Conference program and abstracts for Intercultural Crossovers, Transcultural Flows: Manga/Comics

Submitted by nele on Wed, 2010-04-21 10:13

INTERCULTURAL CROSSOVERS, TRANSCULTURAL FLOWS: MANGA/COMICS

2010, Sept. 30 - Oct. 2

International Conference organized by Jaqueline Berndt (Kyoto Seika University), Franziska Ehmcke (University of Cologne), Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (University of Tübingen) and Steffi Richter (University of Leipzig), in cooperation with the Japan Foundation (Japanisches Kulturinstitut), the Center for Intercultural and Transcultural Studies, University of Cologne and the International Manga Research Center, Kyoto Seika University.*

 

PROGRAM

 

- Thursday, 30 September 2010 -

Registration - 11.30-13.00
Welcome - 13.30-14.00

Paper Presentation 1: Ph.D.  Students Workshop
chair: Jean-Marie Bouissou (Paris, France)
14.00-14.35 - Felix Giesa (Cologne, Germany) & Jens Meinrenken (Berlin, Germany): 20th century toy, I wanna be your boy: Character and identity in
Urasawa Naoki’s “20th Century Boys” -abstract
14.35-15.10 - Verena Maser (Nürnberg-Erlangen, Germany): Love between girls in the graphic arts: A comparison between yuri and the webcom “Yu+Me: dream” -abstract

15.10-15.20 - Break

15.20-15.55 - Nele Noppe (Leuven, Belgium -website): Translating the visual languages of Japanese fan comics and North American and European fan art -abstract
15.55-16.30 - I-Wei Wu (Heidelberg, Germany): A flow of satirical pictorials in East Asia: The case of “Shanghai Puck” and “Tokyo Puck” -abstract

16.35-17.00 - Break: Coffee

Paper Presentation 2: Manga in Asia outside Japan
chair: Franziska Ehmcke
17.00-17.35 - Helmolt Vittinghoff (Cologne, Germany): Chinese Comics: Amusement or/and propaganda? -abstract
17.40-18.15 - Ulrike Niklas (Cologne, Germany): Amara Chitra Katha and modern Indian middle class -abstract

18.15-19.00 - Break: Snack

Keynote Lecture
chair: Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
19.00-20.00 - Frederik Schodt (San Francisco, United States): Creation of a manga-comic hybrid -abstract

Reception at the Cultural Institute of Japan, Cologne

 

- Friday, 1 October 2010 -

Paper Presentation 3: Historical perspectives on manga
chair: Steffi Richter
09.30-10.15 - Ronald Stewart (Hiroshima, Japan): “Manga” as a form of “Western” resistance against traditional Japanese Expression: Kitazawa Rakuten
and the early discourse on “manga” -abstract
10.15-11.00 - Pascal Lefèvre (Leuven, Belgium): The mischief gag comic, an
international phenomenon: Yokohama Ryuichi’s “Fuku-chan” and its
friends in Europe and the Americas -abstract

11.00-11.15 - Short Break

Paper Presentation 4: “gekiga” movement revisited
chair: Jaqueline Berndt
11.15-12.00 - Roman Rosenbaum (Sydney, Australia): From the national to the
transcultural: Tatsumi Yoshihiro’s “gekiga” -abstract
12.00-12.45 - CJ (Shige) Suzuki (Bethlehem, PA, United States): Tatsumi Yoshihiro and the gekiga movement in the global sixties -abstract

12.45-13.45 - Lunch

Paper Presentation 5: Transmedial and transcultural aspects 1
chair: Thomas Becker
13.45-14.30 - Maheen Ahmed (Bremen, Germany): Hybrid methodology for La Nouvelle Manga -abstract
14.30-15.15 - Elisabeth Klar (Wien, Austria): Mutants and machines: The body in European and Japanese erotic comics -abstract

15.15-15.30  - Short break

Paper Presentation 6: Transmedial and transcultural aspects 2
chair: Pascal Lefèvre
15.30-16.15 - Thomas Becker (Berlin, Germany): Premedialisation as symbolic capital in the intercultural communication of graphic arts -abstract
16.15-16.45 - Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (Tübingen, Germany): Manga/comic hybrid forms in picturebooks -abstract

16.45-17.15 - Break: Coffee

Paper Presentation 7: Manga in Europe
chair: Jean-Marie Bouissou
17.15-18.00 - Marco Pellitteri (Trento, Italy): Manga in Europe: A short study of market and fandom -abstract
18.00-18.45 - Paul Malone (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada): Transcultural hybridization in home-grown German manga -abstract

18.45-19.00 - Break

19.00-20.00 - Panel Discussion with female German mangaka: Christina Plaka, Anne Delseit & Martina Peters

Dinner (restaurant, just for speakers)

 

- Saturday, 2 October 2010 -

Workshop: Transculture, Transmedia, Transgenre: NARUTO challenging Manga/Comics Studies
The sort of manga, which dominates the perception of Japanese comics worldwide in the early 21st century, is hardly to be characterized by intercultural relations, that is, exchanges between discrete entities. Mainstream manga today are, first and for all, shaped by and engaged in transcultural flows. Whereas previously, American comics, bande dessinée and manga retained an obvious distinctiveness for both artists and readers, nationally defined styles and narratives have been losing significance under the conditions of globalization and information society. This situation raises, at least, three issues: first, whether the intercultural is actually replaced by the transcultural or rather supplemented; second, whether the cultural is confined to the national, or how the national relates to the regional, local and subcultural, which also applies to trans/gender; third, how the transcultural is facilitated by recent transmedia flows which call the very identity of comics into question. This workshop focuses on one representative work, or more precisely, franchise: NARUTO.

