InTO.MANGA – Critical Paths in Manga Studies Torino, Italy January 22-24, 2026
This fall, with two leading university presses each publishing a major new scholarly monograph (Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics by Eike Exner from Yale University Press and Manga’s First Century: How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905–1989 by Andrea Horbinski from University of California Press), it’s clear that manga studies as an academic field is continuing its rapid growth and development. And now, a different university has announced plans for what going may very well become a global center for the study of Japanese comics.
And now, the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and Modern Cultures at the University of Torino (Italy) has announced that in January, it will host the inaugural symposium InTO.MANGA – Critical Paths in Manga Studies, with a stated goal of establishing a forum for debate and discussion on manga as a “form” with particular narrative, visual, and cultural dimensions. The symposium will specifically recognize manga as complex objects, and will specifically welcome multidisciplinary approaches and perspectives grounded in fields such as:
posthuman studies
medical humanities
translation studies
narrative theory
platform studies (including interplays between manga and other kinds of media)
Participants are invited to submit proposals for individuals presentations of approximately 20 minutes in length (300 words) or complete panels with up to 4 speakers to info.intomanga@gmail.com.
The deadline for submissions is September 15, and speakers will be notified by September 30.
InTO.MANGA – Critical Paths in Manga Studies is partly funded by the Japan Foundation. The symposium organizing committee is composed of Dr. Jaqueline Berndt (Stockholm University, editor of last year’s The Cambridge Companion to Manga and Anime), Marta Fanasca (University of Bologna), Paolo La Marca (University of Catania), and Gianluca Coci, Edouardo Occhionero, Asuka Ozumi, and Anna Speccio (all University of Torino).
The full Call for Papers, with additional details, follows:
English-language scholarly writing on Japanese comics is not something that just started last year – or five years ago – or ten. Fred Schodt’s Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga, the first book on the topic from a U.S. publisher, appeared in 1996 – and more than a decade earlier, he had already written Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics for Kodansha International. For that matter, already in the late 1970’s, The Journal of Popular Culture had published a paper about “Salaryman comics in Japan“, and the journal Youth & Society featured an article entitled Contemporary Japanese youth: Mass media communication that opened with the statement that “[C]omic books are both endemic and ubiquitous to contemporary Japanese society”.
It is also not an understatement to say that in the last several years years, English-language scholarly writing on Japanese comics has been booming. In 2022, Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History became the first book on Japanese comics to receive the Best Academic/Scholarly Work Eisner Award. This was followed by the publication of a comprehensive – and much-needed Manga: A Critical Guide – in my review, I called it a “the go-to book for anyone interested in the medium”. Then, last year, Cambridge University Press felt that it was time to add a Companion to Manga and Anime to the series of volumes of what it calls “authoritative guides, written by leading experts, offering lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics, and periods”. For that matter, later this year, two more major academic publishers are each bringing out a monograph – Yale University Press, with Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics, by Comics and the Origins of Manga author Eike Exner, and the University of California Press, with Manga’s First Century: How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905–1989, by historian and manga scholar Andrea Horbinski.
And beyond those, there is one more to look forward to. Mechademia: Second Arc, the premier scholarly journal with a focus on “studying objects and practices that have developed around media forms associated with Japan”, is now accepting submissions for a Graphic Narratives issue – scheduled for a Summer 2027 publication. Submissions for the issue are accepted through July 1. Its main goal will be to expand the range of scholarship of graphic narratives from Japan – as well as from other Asian countries/areas/regions – to emphasize attention to form and style, as well as “purpose”, rather than content alone.
Everybody loves an awards ceremony. And if movies can have the Oscars, Broadway theater can have the Tonys, and comics can have, uh, the Eisner Awards, why should manga feel left out! And, later this summer, the organizers of New York City’s Anime NYC convention will be holding a gala awards ceremony for the English-speaking manga community. The American Manga Awards was launched last year, and for 2025, the awards will be presented in seven different categories for titles, along with potentially several individuals selected for induction into a Manga Publishing Hall of Fame.
What is particularly noteworthy especially from the perspective of manga studies is who will actually be deciding on the winning titles. Yes, the judges are journalists, publishing and comics industry professionals, translators, and essentially, media personalities. But, one is very possibly currently the leading academic expert on Japanese comics currently working and teaching in the U.S., and another, a school librarian (and Queens College School of Library and Information Science adjunct professor), who just recently steered the publication of a guide to introducing manga in school settings for the American Association of School Librarians.
