The English-language academic world is starting to take an interest in anime and manga.  Previously, there had been the occasional “Girls read yaoi! Who knew?!” article, as well as an academic or two like the cultural anthropologist Matt Thorn, who has written a great deal about comics, shoujo manga, and other pop culture phenomena, but before anime and manga started edging their way into Big Box Bookstores and prime time television, the interest was minor.

But just like interest in manga and anime has been growing in the English-reading world, so has academic interest been growing, to the point that an annual academic journal that focuses on anime, manga, and the fan arts has been launched.  Mechademia is published by the University of Minnesota Press, and its premiere issue was released this fall.  It has papers on a wide variety of subjects, from an introduction to cosplay and the social settings in which it occurs, to an examination of “Superflat” art (a postmodern art movement in Japan that uses anime and manga techniques to criticize the cultural and social milieu) in 1990s Japan, to an article on the globalization of manga which includes, at least one previous commenter here will be happy to know, a bit of information on manhua in Taiwan. 

The International Journal of Comic Art naturally publishes some articles on manga, although its focus is on the broader world of comics, and The Comics Journal, although more of an arts magazine than a peer-reviewed academic journal, also publishes occasional articles on manga and mangaka.  Issue 269 of The Comics Journal was devoted to shoujo manga, and includes an interview with shoujo grandmaster Moto Hagio.

Journals of library science are also taking note of manga, although their articles are primarily focused on helping the befuddled librarian make sense of this strange new, often back-to-front, type of book that the kids and teenage patrons of their libraries are demanding.  One of the concerns is simply: where should manga be shelved?  Traditional Dewey Decimal cataloging rules that most public libraries use state that comics and comic art are to be shelved in nonfiction, in the 700s with the art books.  The problem is that readers think about manga and other comics in the same way that they think about prose fiction, and it rarely occurs to people browsing in the library to go to nonfiction to look for comics.   Some libraries ignore the rules and shelve manga in Fiction, but then they have to choose whether to follow the bookstore method and shelve it separately by title, or whether to mix it in with the regular fiction and shelve by the name of the mangaka.   Even unflipped manga is still a slight problem – my mother, who volunteers at a public library, tells me she spends a lot of time scraping library barcode stickers off the front covers of unflipped manga, where the distributor puts them, and placing them on the back covers, where they are located on the rest of the books in the library.

Other academic papers are scattered throughout the literature – a quick search on “manga” in the article databases I have access to at work brings up several articles published in the last few years – any of you contemplating writing a paper for school on manga should go to your school’s librarian and ask about the article databases you have access to and search in those.  There are several other resources online for academic writing about anime and manga.  Matt Thorn’s website contains articles and essays he’s written and published about manga.  AnimeResearch.com, although it doesn’t seem to have been updated in a year, contains links to online articles about anime and manga, and citations for printed articles, papers, and books.  The Anime/Manga Web Essay Archive also contains links to articles and essays available online.  It does a fairly good job of separating works published in academic peer-reviewed journals from those written by fans and posted online.  Fan essays can be good resources, but academic journals hold more weight with your professors when you write papers, because the papers published in them have to be reviewed by other scholars in the field before they see print.

What are the grand conclusions we can draw from this trend of treating anime and manga in an academic manner?  Nothing spectacular, just that as literary, artistic, and social trends grow in the wider culture, interest in them grows in the academic world.  However, I think the most exciting thing about this is that it shows you can go to graduate school and get your Master’s and Ph.D. degrees and begin to carve out an academic career for yourself while still obsessively reading and writing about the manga that you love.

As always, marriage proposals, fan letters, and hate mail can all be sent to me at manga@magatsu.net.