Background
Denmark and Greenland have, for a long time, been historically connected; in 1721 the Danish/Norwegian priest and missionary Hans Egede travelled to Greenland in search of the Norse. He didn’t find them, as the Norse had disappeared at the start of the 15th century. He did however find the Inuit, and he focused his missionary activities on them instead. In 1728, Egede founded the colony Godthaab (which is now known as Nuuk, the capital of Greenland today), and until 1953 Greenland was considered a Danish colony. In 1953, Greenland became a part of the Danish realm under the constitution of Denmark. Greenland received Home Rule Government in 1979, and in 2009 this Home Rule Government was extended to Self Government – although the Danish monarch is still the head of state in Greenland. Since the 19th century, Danish (and later also Greenlandic) scientists have been working in Greenland, documenting everything from archaeology, anthropology and language, to geology, biology and glaciology.
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Tags: archaeology, Denmark, Greenland, Inuit, prehistory, shamanism
This paper looks at a few experiments on comics-storytelling in digital comics. The paper starts with introducing aspects from media psychology and research on technical documentation to look into the narrative and graphic structure of comics and touches on the characteristics of digital media before focusing on specific examples in more detail.
It can be said that a lot of digital and analogue comics constantly experiment on formal and narrative options. This is most obvious where elements of other narrative media get included (see Dittmar 2012 for a more thorough discussion of digital comics). The growing spectrum of forms offers more and more areas to use comics for: not only fictional but also non-fictional issues are communicated increasingly often in comics. For instance, maintenance manuals and assembly instructions for all kinds of artefacts are provided in sequential images more and more (see Schwender 2007, also: Jüngst 2010) – they are much easier to read than descriptive texts, as no translation of text into visual information is done, but the artefact in question and its parts are depicted and can be recognised easily.
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Tags: digital comics, interactivity, multimedia, storytelling
Shōjo manga varies in style and genre.[1] But despite this diversity, there is a certain conception of shōjo manga aesthetics, dominated by images of flowers, ribbons, fluttering hem skirts, and innocent-looking girls with large, staring eyes.[2] Traditionally, the beginning of shōjo manga has been equated with Tezuka Osamu’s Princess Knight (Ribon no kishi), but more recent studies have instead focused on prior texts,[3] namely the creations of Takahashi Macoto, who was influenced by the so-called lyrical illustrations (jojōga) of artists such as Nakahara Jun’ichi, Takabatake Kashō and Takehisa Yumeji.[4] Manga influenced by jojōga have arguably prioritized visual qualities.[5]
The importance of visual qualities has increasingly been recognized in shōjo manga studies.[6] However, most critical examinations of shōjo manga place emphasis on the role of narrative structure and representation of gender. This applies particularly to those who read shōjo manga as a medium to challenge conventional gender roles. As Iwashita Hōsei points out, female manga researchers especially have tended to focus on biological and socially constructed gender (2013a: 58). This column discusses two such works, Fujimoto Yukari’s Where is my place in the world? (1998, revised edition 2008) and Oshiyama Michiko’s Discussion of Gender Representation in Shōjo Manga: Forms of “Cross-dressed Girls” and Identity (2007, revised edition 2013).
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Tags: adult readership, aesthetics, Ariyoshi Kyōko, Ballet manga, Berusaiyu no bara, Boys’ Love, Chao, costume, fandom, fashion, France, French revolution, Fujimoto Yukari, gender roles, gender-subversive narratives, Hagio Moto, Hana-Kimi, Hanazakari no kimitachi e, Hatori Bisco, Honda Keiko, Ichijō Yukari, Ikeda Riyoko, Iwashita Hōsei, Japan, Japanese manga, jojōga, josei, Kyoto International Manga Museum, LaLa, Maki Miyako, manga, manga criticism, manga studies, Margaret, Matsunae Akemi, Mizusawa Megumi, Nakahara Jun’ichi, Nakajo Hisaya, Nakayoshi, Negative Perceptions of Comics, Nishitani Shōko, Nishitani Yoshiko, objectification, Osamu Tezuka, Oshiyama Michiko, otomechikku, Ouran High School Host Club, Ouran kōkō hosuto kurabu, passivity, Princess Knight, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Ribon, Ribon no kishi, Saitō Chiho, sexuality, Shimizu Reiko, shōjo, Shōjo kakumei Utena, Takabatake Kashō, Takahashi Macoto, Takehisa Yumeji, Takemiya Keiko, Takeuchi Naoko, Tezuka Osamu, The Cherry Project, The Rose of Versailles, Toe Shoes, transgression, Tsuki no yoru hoshi no asa, Yamagishi Ryōko, yaoi, Yokomori Rika
At first sight, the relationship that architecture has with comics seems to be obvious and inarguable. According to Frank Lloyd Wright ‘architecture is life; or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived’ (Baker 2008, 117).
As comics is a medium that usually portrays human life through its characters, the representation of architecture will help the reader/viewer to understand the characteristics of the characters, since architecture is an interface created by Man to make the world fit to his needs and routines. However, the relationship that architecture has with comics is not limited to obvious representations of it in comics; it is also present in depictions of its creative process and even in the similarity between the experiences of the comics reader and the user of architecture. According to Buchet (2013), the architect can be compared to a strip cartoonist: when he draws a museum or even an airport terminal, there is an implicit narrative that the visitor reads when attending these places.
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In part one, I showed how the manga artist Tezuka Osamu and his body of work function as more than a mere object of analysis within manga studies but as a totalizing discourse upon which a number of larger critical concerns are projected. This has the rather odd effect of rendering “Tezuka” a milieu which can absorb even those critiques which seek to overcome a Tezuka-centric purview as to what manga might be in both historical and formal terms. I used the critical writings of Takeuchi Osamu not to evaluate them as such but to demonstrate the discursive mechanics of this totalizing absorption. In part two below, I will once again use Takeuchi’s critical oeuvre to examine, in addition to how the critic’s own personal predilections can become subsumed into seemingly objective claims, the assumptions underlying manga formalism: how manga fit with other media, how manga is understood as children’s literature, and how manga is treated as, if not entirely presumed to be, a predominantly postwar phenomenon.
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Tags: adult readership, aesthetics, akahon, Allied occupation of Japan, boku-gatari, Chame, children readers, children’s literature, Chōjū jinbutstu giga, ehon, emakimono, emonogatari, fandom, Gendai manga hakubutsukan, Giants of Children’s Manga, graphic narrative, Hasegawa Machiko, historiography, History, illustrated stories, Japan, jaqueline berndt, Kitazawa Rakuten, koma manga, manga criticism, manga hyōgen, Manga no sengo shisō, Mangashugi, Meiji Restoration, Miyamoto Hirohito, Natsume Fusanosuke, newspaper strips, Osamu Tezuka, Paul Gravett, periodicals, post-war period, rakugaki, Ryan Holmberg, Sazae-san, semiotics, Sengo manga no 50nen-shi, Sharon Kinsella, Shisō no kagaku, shōjo, shōnen, sociology, subjective criticism, Takeuchi Osamu, Tezuka, Tezuka Osamu, Thoughts on Manga in the Postwar, Tokyo Puck, Tsurumi Shunsuke, WWII, Yamada Tomoko, Yomota Inuhiko, Yonezawa Yoshihiro
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