Dr. Shige (CJ) Suzuki is currently an associate professor in the department of modern languages and comparative literature at Baruch College (City University of New York). His latest publication is the chapter Comics at the intersection of womanhood and disability: Essay manga, affect, and community, in the essay collection Women’s Voices in Manga: Japanese Cultural and Historical Perspectives, and he also recently contributed a Gekiga, or Japanese alternative comics chapter to the new second edition of the textbook Introducing Japanese Popular Culture. In 2023, Prof. Suzuki co-authored the Bloomsbury Comics Studies monograph Manga: A Critical Guide – currently the major comprehensive overview of Japanese comics that is available in English. He speaks frequently at various academic conferences around the U.S. and in Japan, and is currently working on a full-length book on Japanese alternative comics.
Yes, the American Manga Awards are one single, specific, and unique event. But, nonetheless, I would like to think that the organizers’ decision to invite Prof. Suzuki to serve as one of the judges is a great example of how the contributions that scholars are making to the public reception of Japanese comics around the world is being recognized and acknowledged.
First announced at the end of 2023, and running successfully in April of last year, the online symposium Queer and Feminist Perspectives on Japanese Popular Cultures represents a major and exciting new stage in the development of Japanese popular culture studies as a vibrant academic field. The 2024 program brought together speakers from academic institutions in the U.S., Japan, Canada, Australia, UK, and several EU countries – and the event was free and open to all interested participants. Following up on the successful first year, this past February, its organizers launched the Call for Papers for the 2025 Symposium, and now, are able to present this year’s program!
The Queer and Feminist Perspectives on Japanese Popular Cultures Symposium 2025 will run from Monday, May 19 to Wednesday, May 21. It will be held primarily online, with details for one public lecture to be announced. The program is set to feature keynote addresses and public lectures from some of the leading scholars currently working in the field, as well as up to 20 individual presentations – once again representing a truly wide range of global approaches, methodologies, and viewpoints, addressing anime and manga (as well as anime/manga fan cultures), video games, uses of and interactions with social media, and popular culture more broadly. The Symposium is FREE, but registration is required. Before the Symposium starts, you will receive a link to view the actual speeches and presentations.
You can direct any questions about the Symposium to the organizers at popculturesjapan (at) gmail (dot) com. Support for the Symposium is provided by the Media, Gender, and Sexualities Group (University of Tokyo) and the Platform Lab (Concordia University).
And for my part, I would like to thank the organizers of the Symposium for their dedication and hard work, and wish them and every one of the participants in this year’s event the best of luck!
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Queer and Feminist Perspectives on Japanese Popular Cultures Symposium 2025
Over the past ten or so years, the Japanese program at Baruch College (City University of New York) has hosted a series of mini-seminars and talks by individual speakers on topics related to Japanese animation and comics. The series started in 2015 with Globalized MangaCulture and Fandom and continued with Alt Manga: Alternative Manga Symposium (April 2016), Manga/Comics and Translation (April 2017), Manga/Comics against Human Trafficking (April 2018), and, in 2019, Untold History of Japanese Comics: Prewar and LGBTQ+ Manga. And, after an understandable hiatus, it has continued, with the latest one scheduled for next week.
The speaker, Dr. Grace En-Yi Ting is an assistant professor in the gender studies programme, The University of Hong Kong, and author of, among other publications, the essay The desire and disgust of sweets: Consuming femininities through shōjo manga (U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal) and the Gender, manga, and anime chapter in the Routledge Companion ot Gender and Japanese Culture. Entitled Cats, Single Ladies, and Manga: Feminist Fantasies of Cohabitation in East Asian Discourse, the talk is an examination of Japanese popular culture’s approach to themes of “heteronormative pressures regarding marriage and reproduction”, as expressed in particular in the manga The Masterful Cat is Depressed Again Today and its 2023 anime adaptation.
Thursday, April 4 12:50 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. Baruch College 55 Lexington Ave, VC-4-165 New York, NY 10010)
The talk is open to members of the Baruch community and the general public, but registration is required. Additional details and the registration link are available on the Baruch Japanese Program website.