9.30-9.40 Introduction: Steffi RICHTER (chair)

Part 1: A Media Product and its Crosscultural Mediators
9.45-10.05 - Radek BOŁAŁEK (Warsaw, Poland): NARUTO on the Polish comics market: Observations from the perspective of a (researching) publisher -abstract
10.05-10.25 - OMOTE Tomoyuki (Kyoto, Japan): NARUTO as a typical weekly-magazine manga -abstract
10.25-10.45 - ITŌ Gō (Tokyo, Japan): Particularities of boys’ manga in the early 21st century: How NARUTO differs from Dragon Ball -abstract
10.45-11.15 Zoltan KACSUK (Budapest, Hungary): Subcultural entrepreneurs, path dependencies and fan reactions: The case of NARUTO in Hungary -abstract

11.15-12:00 - Discussion

12.00-13.00 - Lunch

Part 2: National ‘Odor’
13.00-13.20 - YAMANAKA Chie (Echizen, Japan): NARUTO as a manhwa: On the reception of Japanese popular culture in the Republic of Korea -abstract
13.20-13.40 - Franziska EHMCKE (Cologne, Germany): The tradition of the naruto motif in Japanese Culture -abstract

13:40-14:10 - Discussion

Part 3: Gendered Readership
14.15-14.35 - FUJIMOTO Yukari (Tokyo, Japan): Women in NARUTO, women reading NARUTO -abstract
14.35-14.55 - ŌGI Fusami (Dazaifu, Japan): NARUTO as a transcultural narrative in North America: Uniting superheroes and women -abstract

14:55-15:20 - Discussion

Part 4: Beyond Comics
15.20-15.40 - Martin ROTH (Leipzig, Germany): Playing NARUTO: Gaming experience, databases and unit operations -abstract
15.40-16.00 - Jaqueline BERNDT (Kyoto, Japan): NARUTO as a challenge to Comics Studies -abstract

16:00-16:15 - Coffee Break

16:15-17:00 - Final discussion

 

ABSTRACTS


Felix Giesa (Cologne, Germany) & Jens Meinrenken (Berlin,
Germany): 20th century toy, I wanna be your boy: Character and identity
in Urasawa Naoki’s “20th Century Boys”
Our paper will deal with Urasawa Naoki’s science fiction mystery manga
20th Century Boys, especially with the question, how the comic artist
unfolds a reflection of 50 years from the late 1960s of the 20th
century until 2015. On multiple timelines Urasawa develops a unique
memory culture which is based on a multitude of visual metaphors that
the author recruits from the complete (medial) pictorial inventory of
the late 20th and early 21st century. Through the use of globally known
images and pictures, like the UN building or the first landing on the
moon in 1969, a link to the collective memory is achieved. This is
supported by a permanent recourse to popular culture on each narrative
level. We find this most prominent in the use of the mega hit “20th
Century Boy” by the British rock band T.Rex. During the opening
sequence the song is presented in an analepse in which narrator Kenji
reports about his adolescence rebellion – and its failure. On the
current narrative level we are confronted with a militant sect, whose
apocalyptic habitus threats to destroy the world. The different time
and in parts reality levels of the narration are set in an everlasting
field of conflict that is created by a complex association of different
media forms. The prophetic power of the images plays a crucial role in
this. By referring to the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin gas attacks by the
Aum sect (Ōmu Shinrikyō), the manga develops its own setting of
catastrophe, of a destruction of the world. Planned to be an instrument
of these actions is a “robot” that will apply biological attacks on
London and San Francisco. By invoking the cyborg theme, the manga
reveals a moment of self-referentiality that leads from Urasawa’s own
work like PLUTO back to Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy or Dororo and even the
traditional visual presentation of yōkai spirits. By applying an
intermedial analysis to 20th Century Boys we will show how by recurring
to the collective memory, Urasawa generates a moment of identity and
designs his character within the pages of the manga.

Verena Maser (Nürnberg-Erlangen, Germany): Love between girls in the
graphic arts: A comparison between yuri and the webcom “Yu+Me: dream”
Since around 2003, we find increasingly more stories about love between
girls in manga, the so-called yuri genre. I will compare the genre’s
main contents with the American webcomic “YU+ME: dream” by Megan Rose
Gedris, which started in 2004. “YU+ME: dream” tells the story of
highschool student Fiona Thompson falling in love with her new
neighbor/classmate Lia Riolu. The art style was clearly influenced by
manga. At first glance, there are a lot of similiarities between
“YU+ME: dream” and yuri manga, such as Maria-sama ga miteru (Maria
Watches Over Us): The main characters are all girls in their teens, the
stories are set in highschools with all students wearing school
uniforms. The differences between yuri and “YU+ME: dream”, and thereby
between the Japanese and the American approach towards love between
girls, become evident when taking a closer look at how the relationship
is treated. In modern yuri manga, one will almost never find classmates
casting aspersions on female-female couples. The girls who are falling
in love with other girls are almost never confused by their feelings
and rarely shed tears on their love interest not being male. Sanctions
are rarely imposed by parents or teachers, mostly because none of them
gets to play a major part in yuri manga. “YU+ME: dream” on the other
hand depicts girls confused by their sudden same-sex oriented feelings
and classmates writing insulting graffiti on walls. Teachers and
parents, too, are opposing the relationship. Thus, these two different
approaches tell us a lot, not so much about the two societies’
attitudes towards lesbianism (as this is not the main topic of yuri),
but about how love between two girls is made into a piece of
entertainment and thereby what kind of stories are seen as entertaining
by their respective audiences.

