.”

And, although this article will not be published in an actual journal issue until at least later this year, I think it still deserves to be highlighted as both an excellent example of how to conduct and structure in anime studies – and a very important contribution to the literature of the field!

  • Petit, Aurélie. The hentai streaming platform wars. Porn Studies (forthcoming).

    “By providing a detailed history of the American hentai anime market, from its arrival through fan-distributed video networks up to its current challenges on both legal and pirate streaming platforms, the article demonstrates that the historical conflicts within the hentai streaming ecosystem do not call for tech-solutionist approaches (tracking and deplatforming content). Rather, the article will ask for the pornographic industry as a whole to revaluate how it considers animated productions during porn platformization.”

As you may see just from these, something that continues to remain true about anime and manga studies as an academic area is that publications on topics related to it can – and do – appear in many different journals. Just some of the other publications that welcomed anime and manga-related papers in 2024 included Communication, Culture & Critique, Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies, Internet Research, Language & Education, and Soccer & Society. And that’s even before mentioning the dedicated Journal of Anime and Manga Studies, which in 2024 published its 5th volume, and Mechademia: Second Arc – its Summer 2024 Volume 16, Number 2 had the subtitle Media Industries and Platforms, followed by the Winter 2024 Volume 17, Number 1 Cosplay, Street Fashion, and Subcultural Styles.

So, two days into 2025, what kinds of developments related to anime and manga studies can we look forward to? Well, pick from plenty!

In August, Yale University Press will be publishing Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics, the new monograph by independent scholar Eike Exner, whose previous Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History is to date the only book on Japanese comics to receive an Eisner Award.

This book is the first to tell the history of comics in Japan as a single, continuous story, focusing on manga as multipanel cartoons that show stories rather than narrate them.

Scholarly monographs are, unfortunately, not priced to make them affordable to the casual reader. This is why it’s so exciting to find out that Bloomsbury Academic is releasing a paperback edition of Mimi Okabe’s Manga, Murder and Mystery: The Boy Detectives of Japan’s Lost Generation – recently honored by the International Crime Fiction Association with its Annual Prize for Non-Fiction Books on Crime Fiction.

Little is known about the boy detective in Japanese detective fiction despite his popularity. Who is he, and what mysteries does he unveil about cultural understandings of youth in Japanese society? Manga, Murder and Mystery answers these questions by exploring the figure of the shonen (boy) detective in commercially successful manga series such as Detective Conan, The Case Files of Young Kindaichi, Death Note and Moriarty the Patriot.

Lindsay Coleman, Rayna Denison (University of Bristol), and University of Illinois emeritus professor David Desser are the editors of the University of Hawai’i Press edited collection The Many Words of Takahata Isao – the first comprehensive exploration of the director’s works both at Studio Ghibli, alongside Hayao Miyazaki, and on television. Other details about this collection have not yet been announced. One more edited collection, a Palgrave Handbook of Anime and Manga in Europe, has been mentioned several times as being in development, but more complete details are also not available.

Several other scholars have also announced or mentioned that they are working on anime/manga-related book-length projects that at various stages of completion. Historian and manga expert Andrea Horbinski will be publishing a monograph with the title Manga’s Global Century: Japanese Comics, 1905-1989, Amanda Kennell (University of Notre Dame) has announced the upcoming book “Seeing Anime, aimed at helping viewers better understand the history and artistry of animation”. Michael Cronin (College of William & Mary) is “currently pursuing a book-length project that explores the pivotal year 1995 as represented in anime, manga, literature, and film”. And Susan Napier (Tufts University) – who pretty much introduced the idea of anime as a subject for scholarship – has an “ongoing book project – ‘The World According to Ghibli: How a Small Japanese Animation Studio Challenged Disney’s American Dream'” Finally, Mechademia continues a robust twice-a-year publication schedule as the journal approaches its 20th anniversary. The themes of the two issues that are scheduled for 2025 will be “Methodologies” (Summer) and “Death and Other Endings” (Winter).

So, again to close out 2024 and welcome 2025, I would like to wish the best of luck to all of us who are currently working in the field of anime and manga studies, and to anyone who is considering entering this field. Let’s look ahead to innovative scholarship, insightful conversations, meaningful analysis, and collaborative learning.

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