How do we categorize different kinds of Japanese comics? What categories or labels do we use? For that matter, who even decides what categories or labels we even have access to? These questions are provocative, but as it turns out, they are not rhetorical. Outside Japan, and particularly in the U.S., there are actually specific organizations that are tasked with assigning labels to different kinds of published materials, and probably the most important organization of this type is the Library of Congress. Unless you are somehow involved with the Library of Congress classification system in your work, or have studied it in a library/information science graduate program, the activity of the Library of Congress that are you probably most familiar with is the system of terms to organize entries in library catalogs both by subject and by genre.
Since November 2022, “manga” has been included on the approved Library of Congress list of terms as both a subject heading (for materials about manga) and a genre term – for actual manga titles. And, as it turns out, last year, the Metadata and Cataloging Committee of the American Library Association Graphic Novels and Comics Round Table presented a proposal to the Library of Congress endorsing the establishment of several specific terms that would apply to “manga subgenres”. In particular, the Committee endorsed four broad terms, with these potential recommended descriptions:
shonen: “Manga emphasizing action and adventure, often with slapstick humor, a journey featuring personal growth, heroes with spiky hairstyles ,and themes of friendship, determination, and teamwork.”
shojo: “Manga emphasizing personal feelings and emotions, often centered on relationships, with a distinctive artistic style featuring lithe characters and big eyes, decorative panel dividers and layered panels.”
Boys love: “Romance manga with beautiful, androgynous male leads, featuring exclusive mutual attraction and a plot driven by emotion and psychological obstacles. For comics about realistic gay experiences, see Gay comics.”
Yuri: “Manga depicting the homosocial, spiritual bonds and relationships between adolescent girls, often with a floral motif of lilies. For comics about the lesbian experience, see Lesbian comics.”
[Ed. note: Book publishers rarely make an effort to promote new books on topics like manga. Guess leaves it up to people like me, who are interested in these kinds of books, to promote!]
Shige (CJ) Suzuki and Ronald Stewart Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, 280 pages. [Amazon] — [Bloomsbury USA]
This is a pre-peer review preprint of an article that has been accepted for publication in East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, 9:2, 2023.
When it comes to books that can explain manga to a non-Japanese reader, Fred Schodt’s Manga Manga: The World of Japanese Comics and Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga are the ones that come to mind right away. But important as these two titles are, they are now more useful as historical artifacts – Manga Manga was first published in 1983, and Dreamland Japan last received an update in 2011. Japanese comics have changed a good deal even in the last decade, and how we understand Japanese comics has also changed quite a lot. And while several authors have recently written (or contributed to) in-depth studies such as Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan, Manga and the Representation of Japanese History, and Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze, what we haven’t had is a general survey that would try to explain, or at least summarize “Japanese comics” in a neat and comprehensive package. And this is precisely the task that Manga: A Critical Guide sets out to accomplish – the book’s goal is to serve as both an introduction to the art form of manga, and to its impact and influence around the world, and as a summary of how critics and scholars approach manga and the questions they ask. Accordingly, its focus is on “manga” (exactly what is meant by the term is itself one of the points the book addresses) as a whole, rather than not on particular titles or creators, and while this book is not aimed purely at a scholarly audience, it’s also not designed for fast and casual reading like something like the now out-of-print The Rough Guide to Manga, or the just-released (and translated from French) A History of Modern Manga.
One common thread that links these books and articles is that they generally either present a “high-level” overview of the idea of including manga, etc. in library collections, or actually quantify the extent to which libraries are doing so. What they generally do not discuss, with the exception of some of the chapters in Graphic Novels and Comics in Libraries and Archives are the actual mechanics of this process. How does a library go about purchasing comics/manga, what are some of the different possible approaches to adding records for these kinds of titles to a library’s catalog, where should they even be physically located in the library space?