Nele Noppe (Leuven, Belgium): Translating the visual languages of Japanese fan comics and North American and European fan art
Amateur comics are a key medium of expression for fans not only in
Japan, but also in North America and Europe, where they are classified
as “fan art”. Scholars of manga and comics tend to ignore these vibrant
comics-creating communities, being under the mistaken assumption that
the content of fan comics must be entirely different from commercially
published comics and manga. In reality, the main difference is often
simply one of legal categories. As a first step towards cross-cultural
examinations of fan-created comics, I will document the visual contents
of several hundred Japanese amateur manga and amateur manga’s European
and North American counterparts based on the same source work (Harry
Potter). Through a comparative analysis of the ways in which fan
artists visualize established characters, sexual content, and humour
(main themes in fanwork everywhere), I will show how culturally defined
visual codes influence visuals in fan-created comics and establish
transcultural influences between Japanese and North American
fan-created comics. Finally, I will propose a non-restrictive way of
interpreting the similarities and differences found.

I-Wei Wu (Heidelberg, Germany): A flow of satirical pictorials in East Asia: The case of “Shanghai Puck“ and “Tokyo Puck”
This paper attempts to examine the relation between early Chinese
manhua (漫畫) and Japanese manga (漫画) by focusing primarily on the
Chinese illustrated newspapers, Shanghai Puck and Tokyo Puck. In the
first section, I deal mainly with the Chinese term “manhua”. Most
Chinese scholars claim the term was brought in from Japanese in 1925 by
Fong Zikai (豐子愷), a famous Chinese writer and cartoonist who studied in
Japan. However, it is not the first time that the term “manhua”
appeared in China. Already 21 years before, in 1904, the Shanghai
newspaper Jinzhong ribao (Alarming Bell Daily) (警鐘日報) titled its
illustrations “shishi manhua” (current-event comics), revealing the
Chinese very basic understanding towards comics. On the basis of this
clue, I will trace the literal meaning of “manhua” in the Chinese
context, analyze important pictures in Chinese illustrated newspapers
and uncover how comics were presented. In the second section the
research concern shifts from the term “manhua”, to comics from both
Japan and China by taking a closer look at the exchange of images and
publications. Imitation and adaptation—the means of localization—are
main focuses here: What is selected? How are pictorial elements
re-arranged? I will propose the evidence of images taken from Chinese
illustrated newspaper and Tokyo Puck, a representative manga magazine
initially published in 1908. As for publication, I regard Shanghai
Puck, the first Chinese manhua magazine published in 1918, as a good
example to explain this incidence by surveying the layout, the format
and the pictures. However, imitation and re-arrangement does not seem
to exist only in these two magazines, since the publication of Tokyo
Puck was also inspired by western magazines. In this section, I will
also try to situate these images and publications in the global context
and interpret the exchange from a transcultural prospective.

Helmolt Vitinghoff (Cologne, Germany): Chinese Comics: Amusement or/and propaganda?
Picture stories have quite a long history in Chinese culture, but after
the first overwhelming success of Chinese comics in the twenties and
thirties of the last century, they seem to have greatly lost their
influence and popularity today. Since the arrival of television
culture, game consoles and the import of American and Japanese products
in the nineties, this process of falling into oblivion seems to have
accelerated not only among the readership but also with the powers that
used them for their own ends. Is this process due to a growing of
literary quality awareness or the oppressive censorship of political
authorities? Or due to a change in the recreational requirements,
especially of children and young people who were the lion’s share of
the readership? Or due to a lacking creativity of the writers or their
wrong choice of topics? The intention of my paper firstly outlines the
development of Chinese comics with a focus on the differences between
mainland China, Hongkong and Taiwan, with noteworthy examples.
Furthermore I shall examine the significance of comics as a means of
propaganda especially in the seventies. I shall conclude with a
hypothetical outlook of the future of Chinese comics.

Ulrike Niklas (Cologne, Germany): Amara Chitra Katha and modern Indian middle class
The Indian Middle Class distinguishes itself most often by a rejection
of its own cultural roots in an attempt to appear as “westernized” as
possible. This often leads to a loss of cultural identity and knowledge
of the young generation(s), especially in the case of children educated
in “English-medium” schools which are preferred by middle-class
families. Since several decades, there exists a publishing house in
India, specialized on “Comics” that render Indian cultural elements
into easily understandable formats. The issues of these “Amara Chitra
Katha” (lit. “Immortal picture stories”), depict Indian Mythology,
Literary Works, History and Biographies of important personalities. In
the case of the renderings of classical works, these comics are
astonishingly near to the originals (in all their brevity) and thus
appear on a first glance as apt tools for a - though superficial -
still to a great extent authentic acculturation (or re-culturation ?)
for young middle-class generations – and they are widely used to this
effect. Amara Chitra Katha–booklets appear mostly in English language
(which clearly shows the target group they are meant for), although a
small number of issues have been rendered into vernacular languages,
too. The latter, though, have not met with a great success and have
almost disappeared from the market by now. In my paper, I will deal
with this middle-class phenomenon of “lost culture”, besides attempting
to analyze a few “classical” Amara Chitra Katha issues with regard to
their quality and truthfulness to the originals they are meant to
represent.

