Bibliographies - Anime and Manga Studies

Category: Bibliographies

09
Dec
2015

Creator Bibliography: Shigeru Mizuki

When manga artist Shigeru Mizuki died last week, news sources not just in Japan, but all around the world – New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC, Reuters, and numerous others – published articles about his life and work. Mizuki had been involved in creating manga since the 1950’s, but it is only relatively recently that his work began appearing in English. Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths (originally published in Japanese in 1973) received a “Best U.S. Edition of International Material – Asia” Eisner award in 2012, Nonnonba and Showa 1926-1939: A History of Japan, were nominated in 2013 and last year, and earlier this year, the next two volumes in the non-fiction series, Showa 1939–1944 and Showa 1944–1953 again won in the category.

So far, Mizuki’s work has received only a small amount of scholarly attention – certainly compared to the number of academic publications on Hayao Miyazaki and Osamu Tezuka. Why this is so is a valid question. Obviously, Mizuki is still largely unfamiliar to Western audiences. In addition, the few works of his that have been translated differ significantly in their style and subject matter from most other manga available in the West, so it is plain-out hard to analyze them comparatively. In fact, I would argue that the most direct way to approach Mizuki’s writing would be to de-emphasize the manga aspect of his work, and to read him alongside authors like Erich-Maria Remarque, Gunther Grass, and Yuriy Bondarev – writers for whom the War (whether the First World War or the Second) was the defining event of their lives and the single event that directed their entire careers. It is no surprise, for example, that Christina Knopf includes Mizuki’s work in her survey The Comic Art of War: A Critical Study of Military Cartoons, 1805-2014 (McFarland, 2015).

So, as I have already done for Miyazaki, Mamoru Oshii, Satoshi Kon, and Makoto Shinkai, and as I am in the process of doing for Osamu Tezuka, I would like to begin compiling a bibliography of English-language academic writing on Shigeru Mizuki. The entries in it are drawn from items that are already included in the Annual Bibliography of Anime and Manga Studies, and correspond books, chapters in edited collections, and articles in academic/scholarly journals that discuss Mizuki’s life and work extensively. I am, of course, aware of other academic publications that mention Mizuki in passing or include discussions of his work – an example is the essay “Early modern past to postmodern future: Changing discourses of Japanese monsters”, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Ashgate, 2013) – so this bibliography is selective, rather than comprehensive. It is also a work in progress, and will be updated continuously as I identify new items to add. Any new additions will be reflected on a separate page, not in this post.

Shigeru Mizuki: A Bibliography of English-Language Scholarship

2015

Olutokun, Deji Bryce. The Showa masterwork of manga pioneer Shigeru Mizuki. World Literature Today, 89(3/4), 24-28.

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08
Dec
2015

Annual Bibliography of Anime and Manga Studies – 2003 Ed.

categories: Bibliographies

The most memorable moment for Japanese animation in the U.S. in 2003 – and, quite possibly, to date – was the selection by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away as the year’s best animated feature film. The Oscar could be used as an easy explanation for why Western scholars and Western audiences should pay attention to anime – even if, paradoxically, Spirited Away, much like Miyazaki’s other films, is decidedly not representative of Japanese animation as a whole.

Stone Bridge Press, already the publisher of Helen McCarthy’s Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation, as well as Gilles Poitras’ The Anime Companion What’s Japanese in Japanese Animation and Anime Essentials: Every Thing a Fan Should Know, eagerly welcomed the opportunity to introduce readers to Japanese animation in a format that would probably be less intimidating than a theoretical, heavily footnoted text such as Anime From Akira to Mononoke. Anime Explosion! The What? Why? & Wow! of Japanese Animation would be just such an introduction – a necessarily breezy, maybe even surface-level tour through anime’s major stylistic and thematic elements. No, this is not the same kind of book as Napier’s – or, for that matter, as Thomas Lamarre’s The Anime Machine – but, I think it achieves its particular purpose as an introduction and a prompt for critical thinking and follow-up questions – quite effectively.