Of course, the first question that can come up in relation to this chapter is what do its authors even mean when they refer to a library’s “nontraditional patrons”. Presumably, the main goal of an academic library is to collect and provide access to books and other materials that would support the needs of researchers. The Japanese Manga Collection that they describe, on the other hand, is designed to support in-class reading (in the terminology used by the University of Pennsylvania Japanese Language Program, “tadoku” – “extensive reading” – where students “choose Japanese-language books appropriate to their level, then read as much as they can without a dictionary and by skipping difficult sections, grasp the overall content from the parts they can decipher on their own”. Traditionally, this approach used “graded readers” – “easy-to-read books specifically targeted at programmed grammatical and vocabulary levels”, but the authors, one of whom was the University of Pennsylvania Libraries Japanese Studies Librarian, realized that students were more interested in, and would engage with the tadoku approach more – if the books it offered would be titles they were interested in on their own – i.e. manga. Coming to this realization then led into the “mechanics-related” questions on selecting titles to purchase, actually purchasing these titles, creating correct bibliographic records, and then simply advertising the existence of the new collection to potential users.
The aim of tadoku is for students to choose Japanese-language books appropriate to their level, then read as much as they can without a dictionary and by skipping difficult sections, grasp the overall content from the parts they can decipher on their own.
Possible approaches the authors describe for selecting titles to purchase include reaching out to language instructors to solicit recommendations from students, as well as trying to become aware of manga titles that are popular “among a more general population of patrons”, using the recommendation algorithm on Amazon Japan to get a better understanding of “what is both currently popular and relevant for the growing collection”, reviewing records in Wikipedia for details about spin-offs and sequels and such, and drawing on the catalogs and other marketing materials put out by the major U.S. publishers of translated manga for a sense of “currently popular titles” and “important publishing trends”. One such trend that the authors specifically point out is “women-authored gay romance stories” and a “queer lens on manga”, leading to “a selection focus on LGBTQ titles that orient readers to gay history and culture as well as relationships and everyday life.” Of course, all of these approaches have the potential for a selection bias and can lead to a collection that over-represents certain types or genres to the exclusion of others that are perhaps not as “trendy”, but better represent the full range of the different kinds of manga that are available to readers in Japan.
Students of Japanese as a foreign language are often inspired by their interest in popular culture, so there was naturally a demand for Japanese comics, or manga, to engage with in class for tadoku
Building a Japanese Manga Collection, p. 145
From this, the article describes the process of locating details about two particular manga titles (My Brother’s Husband! and Jūhan Shuttai!), aimed at a librarian with no familiarity whatsoever with manga, such as both the advantages and the limitations of Wikipedia for locating details about these titles, and the challenges of using Amazon Japan to actually purchase volumes. The next section is its most intensely technical, dealing with possible ways of actually representing manga in a library catalog in a way that would make these books distinct from non-Japanese graphic novels/comics. Right now, the best such way is to use the Library of Congress Subject Headings system’s “Comic books, strips, etc.” heading, and add the Japan geographic subdivision. The authors also recommend specifically highlighting that the book is in Japanese, and whenever possible, including the actual original Japanese title (in kanji, not just transliterated) in the catalog record.
In the absence of a widely adopted library-facing thesaurus that establishes “manga” or “manhwa” as freestanding subjects – and the consequent lack of representation for established subgenres in Japan and Korea – libraries should adopt and maintain those conventions that serve their users and describe their collections best.
Building a Japanese Manga Collection, p. 157
Example: Penn Libraries catalog record, 弟の夫 (My Brother’s Husband)
One more part of the article addresses the other key aspect of developing and maintaining this kind of collection – how do you actually make its existence known to library users? This involved deciding on a unique name for the collection, and a dedicated physical location, and even specifically indicating the collection on book spine labels. Nonetheless, the collection remained largely unknown to users other than Japanese language students, and to remedy this, the librarians specifically designed a marketing campaign with both print and digital signs, including signage displayed on the library’s ground floor.
The East Asia Comics Collection has been designed for direct application in language pedagogy and as active circulating resources for student enrichment, and its development represents a shift in how the Penn Libraries’ East Asian-language materials have been advertised and used.
Building a Japanese Manga Collection, p. 161
A conclusion also summarizes the way the collection has actually been used, and how it fits into the library system’s broader mission of “making language learning and the library itself fun for underserved demographics” (such as students in language courses, as opposed to researchers), and even the way it is potentially open to public users who can access university library collections at specified times, as well as other college/university libraries via inter-library loan.
