Jaqueline Berndt Book order

Manga encompasses various aspects: it serves as a culture industry and a component of the 'media mix,' acts as a tool for 'Cool Japan' campaigns by the Japanese state, represents a visual language for a global fan culture, and provides a source of cute characters. Importantly, manga also consists of comics, primarily serial graphic narratives, where the media specificity influences the representational capacities that interest historians and gender studies scholars. This volume compiles German and English-language essays from a decade of manga studies, derived from book chapters and conference papers in non-comics-specific contexts. The essays do not merely utilize manga as cultural or Japan-related material; instead, they critically examine the aesthetic and cultural conditions and discourses relevant to such usage. Here, the focus is squarely on manga itself.

Since the late 1990s, Japanese comics, or manga, have become established as a globally-successful print medium. Striving for the transcultural and transdisciplinary exchange between Japanese manga researchers, European comics experts, and japanologists, this anthology addresses itself to readers who take an interest in cultural, historical, and theoretical reflections on reading manga. Its first part focuses on the case study of Nakazawa Keiji's Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen, 1973-1987), paying special attention to its reception in different cultures. Because of its subject matter Barefoot Gen provokes exploratons of comics' potential to narrate history realistically which is the object of attention in the second part. Finally, the third part highlights a variety of topics related to the impact of manga on other comics cultures. In accordance with the fact that Comics Studies can be conceptualized only as a multidisziplinary field research, the contributors to this anthology deploy a variety of angles: from Media History and Cultural Studies to Linguistics and Social Sciences as well as Gender Studies and Aesthetics.