(Dennis Redmond’s The World is Watching: Video as Multinational Aesthetics, 1968-1995, an in-depth close reading of three seminal television/video series from three different countries, cultures, and time periods – including Neon Genesis Evangelion – is listed on Amazon as having been published in 2003. However, the book itself has a 2004 copyright date, and so, for the purposes of compiling annual lists of publications on anime/manga, I include it in the one for 2004).

In terms of individual articles on anime/manga, the 53 that appeared in English-language academic journals in 2003 were the largest number not only to date, but in fact, in any year until 2007. The International Journal of Comic Art once again welcomed the greatest percentage, with 6 (11%), but 5 more were published in a special issue of the U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal with a particular focus on manga, and 3 in an “Asian animation” special issue of Asian Cinema. Other journals that featured scholarly articles on anime/manga in 2003 included Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, and the Social Science Japan Journal, for a total of 37 different journals. 7 of them (19%) were published by commercial publishers (2 each by Taylor & Francis and Wiley, 1 each by Common Ground, Intellect, and Sage), and 3 more by university presses (Duke University Press, Oxford University Press, University of Hawaii Press). 19 of the articles (36%) are currently available in open access.

(Another editorial caveat. I recognize that my criteria for selecting items to include in these lists are inherently subjective. Some – such as, for example, Memories of pilots and planes: World War II in Japanese manga, 1957-1967 – clearly a scholarly article on Japanese comics, published in what is clearly an academic journal – are obvious candidates for inclusion. But there are others that, under more selection criteria, would have been left out. The 2003 list in particular includes several articles that appeared in the non-academic magazines Kategaiho, Look Japan, and Nipponia, produced in Japan but aimed at Western audiences, as well as several pieces authored by undergraduate students and published in journals intended primarily to present such writing to small, most likely local audiences.)

English-language books, book chapters, and journal articles on anime/manga – 2003

This list is also permanently archived as a separate page. Any additional items will be added to the archived list only.

Books
Total published: 1

Drazen, Patrick. Anime explosion! The what? Why? & Wow! of Japanese animation. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge. (more…)

22
Nov
2015

Annual Bibliography of Anime and Manga Studies – 2004 Ed.

categories: Bibliographies

2004 marked another year of steady growth in the number of academic English-language publications on anime and manga. One clear highlight was Stray Dog of Anime: The Films of Mamoru Oshii, the first book-length examination of the works of an anime director other than Miyazaki. Interestingly, it grew out of work that its author, Brian Ruh, completed while he was a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, studying under Susan Napier, already the author of 2001’s Anime From Akira to Miyazaki: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation.

The one relevant essay collection published in 2004 – Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon – is notable immediately for its rather unfortunate title. As the years since have shown, 2004 was clearly too early to talk about a “fall of Pokemon”. Having said that, the book itself was certainly timely, and included a very wide range of approaches to the “Pokemon phenomenon” in Japan and around the world, such as an excellent case study of the process of “localizing the Pokemon TV series for the American market”. Perhaps because of its timeliness – and maybe because it was coming from a high-profile academic publisher (Duke University Press), it received favorable reviews in several different academic journals, such as Popular Communication, Social Science Japan Journal, and The Journal of Asian Studies.

The 45 articles on anime/manga that were published in 2004 in English-language academic journals were spread out over 33 different journals. The International Journal of Comic Art published 5, Femspec, another 3, and 6 journals had two articles each, with 25 others only publishing one. Some of the journals that accepted publications on anime/manga in 2004 included English Journal, M/C: A Journal of Media and Communication, Publishing Research Quarterly, Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media, and Sex Roles.

Only 6 of the articles (13%) appeared in journals published by for-profit publishers, rather than university presses, academic departments, or non-profit organizations. 20 of the articles were published in open-access journals or are now available in open access. And, two of the 45 articles are particularly worth highlighting:

Oishinbo’s adventures in eating: Food, communication and culture in Japanese comics, by Laurie Brau deserves the award – if there was ever such an award – for appearing in the most unlikely subject-specific academic journal to accept a paper on anime/manga. It was published in Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies.