Frederik Schodt (San Francisco, United States): Creation of a manga-comic hybrid
While adhering to the same basic grammar of sequential “panels,” “word
balloons,” and “sound effects,” Japanese manga and North
American/European comics today use radically different formatting
traditions, and also different artistic conventions. Starting around
1977, more and more manga have been translated and published in the
West. In the process, it has been necessary to “localize” manga, both
in terms of language and format, to make them acceptable to Western
readers. The same process occurred in Japan at the beginning of the
twentieth century, when Western styles were imported and localized for
Japanese readers, but the results were very different. I have been
involved in this localization process in North America since 1977, both
directly, as a translator, and indirectly, as an observer and writer
about Japanese manga. In addition to studying the way that Japanese
artists have incorporated Western traditions, dating back to the
mid-19th century, I have also studied the way that American artists and
publishers have tried to incorporate Japanese styles. But there have
also been changes in the process of “localization” over the years, and
in this paper I will draw heavily on my personal experience in the
industry to illustrate them. The need to translate manga, and to
translate the language in them so that they are readable to Western
readers, has not changed. However, whereas in the beginning the goal of
localization was to create a product that North American and European
readers would find identical to the comics that they normally read, in
recent years the emphasis has changed, to creating a product that is as
faithful as possible to the original Japanese format. The end result
has been the accidental creation of something new, neither purely manga
nor purely comic, but a hybrid. In this paper, I will specifically
examine what is one of the most controversial aspects of manga
localization—the shift in the West from publishing translated manga in
a “left-to-right” format to a “right-to-left” format.

Ronald Stewart (Hiroshima, Japan): “Manga” as a form of “Western”
resistance against traditional Japanese Expression: Kitazawa Rakuten
and the early discourse on “manga”
Despite the work of a handful of scholars who have done archaeologies
of the use of the term “manga” (eg. Uryū and Miyamoto), and/or have
highlighted foreign influences over time (eg. Shimizu), there is a
still tendency for “manga” to be defined purely by its most prevalent
current permeation. The result being, limited, and often fixed,
conceptions of the term “manga” and its forms, and teleological views
of manga development – seeing it as something uniquely Japanese, at
times connecting it to traditional culture, and largely glossing over,
or playing down, the various points of contact with the comic art of
other regions/countries in its history. By focusing on Kitazawa
Rakuten’s use of the word “manga” to label his attempt to replace Edo
period visual expression with a more “universal” or “Western” form of
expression, this paper hopes to throw new attention on two aspects, the
historically dynamic nature of the term “manga” and Japanese comic
art’s interaction with the outside world. Kitazawa Rakuten (1876-1955)
was Japan’s first career cartoonist, popular in late Meiji-period, he
remained through his work, and through his students work, a major
presence in Japanese comic art well into the Shōwa period. As well as
being a pioneer in modern cartooning and comic-strip character creation
in Japan, he is considered along with Imaizumi Ippyō, to have played a
significant role in popularizing the use of the word “manga”, and
making a transition from Edo period, and early-Meiji period
ponchi-type, visual culture structures to the use of simplified koma –
the basic building block of comics today. After his popularity had
somewhat waned, between the 1920s and the early-1950s, Rakuten wrote
three articles reminiscing on Japanese comic art history and asserting
that for him “manga” was an international language, and that he used as
a reaction against traditional Japanese expression. In this paper, I
will examine Rakuten’s writings, comic art, and association with the
modernist art journal Hōsun, to elaborate his conception of “manga”,
one very different from today’s common use.

Pascal Lefèvre (Leuven, Belgium): The mischief gag comic, an
international phenomenon. Yokohama Ryūichi’s “Fuku-chan” and its
friends in Europe and the Americas
Comics in various countries are often more interrelated than one
usually believes. Already in the late nineteenth century there was an
extensive international exchange between several countries. My paper
wants to focus on one particular genre in the field of comics, namely
the mischief gag comic about children playing pranks on someone else,
usually an adult. The first famous untamed, ferocious children in the
comics medium were the German Max und Moritz created by Wilhelm Busch
in 1865. After a few violent assaults on adults both rascals were
executed. Despite their short fictive life, these ferocious youngsters
still live on in a more diluted but multiplied form, because they have
an offspring of hundreds of comics series directly or indirectly
inspired by them. In fact, it were German immigrants that brought Max
and Moritz to the United States: in 1897 the German born Rudolph Dirks
created for Hearst in America The Katzenjammer Kids, which were on
their turn extremely influential. The genre of the mischief gag was
immediately adapted by cinema; the very first narrative film in 1895 by
the Lumière brothers was, in fact, an adaptation of a mischief gag,
L’Arroseur arosé. Moreover, even till today there is a lasting
fascination for such pranks, because worldwide there are still hundreds
of comic strip series about mischievous children. They may have quite
different names and live in very different cultures, but the basic
formula of the mischief gag has not changed much over the last century
and will probably continue in the future. My paper will take Yokoyama
Ryūichi’s Fuku-chan (Little Fuku) (of the 1930s and 1940s) as a case
study and compare it with European and American examples.

Roman Rosenbaum (Sydney, Australia): From the national to the transcultural: Tatsumi Yoshihiro’s “gekiga”
This paper investigates the intercultural and transcultural
implications of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s gekiga movement in Japan. What are
the implications of Tatsumi’s graphic representation of cross-cultural
differences in terms of what Roland Kelts has called ‘transcultural
longing’?  Gekiga in Japan was a countercultural movement that
eventuated in response to the perception of the stereotypical drawing
of manga developed by Tezuka Osamu in his mimesis of Walt Disney
comics. Yet as David Blake Willis and Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu have
argued in Transcultural Japan the West is preoccupied with conceptual
dichotomies and dialectical oppositions and has therefore overlooked
the transcultural and transnational elements in Japan that have created
a contemporary society with fluid boundaries and innovative cultural
formations. Thus, is Tatsumi’s gekiga genuinely similar to the American
countercultural movement of the 1960s, where Robert Crumb, Kim Deitch
and Art Spiegelman discarded the old funny page format and themes and
started a new way of graphical representation, or does it manifest an
entirely different cultural approach? What are the differences and
similarities between the American underground comic movement and
Japanese gekiga; considering that both eventuated in the early 1960s as
part of a larger social transformation in society? The paper also
considers the contemporary significance of the recent transliteration
of Tatsumi’s oeuvre in English by Canadian based Drawn & Quarterly.
I will focus in particular on the intercultural and transcultural
properties of Tatsumi’s recent work and how translations of his work,
like Adrian Tomine’s A Drifting Life, conceptualise the gekiga or
‘dramatic pictures’ movement that launched the alternative comic scene
in Japan in opposition to the prevalence of manga or ‘whimsical
pictures.’ To what extent was the gekiga groups manifesto a product of
intercultural/transcultural influence and how did its legacy effect the
internationalisation of manga?

