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The contributions to this volume are less engaged in studying “popular culture” rather than media, giving preference to materialities, affordances, pragmatics, and actors’ interrelations. Specific actors in specific situations and contexts come to the fore, as do specific events and experiences on the part of media users. Fans are recognized as producers of valuable knowledge, potent creators, and the researcher’s “teacher.” Sociocritical potential is found in forms of interactivity. To accommodate the focus on methods and their reflection as methodologies, the present volume is not structured along the lines of research objects or, more specifically, individual media. Consequently, contributions from the perspectives of game studies or anime studies are not grouped together. Instead, each of the three parts into which this volume falls presents a certain emphasis. The first part, titled “Research Methods and their Objects,” highlights most clearly how reflections on objects and methods constitute methodologies. The second part shifts the center of attention to “Media Texts and Formal Analysis,” while the third, and most diverse, part assembles considerations of “History, Semiotics, and ‘Grounded Theory’.”

Manga are a global phenomenon that by the 2010s had gained attention beyond the initial subcultural field. Exhibitions leaning on references to “Japan” helped to establish an acceptance among non-readers, first in Japan and later abroad. But once manga had matured as a transnational media, the situation went into reverse: manga came to be employed as a means of promoting “Japan.” Drawing on comics studies, and exhibition research, this chapter examines the relationship between exhibiting manga and representing “Japan” using the example of the world-traveling exhibition “Manga Hokusai Manga: Approaching the Master’s Compendium from the Perspective of Contemporary Comics” (The Japan Foundation, 2016-). While the first section provides a brief survey of manga exhibitions in Japan, the second (and main) section looks at how they facilitate the purpose of representing “Japan.” Attention is drawn to conditions of exhibition-making that tend to go unheeded by critics (budget, availability of exhibits, and internal conflicts). Regarding the “exhibition as narrative”, the analysis focuses on what the show in question “tells,” both verbally and visually, and what it affords. The third and closing section shifts the emphasis from representing “Japan” to representing manga. It considers the target-audiences of manga-as-comics exhibitions and suggests turning the attention from the representation of particular subject matter to spatiality as the point where graphic narratives and exhibition layout meet.

This chapter puts conceptualizations of kuzazōshi as “comic books” to the test by subjecting two early modern graphic narratives to a mangaesque reading, that is to say, a reading that treats them as if they were contemporary story-manga. However, this reading does not foreground character types, narrative tropes, visual motifs, or parodic intertextuality, which normally are the subject of investigation by literary scholars; preference is given to embodied reading, to the perceptual rather than cognitive effects of the forms at hand. This includes intermedial considerations, in particular regarding the argument that the storytelling of modern comics is fundamentally informed by cinema. The manga-informed readings foreground two central issues: on the one hand, the perceptual movement of the gaze which connects to page-turns as movements of the hand, and the narrative’s visual flow forward; on the other hand, the representation of characters’ feelings, which in turn may move the reader and lead to empathetic engagement. In conclusion, the contingency of the notion of “manga” comes to the fore, and the conceptualization of kusazōshi as “comic books” appears as a matter of degree, depending on the considered historical periods, genres, and works of manga, and also the aesthetic aspects that are highlighted. Rendered in still, mute, and monochrome fragmented drawings, both kusazōshi and (print-based) story-manga afford an agency to their readers, that differs from both classic live-action film and recent (vertical-scroll) webtoons. To trace this agency, it is vital to consider the perceptual, sensory, and cognitive effects of the material forms at hand, and their embodied reading.

[keynote lecture:] One distinctive characteristic of anime is the frequent use of close-ups featuring eyes. Big eyes have been read as “mirrors of the soul” or tools of gaze dynamics, based on the presumption that characters’ inside and outside, or the acts of seeing and being seen, can be neatly separated. But contemporary anime fiction does not necessarily comply, and the frontally taken one-eyed shot is a case in point. This talk will examine anime’s extreme close-ups of single eyes from a phenomenological angle. Instead of analyzing what the “anime eye” represents, the focus will be on how it operates for the viewer. In a way that easily appears “post-cinematic,” the “anime eye” comes to the fore as a sensory interface. It privileges haptic visuality and affective responses, accommodates small displays and fragmented forms of use across varying devices, and undermines aesthetic as well as narrative consistency (e.g. “chibi”). But questions arise: How anime-specific is it? Has it originated from manga, or reversely, entered Japanese comics as an anime-esque element? Furthermore, is it a marker of anime in general or rather bound to a certain period and genre? And finally, hasn’t anime always been “post-cinematic” to a greater or lesser degree?

This Companion conjoins manga and anime as distinct while interrelated media forms. Focusing on corporate productions in the Japanese environment, it introduces how manga and anime operate individually and together. In line with this, common characteristics such as visuals, voices, serial narratives, and industrial conditions are addressed in a twofold way, that is, from the respective vantage points of both manga studies and anime studies. A form-conscious approach prevails, which results from the central position ceded to mature readers and viewers, acknowledging their imaginative as well as critical agency. This approach provides analytical tools that can be applied to changing contents and situations, up to and including non-Japanese productions and usages of the two media forms. Ultimately, the Companion offers insights not only into the media forms themselves but also into state-of-the-art manga studies and anime studies.

Spanish translation of

2021_“Introduction,” in Anime Studies: Media-Specific Approaches to Neon Genesis Evangelion, ed. by José Andrés Santiago Iglesias and Ana Soler Baena, Stockholm UP, pp. 1–18. Open Access. 

by Jonathan López-Vera con asesoramiento terminológico de David Heredia desde DARUMA Serveis Lingüístics, SL. 

See also Polish translation of the same chapter, by Anna Justyna Radkiewicz, 2022, doi.org/10.26881/pan.2022.28.07.