In The creative commons (Montana Law Review), Lawrence Lessig, then a professor of law at Stanford University, and recently, a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President, specifically uses dojinshi as an example of the kind of creativity that can only flourish when it is not subject to the kind of burdensome copyright regime that is currently in place in the U.S.

English-language books, book chapters, and academic journal articles on anime/manga – 2004

This list is also permanently archived as a separate page. Any additional items will be added to the archived list only.

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11
Nov
2015

Annual Bibliography of Anime and Manga Studies – 2001 Ed.

categories: Bibliographies

The years from 1993 to 2000 constituted the beginning period of the growth of English-language anime/manga studies, as scholars such as Susan Napier, Anne Allison, Antonia Levi, Sharon Kinsella, Mary Grigsby and Kinko Ito first began to publish scholarly writing on Japanese animation and Japanese comics.

2001, and in particular, the publication of Napier’s Anime From Akira to Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, marked the start of the next stage. Napier had already established herself as a well-regarded scholar of Japanese literature, and this book, coming as it did from a major publisher, introduced the idea of academic approaches to Japanese animation to both scholars and non-academic readers. It was received favorably, with positive reviews appearing in journals such as the Journal of Asian Studies and Monumenta Nipponica, and even made an appearance in Entertainment Weekly, even if the magazine’s response to it was dismissive to say the least – “Why would anyone who loves anime’s unbridled vibrancy want to slog through the antiseptic dryness of a textbook?” And in fact, in addition to the book, that year, Prof. Napier also authored a book chapter on “the body in Japanese pornographic animation”, and articles on anime in Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique and the Harvard Asia Pacific Review – making herself known even further as a “pioneer in the scholarly study of anime”.

(As a caveat, Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke‘s hard-cover edition actually has a 2000 copyright date – but it wasn’t until the 2001 paperback that the book really started getting noticed – both inside the academic world, and by the general public.)

The two major essay collections with chapters on anime/manga that were published in 2001 essentially present the two major approaches to studying anime that scholars took at that point – within the context of a focus on Asian animation, and, separately, on Asian comics – the implication being that at this point in time, it was just too early for a full essay collection that would focus specifically on either anime or manga. Though, of course, it would only be another several years before such collections began appearing. Finally, another noteworthy publication that appeared in 2001 was the catalog for the exhibition My Reality: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Japanese Animation. Featuring works by over a dozen Japanese and Western artists, it opened at the Brooklyn Museum of Art on July 28, 2001, and traveled around the U.S. through 2004. The highlight of the catalog was Takashi Murakami’s essay on the relationship between anime and Japanese art.

Books, Book Chapters, and Journal Articles on Anime/Manga – 2001

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09
Nov
2015

Annual Bibliography of Anime and Manga Studies – 2000 Ed.

categories: Bibliographies

In 2000, it was becoming evident that academic interest in Japanese animation and comics was surging across different publication formats – books by single authors, edited collections such as A Century of Popular Culture in Japan and Japan Pop! The World of Japanese Popular Culture (with 9 chapters on anime/manga between them), individual chapters in collections on other, more general topics, and articles in peer-reviewed journals. It was no surprise, for example, that a “global science fiction” special issue of Science Fiction Studies would include papers on Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor II, and a review essay of “books on Japanese comics and animated films”. In addition, 2000 marked the launch of the open access journal Image [&] Narrative, at that point, only the second academic journal on comics and related topics. Its subject focus on “visual narratology and word and image studies in the broadest sense of the term” clearly included manga, and three articles on Japanese comics appeared in the inaugural issue. In total, 26 individual articles on anime/manga appeared that year, across 21 different journals. Once again, beyond the perhaps expected publications such as the Animation Journal, the International Journal of Comic Art, Japanese Studies, Japan Studies Review, and Senses of Cinema, scholarly essays on Japanese animation, Japanese comics, and related topics could also be found in the Journal of Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and the main academic journal of the international Society for Advancement of Management.

