Kinsella, Sharon. Adult
Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary
Japanese Society. Richmond, Surrey:
Curzon, 2000; ISBN
0700710043 (paper). Author's
website
Acknowledgments
... ix
List of Figures
... xi
Introduction ... 1
- A Short History of Manga ...
19
- The Manga Production Cycle
... 50
- Adult Manga and the
Renegeneration of Nation Culture ... 70
- Amateur Manga Subculture and
the otaku
panic [on-line
version] ... 102
- The Movement Against Manga
... 139
- Creative Editors and
Unusable Artists ... 162
- Conclusion: The Source of
Intellectual Power in a Late Twentieth-Century
Society ... 202
Notes
... 208
References
... 213
Index ...
224
Review by Pascal
Lefèvre:
Yesterday I bought
Sharon Kinsella's new and first book Adult
Manga, Culture & Power in Contemporary Japanese Society
(Richmond,
Surrey: Curzon, 2000, ISBN (paperback) 0-7007-1004-3 ). It's
really
a book I've been waiting for! I'm not an expert in manga, so
I can't
judge all the statements but her approach is very interesting. It's an
ethnographic study of cultural production by way of participant
observation
research and interviews with 65 editors, artists, critics and
publishers.
She wanted to know which transformations took place in the nature of
popular
culture produced in Japan at the end of the Cold War. She
concludes:
"Adult manga has become a more middle-class medium which expresses the
consciousness of both editors and bureaucrats employed in government
agencies.
From the mid-1980's adult manga has effectively changed from being an
anti-establishment
medium to being a pro-establishment medium." At the same time
editors
are no longer sure what their high-circulation magazines should look
like
and who their readership is. "Publishers noted the absence of
large
nation-wide manga hits and the increasing frequency of minor, less
profitable
hits, amongst small, fragmented readerships." It strikes me
that
there are a lot of parrallels between the Japanese situation and our
European
(and maybe the American?). Unfortunately, I don't know of any
similar
books on European or American comics. The only thing I
deplore is
the fact that it took so long before this book was published, since her
PhD was completed four years agoo. Most of the statistics end
in
the middle of the 90's. I got the impression that she's not
very
well aware of comics outside Japan. When she speaks about the
foreign
artists who worked for the Japanese, I saw that the French artist Baru
was spelled "Balu" (three times). But, I'm very pleased with
this
book because it offered me some new and interesting insights in the
world
of manga. (Note: The review first appeared on the Comics
Scholars' Discussion List on 1 August 2000.)