CJ (Shige) Suzuki (Bethlehem, PA, United States): Tatsumi Yoshihiro and the gekiga movement in the global sixties
Coined and promoted by Japanese cartoonist Tatsumi Yoshihiro in 1957,
gekiga is the term which customarily refers to a group of manga
characterized by dark, realistic drawing styles and serious social and
political themes. Although the nascent development of gekiga can be
traced back to the 1940s, rental manga industry and culture (kashihon
bunka) took its form in the 1960s as a movement. Somewhat similar to
the underground comix movement in the US, Tatsumi and other like-minded
gekiga artists diverted aesthetically from Tezuka Osamu’s seminal manga
styles and explored new, alternative directions with experimentation of
manga medium when manga was still considered “vulgar” and children's
entertainment. My paper examines Tatsumi Yoshihiro’s major works from
the late 1960s to early 1970s and the gekiga movement by situating them
not only in the national history of Japan but also in the context of
the global sixties. The gekiga movement had a countercultural
proclivity of the age which was locally-situated but globally-informed.
Tatsumi’s gekiga works often focus on the dysfunctional masculinity and
frustrated sexual desires during the so-called “high-growth period” of
Japan (1955-1973) where the nationalist desire attempted to cleanse the
negative legacies of the war and consolidate working males into a
capitalist, productive subjectivity. By depicting the alienated and
marginalized lower-middle or lower “ordinary” male protagonists,
Tatsumi’s works critically articulate the ambivalence and
contradictions of the society during the Japanese “economic miracle”
years.

Maheen Ahmed (Bremen, Germany): Hybrid methodology for La Nouvelle Manga
The last few decades have witnessed changes within the realm of comics
that are drastic enough to justify the existence of independent genres.
Unprecedented in its spread, the scale of these transformations is
global and still ongoing. Regardless of the variety of terms coined to
denote it—graphic novels, bd moderne, Autoren-Comics—the phenomenon
itself remains strikingly similar amongst Western cultural spheres:
Opposing the clichés attached to comics, the new word-picture
combinations stand apart from the mainstream through profundity,
diversity and adult material. Due to its cross-cultural basis, the
nouvelle manga has created a niche within the recent word-image
innovations. Initiated and promoted by the French artist Frédéric
Boilet, it merges characteristics of the bande dessinée with Japanese
manga. In order to highlight the distinguishing features of this
unusual mode of cultural fusion, my paper will concentrate upon Mariko
Parade. Published in 2003, this nouvelle manga is the outcome of a
collaborative effort between Boilet and the Japanese mangaka, Takahama
Kan. Instead of adhering to the general tendency of adopting approaches
from literary studies for examining such material, my analysis will be
based upon art historical methodology. Consequently, formal analysis
and iconography will be used for delineating the extent to which visual
techniques from the West and the East have been incorporated and
transformed. This will be followed by a qualitative appraisal of
pictorial and literal aspects like style, themes and narration to
elucidate the differences from manga and traditional bandes dessinées.
The means of creating these differences will also be discussed by
focusing on the technical variation and originality, integration of
complexities like autofiction and the general ‘openness’ of the text
(in the sense accorded to it by Umberto Eco). Lastly, the nouvelle
manga’s transculturality along with the hybrid methodology’s
suitability will be evaluated.

Elisabeth Klar (Wien, Austria): Mutants and machines: The body in European and Japanese erotic comics
Compared to other art forms, the body possesses an exceptional position
in the comic: redrawn again and again, it is copied and cut by the
panels, scattered over the page. Its borders can be wiped away by a
single rubber stroke; it can be impaled, torn apart, and reassembled
without suffering any permanent damage. In the comic, the body is
always indestructible, it is always a superhero. This is also visible
in the erotic graphic novel and particularly in this genre it proposes
a post modern image of the body, and leads to mutants and cyborgs. The
erotic comic or manga plays an important role in Europe equally as in
Japan, and not without good reason as it seems to offer certain
advantages as a medium: It provides visual as well as linguistic
stimuli, it can be realised with a small budget, any sexual fantasy can
be lived and the actors do not have to fake their pleasure. In the
beginning, the erotic comic developed independently in Japan and
Europe, responding to different sexual fantasies and taboos in each of
the two countries, especially concerning the gender roles, the
representation of sexual organs, incest and paedophilia. In Japan,
specific censorship laws take a great influence on the production.
Nonetheless, active cultural exchange can be noticed recently as
notably the influence of the erotic manga on the European market grows
stronger. It is read by a larger public and also inspires European
artists in their drawing style as well as in their motives. At the same
time, there are also comic artists who begin – using the medium itself
– to question the pornographic comic production and criticising
especially the Japanese influence. This paper discusses the role of the
body in erotic comics of both cultures: What kind of image of the body
is offered, how are the gender roles and sexuality in general
represented, who is the target audience and to which demands and taboos
has the comic to respond to? Last but not least this paper is about the
conflicts that an intercultural encounter can lead to if this encounter
concerns such a delicate and intimate aspect of our culture.