As always, the following list will be permanently archived in the Bibliographies section of this site. If I identify any new publications, they will be added to the permanent list only, not to this post.

English-Language Books, Book Chapters, and Journal Articles on Anime/Manga, 2000

Books
Total Published: 2

Kinsella, Sharon. Adult manga: Culture and power in contemporary Japanese society. Richmond, Great Britain: Curzon.

Poitras, Gilles. Anime essentials: Every thing a fan should know. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge.

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06
Nov
2015

Annual Bibliography of Anime and Manga Studies – 1999 Ed.

categories: Bibliographies

On October 29, 1999, Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke opened in 8 theaters around the U.S. It was, of course, not the first Japanese animated feature film to receive an American theatrical release, but it was certainly more prominent than any that was released before. It ultimately expanded to some 130 theaters in the U.S. and Canada, and grossed at least $2.3 million during its theatrical run through the first months of 2000. And so, it was definitely not a coincidence that 1999 also saw the publication of the first English-language book on Miyazaki, authored by British anime journalist Helen McCarthy. Aimed at a general, non-academic audience, it nonetheless performed an excellent job of introducing commentary on Miyazaki’s works to a wide range of readers.

1999 also saw the launch of two different journals that both made an impact on the emerging field of anime/manga studies. From its very first issue, the International Journal of Comic Art, founded by the incredibly prolific comics scholar John A. Lent (he also edited both of the essay collections published in 1999 that contained chapters on manga – and authored one of the chapters), welcomed essays on Japanese comics – defined as broadly as possible. Since then, under Dr. Lent’s editorial guidance, it has published more than 60 such papers, as well as several special issues/special sections on manga, and has featured contributions from many of the most well-known scholars of manga who write in English, including many who are based in Japan and in other Asian countries, as well as in Europe.

The Japanese Journal of Animation Studies, the official publication of the Japan Society for Animation Studies, is a publication that most Western anime/manga scholars are still largely not familiar with. Interestingly, while most of its contents are in Japanese, the very first issue did include one essay on anime written in English, and the issues that appeared in subsequent years have largely followed this pattern. This journal is, of course, a lot more difficult for Western readers to access, but nonetheless, a comprehensive history and bibliography of academic writing on anime and manga cannot be complete without it.

This list is also permanently archived as a separate page. Any updates will be reflected on that page only.

Books

McCarthy, Helen. Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese animation: Films, themes, artistry. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press.

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03
Nov
2015

Annual Bibliography of Anime and Manga Studies – 1998 Ed.

categories: Bibliographies

1998 saw a slight increase in the number of chapters on anime/manga published in edited essay collections – 7 compared to the previous year’s 5. Three of the seven appeared in the first English-language books on Japanese popular culture in general, alongside other chapters on topics such as sumo, karaoke, women’s magazines, live-action television series. The 11 articles on anime/manga that were published in 1998 issues of academic journals were a decrease from the 20 that appeared the year before, but once again, it was clear that major journals such as the Journal of Japanese Studies and the Journal of Popular Culture had accepted the idea that anime and manga were valid subjects of in-depth academic study.

English-Language Academic Writing on Anime/Manga, 1998

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31
Oct
2015

The Early Years of Anime/Manga Studies: 1990-1995

categories: Bibliographies

Looking back more than twenty years, to the five years from 1991 to 1995, is actually a very good way to see how academics first began to approach Japanese animation. This period includes what is considered to be the first paper on anime in a major English-language academic journal (Susan Napier’s Panic sites: The Japanese imagination of disaster from Godzilla to Akira, published in a 1993 issue of The Journal of Japanese Studies), as well as Annelee Newitz’s Anime otaku: Japanese animation fans outside Japan (in Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life). Because this essay was immediately available in open access (though I don’t think the term had even come into use at that point), for many people, it became their introduction to academic writing on anime and anime fans – and even to the concepts of otaku, the communities, structures, and practices of anime fans, while also demonstrating how writing of this kind can be critical and harsh.