Overall, this chapter is a valuable profile of a unique and important library collection, and a very useful template or guide for other libraries that may wish to establish collections of this type, or simply collect manga titles in the original Japanese. Of course, the methods and approaches that its authors highlight are not comprehensive. They for example do not address the usefulness of other resources, such as the Anime News Network Encyclopedia for locating information about manga titles, using lists of awards winners to select titles for inclusion, or basing at least some of the collection on titles that have been the subject of scholarly research. Nonetheless, Building a Japanese Manga Collection is a valuable addition to the literature on manga in libraries, and to library science/librarianship literature in general, and one that, I hope, will serve as an important resource for and aid to librarians who are interested in manga!
A key feature of scholarly writing as a “genre” is that a new contribution to scholarship on a topic does not just stand by itself, but builds on previous contributions, and in a way, engages in a conversation with them. This feature can be seen in the literature review sections of new scholarly articles, as well as in formal reviews of newly-published books. But while book reviews are common in scholarly writing in many different fields, in-depth commentary on previously published articles and book chapters is not common at all. And I think that anime and manga studies as a field that is relatively new and very much evolving would benefit from these kinds of conversations in the form of response pieces to specific recent articles/book chapters.
In the future, I hope to be able to publish response pieces of this kind that are submitted by other readers/scholars. But, right now, I would like to share my own thoughts on a recently published journal article.
[note: I do not know how common the practice of writing commentary/reflection essays on published articles is in other academic programs, but I had to complete assignments of this type in both undergraduate and graduate classes]
“Though Japan’s post-war constitution forbids maintaining the means of waging war, the Japanese Self-Defence Force (JSDF) is one of the most powerful militaries in the world. This contradiction has become increasingly important in recent years as the JSDF has expanded its role and public profile, and as the state has moved closer to re-writing the constitution to allow for a more robust military policy. Alongside this military contradiction is a nationalistic one. The hyper-nationalism of the Pacific War left a general suspicion of overt nationalism amongst Japan’s population, but in recent years casual forms of nationalism have emerged that decouple pride in national identity from political commitment. This article focuses on the manga Gate: Thus the JSDF Fought There! to unpack the relationship between nationalism and the JSDF’s ambiguous position. In this manga, Japan is invaded through a mysterious portal from a fantasy world, allowing the manga to depict the JSDF in combat. While the manga hews close to official JSDF self-representations, in attempting to show the JSDF at war, the manga’s images, characters and narrative foreground contradictions inherent in the JSDF and in Japanese forms of nationalism.”
One common criticism of Japanese popular culture products is that too often, they rely on the same few basic story set-ups that are then explored with only slight modifications and little in the way of innovation. This is why those comics and shows that do significantly buck the expected structures attract so much attention and praise. But every once in a while, a title comes along that doesn’t just “buck” or subvert the expected, but goes in an entirely new direction. An is Gate: Where the JSDF Fought, first a novel series, and then adapted into a manga and a 26-episode anime.
This coming weekend, the organizers of Comic-Con International (returning as a live event after a two-year hiatus) will announce the winners of the 2022 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, established with the goal of “bringing attention to and highlighting the best publications and creators in comics and graphic novels”. For a number of years now, the awards have included one for Best Academic/Scholarly Work, and this year, for the first time ever, one of the titles nominated in this category is a monograph on Japanese comics – Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History (Eike Exner, Rutgers University Press).
Exner’s basic goal in this study is to go beyond the simple statement that Western comics were introduced into Japan along with other Western cultural products, and present an in-depth examination of how Japanese audiences consumed Western comics. He is able to demonstrate that Western comics directly influenced the form and shape of Japanese visual culture, in part simply by examining the extent to which Japanese readers were exposed to translated comics.
When I started studying the history of comics and manga, I found it odd how two things so similar could have developed independently of each other
– Eike Exner, p. xi
So far, I have not seen any formal reviews of this book. But it has received extensive praise from the comics/manga studies community – Henry Jenkins praises the author for “groundbreaking archival research”, John A. Lent calls the book “a history-altering masterpiece!”, Gennifer Weisenfeld points out the “meticulous and comprehensive” scholarship. An audio interview with the author is available on the New Books Network.
Ed. note: In previous years, two other titles on Japanese comics received Eisner nominations – Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture and Community in Japan in 2016 and Women’s Manga in Asia and Beyond: Uniting Different Cultures and Identities in 2020. Several other essay collections that have been nominated for the award did not focus on manga, but included chapters that did.