Thomas Becker (Berlin, Germany): Premedialisation as symbolic capital in the intercultural communication of graphic arts
In 1983, Tezuka Osamu visited the most important comics festival in
Europe, but nobody recognized him in Angoulême. Only in 1990 did the
manga boom set in which made Tezuka famous in Europe and the USA as
well. What are the reasons for this late boom? The intermediality
studies use the term of remedialisation in order to communicate that
every new media transforms and rearticulates the possibilities of older
media. But the very late manga-boom in the USA cannot be explained by
such a term because a remedialisation of mangas by the film industry
did not happen in the beginning of the 1990s. I will argue that the
graphic art of comics has a specific symbolic capital in regard to film
as an art form: the premedialisation by exaggeration. In the 1930s, the
American comics showed extraordinary perspectives and movements of the
camera which were not possible in the movies at that time. The editors
of pulps gave up publishing written stories in order to produce comics,
because the allures of the movie-aesthetic were stronger than any
written adventure on the mass market. Only the new technical means
since Terminator II and the following computer animation in the
beginning of the 1990s made it possible to imitate perfectly the
perspectives of flying persons and extraordinary disasters in a movie.
Therefore, the comics’ symbolic capital of premedialisation was
exhausted in the USA during the 1990s. The manga-aesthetic replaced now
the sense of graphic premedialisation. In this regard, the
manga-aesthetic was not only a premedialisation of movies but of every
virtual moving picture in computer animation and advertising production
as well. Tezuka was the first draftsman to invent the specific grammar
of this premedialisation – but by influence of Disney’s animated films:
the multiple sequences of pictures with very small changes (first
realized in the manga Treasure Island, 1947). The symbolic capital of
graphic premedialisation concerning the moving picture is therefore
related to intercultural communication.

Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (Tübingen, Germany): Manga/comic hybrid forms in picturebooks
Picturebooks, graphic novels, comics and manga have much in common:
they are strongly determined by a narrative form relying on a sequence
of pictures, thus belonging to an art form that Will Eisner once
defined as “sequential art”. Sequential art as an intermedial
phenomenon usually combines pictures and written texts into narratives,
with the exception of artworks without any accompanying text. In this
case the narrative is performed by the picture sequence thus
challenging the viewer/reader to decipher the meaning and narrative
quality from the pictures. However, while picturebooks are generally
characterized by a specific text-picture-relationship that consists in
a seemingly ‘simple’ structure (with just one image on each page), in
comparison to the complex arrangement of panels in comics and manga,
the mutual influence of these art forms have been seldom investigated.
In this paper the relationship and transcultural flow between
picturebooks on the one hand, and graphic novels, comics and manga on
the other hand, will be emphasized. Firstly, it will be shown that the
graphic novel whose origin leads back to the 1930s with the work by
Otto Nückel, Lynd Ward, and Frans Masereel – to name just a few artists
– , strongly influences both the development of comics and
picturebooks. Secondly, the influence of comics and manga on modern
picturebook artists, such as Raymond Briggs, Nara Yoshitomo, Jan
Ormerod, Brian Selznick, Shaun Tan, David Wiesner, and Yashima Tarō,
will be stressed. Thirdly, a new type of picturebook will be presented
that is determined by hybrid forms. These picturebooks are
characterized by a juxtaposition of different visual and textual
patterns that derive from comics and manga. Finally, the impact of this
tendency on the development of new narrative concepts that correspond
to this challenge on behalf of the audience will be discussed.

Marco Pellitteri (Trento, Italy): Manga in Europe: A short study of market and fandom
This paper presents the descriptive results of the first comparative
survey carried out in Europe on manga and their readers, which at
present is still ongoing. The research, promoted by Jean-Marie Bouissou
of Sciences-Po in Paris, sees as key researchers Bouissou himself,
Bernd Dolle-Weinkauff (J.W.Goethe-Universität), Ariane Beldi
(Université de Genève), and myself. The survey has been conducted in
France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland in 2006-2007, through a
questionnaire. In the first phase of the research, now concluded, many
data have been collected, and an initial anslysis has been carried out.
This analysis has led to discover, or confirm, many elements of the
manga audiences, and to dismantle many false ideas on them. After some
overall theoretical considerations on the spreading of pop J-culture in
Europe since the late 1970s, the general situation of the manga market
in Europe today will be illustrated. Then I will proceed in showing the
main results of our analysis on the ‘hardcore’ manga fandom in France,
Italy, Germany, and Switzerland: a brief discussion on the surveys'
methods, some insights for a ‘sociology of manga fans’, and general
observations upon the main research questions—that is, how did manga
fans come to read manga; what are their reading habits and practices;
what are the social dimensions of the European manga fandom; why do
European fans read manga.

Paul Malone (Waterloo, ON, United States): Transcultural hybridization in home-grown German manga
The recent world-wide boom in the popularity of Japanese-style manga
came relatively late to Germany—compared to the US or France, for
example—but at a most opportune time. In the early 1990s, the small and
import-dependent German comics industry had overextended itself; when
recession hit the reunified German economy, a wave of bankruptcies,
mergers and acquisitions all but decimated the comics scene in Germany.
The surviving major firms—in particular Egmont Ehapa Verlag and Carlsen
Verlag—seized upon the rapidly rising interest in manga as a lifeline,
aggressively licensing Japanese properties. They soon made the happy
discovery that manga, with its broad range of genres and styles,
appealed as much to female readers as to males, thus virtually doubling
their audience by drawing in girls and young women who had seldom read
comics before. Moreover, this new import quickly became more than an
intercultural crossover: the high level of active fan participation
that is crucial to manga culture made manga an excellent tool for
recruiting consumers as potential producers. Thus the German
publishers, far more actively than their counterparts in other Western
countries, began hiring and training local German artists—at
considerable expense—to produce home-grown manga. This wave of artists,
overwhelmingly young women, is now combining manga aesthetics with
their own influences and interests to create transcultural hybrid forms
that reflect the increasing diversity of culture within Germany. An
examination of the artistic and narrative strategies of artists such as
Judith Park, Alexandra Völker, DuO (Dorota Grabarczyk and Olga
Andriyenko), Detta Zimmermann, Reyhan Yildirim and Anike Hage reveals a
variety of methods in which these newcomers are combining elements of
their individual ethnic and cultural backgrounds, the broader
German-language culture, and their East Asian models to fashion works
that deserve to be called both “German” and “manga.