With only 22 total items on this list (one book, an essay collection with four chapters on anime, as well as profiles of several leading creators/directors, including Osamu Tezuka, Hayao Miyazaki, Katsuhiro Otomo, and Rumiko Takahashi, and interviews with several of them, 4 chapters in other edited essay collections, and 13 articles), there simply is not a lot available to analyze for the types of journals that published writing on anime/manga over these years. But, there are a couple of points that are worth making. One is that right away, major journals such as Film Quarterly, The Journal of Japanese Studies, and the Journal of Popular Culture were very much open to publishing research on anime and related topics. Another is that right away, it’s possible to trace several academic approaches to anime that would become common later on – comparisons of animated and live-action films (as in “Panic sites”), studies of particular themes in several different anime (as in “War and peace in Japanese science fiction animation”), and examinations of how anime is received outside Japan – and the different parties – creators, distributors/intermediaries, and fans – that participate in this process. It is interesting, too, to note that of the 13 articles, records and abstracts for 7 are currently available online through their publishers (and so, presumably, also in various general and specialized academic databases, potentially with access to the full texts), and one more can be accessed directly and free of charge.

English-Language Academic Writing on Anime/Manga, 1990-1995

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23
Oct
2015

Annual Bibliography of Anime and Manga Studies – 2005 Ed.

categories: Bibliographies

If, as I already noted, “2006 marked the point when the academic study of Japanese animation and Japanese comics could really be thought of as a discreet academic field or area”, 2005 was the concluding year of the period during which anime/manga studies developed into a field (this period, in turn, began in 2001, with the publication by Palgrave Macmillan of Susan J. Napier’s Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, the first English-language academic monograph on Japanese animation). In fact, it was during 2005 that Napier updated her book to respond to developments such as the 2003 Best Animated Feature Film Oscar going to Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, and the explosive growth of the American anime and manga industries.

This list is also permanently archived as a separate page. Any updates will be reflected on that page only.

Books
(Total published: 1)

Napier, Susan J. Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing contemporary Japanese animation, Updated edition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Book Chapters
(Total published: 16)

Bolton, Christopher. Anime horror and its audience: 3×3 Eyes and Vampire Princess Miyu. In Jay McRoy (Ed.), Japanese horror cinema (pp. 66-76). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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20
Oct
2015

Seizures Induced by Pokemon Episode: A Bibliography

categories: Bibliographies

On Wednesday, December 17, 1997, newspapers and other media – first in Japan and then around the world – reported that the previous evening, several hundred children were hospitalized after experiencing various symptoms, including convulsions/seizures, while watching an episode of the Pokemon anime series. The initial coverage, such as by BBC, CNN, and Reuters, was straight-forward and balanced, but soon enough, what took place was sensationalized and exaggerated – like in the E! Online article Convulsion Cartoon Bound for U.S. TV (Jan. 3, 1998).

In the following years, this “incident” has been brought up numerous times in writing on Japanese popular culture. It is no surprise that how authors have used it have little to do with what actually took place – for example, Elaine Gerbert, in Images of Japan in the digital age (East Asia: An International Quarterly, 19: 1/2, pp. 95-155) writes: “[T]he sheer physical power of this medium [of anime] to work on the nervous system was demonstrated when showings of ‘Pokemon’ on Japanese television produced seizures in viewing children.”

Accordingly, I think it would be useful to compile a comprehensive bibliography of academic writing on the incident. Using the Gale Academic OneFile, EBSCO Academic Search Premier, and ProQuest Research Library databases, as well as the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s PubMed resource, I located a total of 11 articles, published between 1998 and 2005 in 7 different journals (Acta Paediatrica Japonica, Epilepsia, Pediatric Neurology, New England Journal of Medicine, Pediatric Neurology, Southern Journal of Medicine, and the non-medical Skeptical Inquirer). 8 of the articles are written by Japanese authors; the authors of the other 3 are American/Western.

Scholarly articles on seizures induced by Pokemon episode

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