The global circulation of comics, manga, and other such visual mediums between North America and Asia produces transnational meanings no longer rooted in a separation between "Asian" and "American." Drawing New Color Lines explores the culture, production, and history of contemporary graphic narratives that depict Asian Americans and Asians. It examines how Japanese manga and Asian popular culture have influenced Asian American comics; how these comics and Asian American graphic narratives depict the "look" of race; and how these various representations are interpreted in nations not of their production.

Discusses the different forms, styles, artists, and publishers of manga, the popular form of comic book in Japan. Frederik L. Schodt looks at the classic publications and artists who created modern manga, including the magazines Big Comics and Morning, and artists like Suehiro Maruo and Shigeru Mizuki; an entire chapter is devoted to Osamu Tezuka.

Cartoonist Osamu Tezuka (1928?1989) is the single most important figure in Japanese post-World War II comics. During his four-decade career, Tezuka published more than 150,000 pages of comics, produced animation films, wrote essays and short fiction, and earned a Ph.D. in medicine. Along with creating the character Astro Boy (Mighty Atom in Japan), he is best known for establishing story comics as the mainstream genre in the Japanese comic book industry, creating narratives with cinematic flow and complex characters. God of Comics chronicles Tezuka's life and works, placing his creations both in the cultural climate and in the history of Japanese comics. God of Comics includes close analysis of Tezuka's lesser-known works, many of which have never been translated into English. It offers one of the first in-depth studies of Tezuka's oeuvre to be published in English.

Born of Japan's cultural encounter with Western entertainment media, manga (comic books or graphic novels) and anime (animated films) are two of the most universally recognized forms of contemporary mass culture. Because they tell stories through visual imagery, they vault over language barriers. Well suited to electronic transmission and distributed by Japan's globalized culture industry, they have become a powerful force in both the mediascape and the marketplace.This volume brings together an international group of scholars from many specialties to probe the richness and subtleties of these deceptively simple cultural forms. The contributors explore the historical, cultural, sociological, and religious dimensions of manga and anime, and examine specific sub-genres, artists, and stylistics. The book also addresses such topics as spirituality, the use of visual culture by Japanese new religious movements, Japanese Goth, nostalgia and Japanese pop, "cute" (kawali) subculture and comics for girls, and more. With illustrations throughout, it is a rich source for all scholars and fans of manga and anime as well as students of contemporary mass culture or Japanese culture and civilization.

Japan's output of manga is massive, accounting for a staggering forty percent of everything published each year in the country. Outside Japan, there has been a global boom in sales, with the manga aesthetic spreading from comics into all areas of Western youth culture through film, computer games, advertising, and design. Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics presents an accessible, entertaining, and highly-illustrated introduction to the development and diversity of Japanese comics from 1945 to the present. Featuring striking graphics and extracts from a wide range of manga, the book covers such themes as the specific attributes of manga in contrast to American and European comics; the life and career of Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy and originator of story manga; boys' comics from the 1960s to the present; the genres and genders of girls' and women's comics; the darker, more realistic themes of gekiga -- violent samurai, disturbing horror and apocalyptic science fiction; issues of censorship and protest; and manga's role as a major Japanese export and global influence.

Since first published in 1983, Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics has been the book to read for all those interested in Japanese comics. It is virtually the "bible" from which all studies and appreciation of manga begins. More than that, given the influence of Japanese manga on animation and on American-produced comics as well, Manga! Manga! provides the background against which these other arts can be understood. The book includes 96 pages from Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix, Reiji Matsumoto's Ghost Warrior, Riyoko Ikeda's The Rose of Versailles, and Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen.

This edited collection explores how graphic art and in particular Japanese manga represent Japanese history. The articles explore the representation of history in manga from disciplines that include such diverse fields as literary studies, politics, history, cultural studies, linguistics, narratology, and semiotics. Despite this diversity of approaches all academics from these respective fields of study agree that manga pose a peculiarly contemporary appeal that transcends the limitation imposed by traditional approaches to the study and teaching of history. The representation of history via manga in Japan has a long and controversial historiographical dimension. Thereby manga and by extension graphic art in Japanese culture has become one of the world's most powerful modes of expressing contemporary historical verisimilitude. The contributors to this volume elaborate how manga and by extension graphic art rewrites, reinvents and re-imagines the historicity and dialectic of bygone epochs in postwar and contemporary Japan. Manga and the Representation of Japanese History will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian studies, Asian history, Japanese culture and society, as well as art and visual culture

Known as the Walt Disney of Japan it is no surprise that Tezuka Osamu is still the best-known manga creator to Western fans. Using essays and reprints of Japanese manga on Tezuka, this book questions his influence and attitudes toward the nonhuman, evolutionary theory, the aesthetic lineage of contemporary manga, incipient feminism in the reinscription of the nonhuman feminine, the sexual politics of manga bodies, the origins of the moe culture, and the styles of didacticism revealing the digressions of insects and classical modes, among others. The authors offer varying perspectives on the historical transformations in production, distribution, and reception that gradually integrated and differentiated an overlapping series of markets and readerships in the postwar era.

In recent years, Manga has seen phenomenal success, not only in Japan, where it dominates the publishing industry, but also in the West, where it is steadily growing in popularity and influence. As swift and sudden as the popularity of this graphic art form may seem, Manga has, in fact, deep roots in Japanese culture, drawing on centuries-old artistic traditions. As early as the twelfth century, Emakimono scrolls existed, a narrative form in which stories of all kinds--romantic, fantastic, even comic--were told through the combined use of text and illustration. Japanese art continued to change as profound political, social, and economic transformations remade the country in the centuries to follow. Today there is little doubt as to the meaning of the term Manga--nor to the astonishing popularity of the form--but few in the West understand the long artistic history that gave birth to this phenomenon and the social factors that continue to shape it today.One Thousand Years of Manga is both an informative account of the genesis of the form and a visual delight. Through its captivating illustrations and enlightening text, the book situates Manga in its proper context, appreciating it for what it truly is: an integral part of Japanese art and culture that is as rich and revealing as it is popular.

Shojo manga are romance comics for teenage girls. Characterized by a very dense visual style, featuring flowery backgrounds and big-eyed, androgynous boys and girls, it is an extremely popular and prominent genre in Japan. Why is this genre so appealing? Where did it come from? Why do so many of the stories feature androgynous characters and homosexual romance? Passionate Friendship answers these questions by reviewing Japanese girls' print culture from its origins in 1920s and 1930s girls' literary magazines to the 1970s "revolution" shojo manga, when young women artists took over the genre.Passionate Friendship's close literary and visual analysis of modern Japanese girls' culture will appeal to a wide range of readers, including scholars and students of Japanese studies, gender studies, and popular culture.

Traditional Monster Imagery in Manga, Anime and Japanese Cinema builds on the earlier volume Anime and its Roots in Early Japanese Monster Art, that aimed to position contemporary Japanese animation within a wider art historical context by tracing the development of monster representations in Edo- and Meiji-period art works and post-war visual media. While the previous volume concentrated on modern media representations, this work focuses on how Western art historical concepts and methodology might be adapted when considering non-Western works, introducing traditional monster art in more detail, while also maintaining its links to post-war animation, sequential art and Japanese cinema.