Radek Bołałek (Warsaw, Poland): NARUTO on the Polish comics market:
Observations from the perspective of a (researching) publisher
With respect to the variety of comics, Poland has the biggest market in
former Eastern Europe. Japanese comics occupy less than 30% of it, but
enjoy usually higher print runs. Retrospectively, three waves of
popularity can be distinguished: the Sailor Moon wave, the Dragon Ball
wave and the NARUTO wave. Participants of the third one form the
majority of manga fans now. As distinct from their predecessors, they
are often more into socializing and merchandising goods than into manga
as comics although privileged by a much better availability of Japanese
titles in Polish and English. Not rarely called ‘Narutards’ (‘NARUTO’ +
‘retard’), a significant number of them is not interested in any other
kind of comics. Admittedly, there are also readers who started
appreciating (and buying) comics because of NARUTO. When growing up,
such readers have three options: to stick to manga for teenagers; to
switch to European/American comics; or to stop reading comics at all.
Against this situation, we founded our company Hanami in 2006.
Publishing sequential art from Japan for grown-up readers in thorough
translation, we try to bridge those worlds which tend to be separated
in the name of NARUTO, that is to say, manga and comics, teenagers and
adults, the printed book and the internet.

OMOTE Tomoyuki (Kyoto, Japan): NARUTO as a typical weekly-magazine manga
Manga are characterized by a mode of production and circulation which
rests mainly on weekly or monthly magazines. In the case of NARUTO, for
example, the first edition of vol. 45 saw a print run of 1.53 million
copies, while its publication site, the magazine Shūkan Shōnen JUMP,
had a circulation of 2.78 million copies weekly at the same time. An
investigation into how NARUTO is being received in contemporary Japan
has to consider the fact that it reaches its readers first in the form
of a magazine, not a book. As a magazine series the manga NARUTO
applies certain techniques which allow for dramatic developments within
the restricted space of 30 pages per installment week after week, and
which make the narrative so easy to understand that it can be consumed
on trains or in bookstores. Readers may also enjoy the synergetic
effects caused by the concurrent publication of several series in the
same magazine. Focusing on the changes which NARUTO as a series has
undergone since 1999 and analyzing the editors’ catchphrases on the
magazine’s page margins, my paper discusses the position of NARUTO in
Japan, especially in relation to other shōnen (boys’) manga of the same
time.

ITŌ Gō (Tokyo, Japan): Particularities of boys’ manga in the early 21st century: How NARUTO differs from Dragon Ball
NARUTO is, in many ways, Dragon Ball’s successor. Assuming the
existence of a distinctive space of expression opened up by Dragon
Ball, my paper regards manga works of the early 21st century like
NARUTO as both preserving and transforming the respective genre code,
which has become crucial for many shōnen manga-style works within
Japan. However, being recognized in tandem with the names of the
magazines in which such manga first appear, for example Shūkan Shōnen
JUMP and Gekkan Shōnen Gangan, genres are usually not related to
specific forms of expression, at least not in the Japanese-speaking
realm. In contrast, outside of Japan, such manga circulate almost
without any consideration of their first publication site. This makes
it apparently both easier to recognize genres and to miss crucial
elements of their formation, that is, the circumstances under which
such manga are published and received in Japan. My paper attempts at
bridging these two positions.

Zoltan KACSUK (Budapest, Hungary): Subcultural entrepreneurs, path dependencies and fan reactions: The case of NARUTO in Hungary
While fan production and dissemination practices, such as online
scanlations, have no doubt set the stage for the manga and anime boom,
which took Hungary by storm in 2006, it was the sudden emergence and
entry of a number of different market actors (TV broadcast companies,
subcultural entrepreneurs, traditional publishing houses) offering
events, contents and products, which helped both fuel and recognize the
size and extent of this previously untapped market. NARUTO was the
single most popular series in the country at the time and still is
today. So it was no surprise that both the anime and manga versions
were soon broadcast and published for the Hungarian audience to enjoy.
It is through the case of the official introduction of the NARUTO
series in Hungary that I wish to examine the role of subcultural
entrepreneurs in facilitating the flow of cultural products between
foreign markets, while focusing on the way these actors are often
required to negotiate a double position, one in relation to the already
established fan reception practices and expectations of their domestic
markets, and the other in relation to the requirements and standards of
their international partners.

YAMANAKA Chie (Echizen, Japan): NARUTO as a manhwa: On the reception of Japanese popular culture in the Republic of Korea
Until 1998, the Republic of Korea prohibited, in principle, imports of
Japanese popular culture, allegedly on grounds of ‘national sentiment’.
Thus, Korea gave the impression of a country with strong anti-Japanese
sentiments. However, in this very country, the book edition of NARUTO
has been selling very well; the games and anime are likewise popular.
And fans have formed respective communities via the internet, engaging
in CosPlay and fan art. This situation may appear as if resulted from a
new insignificance of NARUTO’s ‘Japanese’ elements (be it within the
narrative, be it with respect to the manga industry’s business model),
or ‘Japaneseness’ being rendered odorless, so to speak. By comparing
the reception of NARUTO within Korean comics culture to the tumult
caused by Dragon Ball in the 1990s, I will trace how the focus on
‘Japanese odor’ in Korea has changed and thereby make a contribution to
one important aspect of the workshop, that is, the relation between
culture as national culture and as local subculture.

Franziska Ehmcke (Cologne, Germany): The tradition of the naruto motif in Japanese culture
In Japanese tradition, famous places or scenic spots, called meisho,
are often mentioned in order to convey a certain set of allusions. By
repeatedly using the name of a specific place this will be enriched
with special ideas which are preserved over the years or may change in
the course of time. Naruto, a narrow strait located in the Inland Sea
and part of the old province Awa, is one of these places. The strong
currents caused by low and high tides and many flat rocks in the sea
create a rushing maelstrom (uzumaki) here.

Naruto is first mentioned in a poem included in the oldest anthology
Manyōshū (compiled in the 8th century) and has functioned since then as
a so-called poetic expression (utamakura) standing in for the province
of Awa. But we find naruto also as a code word in Japanese traditional
theatre, for example, a Noh play by Zeami, several Kabuki plays since
Chikamatsu Monzaemon, in Puppet Drama (Bunraku or Jōruri) since
Chikamatsu Hanji, in cabaret like Manzai and in early cinema between
1913 and 1931. It is also a motif in woodcut prints (ukiyo-e) during
the 19th century and in paintings of the 20th century. Tracing this
historical development of naruto, my presentation will illuminate
connotations brought into play by the name which the hero of Naruto
bears, Naruto Uzumaki.

FUJIMOTO Yukari (Tokyo, Japan): Women in NARUTO, women reading NARUTO
Although being a shōnen (boys’) manga serialized in Shūkan Shōnen JUMP,
NARUTO has many female readers. But its depiction of girls and women
is, even for this genre, rather conservative, which becomes apparent
when compared to similarly popular JUMP series. In my paper, I will
first introduce the particularities of NARUTO’s representation of
female characters and its later changes, while contrasting this manga
with ONE PIECE, before turning to yaoi readings of NARUTO. The
appropriation of male characters from popular manga for boys by
(mostly) heterosexual women and their transformation into homosexual
couples, which is now known on a global scale as yaoi, has been an
increasingly important part of female manga culture since the 1980s.
NARUTO is no exception. The fact that it is subject to yaoi readings
raises not only the issue of these readings’ specific characteristics,
but also the question of whether these subcultural activities have
actually affected recent changes in NARUTO’s representation of female
characters.

ŌGI Fusami (Dazaifu, Japan): NARUTO as a transcultural narrative in North America: Uniting superheroes and women
NARUTO is not just a Japanese product, but a transcultural media
phenomenon. Since its introduction in the US in 2003, NARUTO, one of
the most popular Japanese comics for boys, seems to have been
fascinating more girls than any other manga for boys. Overall,
publishers and bookstores suggest that about 40% of the readership of
manga for boys must be female, which brought a big change to the world
of comics, where few women were seen before. Examining NARUTO, this
leading manga for boys appealing to female readers in the US, I will
focus on the concept of ‘heroic masculinity’ as a transcultural key to
two male genres, Japanese shōnen (boys’) manga and American superhero
comics. While it typically appears in American superhero comics as the
notion of power, the primary focal points for NARUTO are rather themes
of identity and human flaws. Precisely this makes it attractive for
female readers, not dissimilar to autobiographical graphic novels by
women such as Persepolis and Fun Home. I would like to consider how
NARUTO presents itself as a narrative with a transcultural power,
uniting different cultures and different genders.

Martin Roth (Leipzig, Germany): Playing NARUTO: Gaming experience, databases and unit operations
NARUTO is one successful example of the continuously growing tendency
towards converging media contents and crossmedia marketing strategies
in contemporary popular culture. In my presentation, I will focus on
video games related to NARUTO and use contemporary concepts like the
‘database’ (Manovich; Azuma), or the idea of ‘unit operations’
(Bogost), as well as recent theories about games (eg. Galloway, Azuma)
to approach two main problems:

First, Japanese critic Azuma Hiroki argues, that postmodern culture
should not be understood through concepts of narration anymore. He
rather puts forward a model of cultural artifacts piled up in a
database. This leads to the question, whether we can understand the
mediamix NARUTO in terms of a database and, what distinguishes NARUTO
video games and the experience of playing them from reading the manga
or watching the anime. This raises as a second issue, how the
experience of playing Naruto as a video game informs the player about
the overall mediamix NARUTO, and in what way these games make the
architecture of NARUTO (or, to put it in Azuma’s terms, the database),
accessible to the player.

Jaqueline Berndt (Kyoto, Japan): NARUTO as a challenge to Comics Studies
NARUTO is both more and less than ‘comics’. First of all, it owes a
significant share of its popularity worldwide to attractive characters,
which move easily between different media and invite far more
activities than reading. As such, NARUTO presents a massive challenge
to the study of comics; it seems to escape what most researchers have
been eager to demonstrate: the aesthetic distinctiveness of ‘sequential
art’, or ‘graphic literature’. Even as printed matter in book format,
NARUTO does obviously not recommend itself for sophisticated readings.
Yet, leaving such mainstream products to Sociology and Cultural Studies
may easily lead to miss their second challenge, which applies to
apparently selfevident notions of sophistication in regard to
narrative, style and readership, and last but not least, to the
analytical tools of Comics Studies in the early 21st century. Thirdly,
NARUTO’s transcultural flows call the culturalization of manga into
question. Comics fans as well as critics and researchers show an
inclination to separating ‘manga’ from ‘comics’, which exceeds the
issue of ‘Japaneseness’ and the command of the Japanese language. As
the paper proposals for this conference suggest, inter- or
transculturality seems to matter for the study of manga, but not of
‘comics’ proper.

 

NOTE: Let's Manga is not involved in the organisation of this conference -we're just passing on information (and presenting).