anime conventions – Contemporary Japanese Literature

Fan Comics at Anime Expo 2015

July 29, 2015August 4, 2015 KathrynLeave a comment

Nicolle Lamerichs, in a 2013 essay titled The Cultural Dynamic of Doujinshi and Cosplay: Local Anime Fandom in Japan, USA and Europe, writes:

I argue that anime fandom is not easily understood as a global phenomenon but rather is composed of different, heterogeneous values and communities. The local iterations of cosplay and doujinshi, which may seem homogeneous activities, are read as manifestations that are firmly anchored in particular traditions. (156)

Essentially, the fan practices and productions on display in anime conventions are different in different countries. Lamerichs readily points out that this has less to do with any sort of “national character” and more to do with the fact that “these fan cultures are individual events with their own ecologies” (158). Nevertheless, Lamerichs argues that, in comparison with Japan, Germany, and the Netherlands, American anime conventions exhibit “a very different tendency towards prints and hand-made drawings rather than full-fledged comics” (161).

Lamerichs is absolutely not wrong, but I would like to respond by positing that online communities primarily used for fannish artistic production and consumption, such as Tumblr, DeviantART, and Pixiv (along with many mirrors, offshoots, webcomic serialization platforms, and independently run artistic collectives), have put not just individuals but fannish cultural norms into closer contact with one another during the past several years. Among other things, this trend has led to an explosion of anime-inspired comics and fan comics at anime conventions in the United States.

I picked up a suitcase full of these comics at the Los Angeles Anime Expo this past 4th of July weekend, and I’d like to share some of them here in order to document this change. Independent artists had tables in the main Exhibition Hall and in the smaller Artist Alley section, but both areas are huge, and I’m not entirely certain I was able to cover the entire floor. Also, as much as I would have liked to buy everything I saw, my financial resources were limited. What I am posting here should therefore not be considered a representative sample. Furthermore, while I am focusing on fan comics based on well-known existing media properties, the reader should keep in mind that there was a great deal of original work available as well.

Without further ado, here are the scans I made of self-printed fan comics from Anime Expo 2015. Click on any of the thumbnails to see a larger image.

The 100% True and #Confirmed Ending to Naruto by Kelly (on Tumblr)
based on the shōnen franchise Naruto

…And☆Steven! by Mike Luckas (on Tumblr)
based on the Cartoon Network animated series Steven Universe

Tomoyo’s Secret Diary, edited by Yuj Lee (on Tumblr)
based on the shōjo manga and anime Cardcaptor Sakura

Pokémon Cross Breeds, by Nathan Nguyen (on Tumblr)
based on the Pokémon series of video games

Artisan Ordinance, edited by MERODii (on DeviantART)
based on the video game Animal Crossing: New Leaf

Bubbline, edited by Schnekk (on Tumblr)
based on the Cartoon Network animated series Adventure Time

Shimotsuma Zine, edited by FANGRRLZ (on Tumblr)
based on the novel and film Kamikaze Girls

I Will Always Be Here, by Karen and Britney (on Tumblr)
based on the animated Disney film Big Hero 6

In addition, there were several cool fan comics and comic anthologies based on the Marvel cinematic universe drawn or edited by Krusca (on Tumblr), and I also came across a cool book based on the manga of CLAMP put together by Lärienne (on DeviantART), GYRHS (on DeviantART), and Samantha Gorel (on DeviantART).

All of these books are *amazing.*

If I have misidentified an artist or editor, or if you are an artist or editor and would like me to remove or update any links or images, please let me know! I have nothing but admiration and respect for people who self-publish their art and comics, and I don’t want to misrepresent or appropriate anyone’s work. Stay awesome!

Schoolgirl Milky Crisis

June 29, 2011July 15, 2011 KathrynLeave a comment

Title: Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade
Author: Jonathan Clements
Publication Year: 2009
Publisher: Titan Books
Pages: 272

Do you love anime? Do you really love anime? Have you lived long enough to catch references to anime titles more than five to ten years old? Do you appreciate dry humor? Do you want to hear some great gossip about the anime industry? If so, you should seriously consider grabbing a copy of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis – or downloading one to your Kindle, which is what I did.

Schoolgirl Milky Crisis has been out for more than two years now, but I had put off reading it because I didn’t think I wanted to read a book “mixing reviews, cultural commentary, insights into classic manga and anime titles, interviews and profiles of Japan’s top creators, and hilarious insider stories from the anime trade.” I assumed such a description was advertising code for “short, unrelated blips of a journalistic nature crammed haphazardly together within an appealing bright yellow cover that will attract potential teenage buyers in the wake of the success of Japanamerica.” In other words, I thought it would be rubbish.

It’s not. Jonathan Clements is a fantastic writer, and the editing and organization of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis is equally well done. The result of this excellent writing and editing is a product that is intelligent and eminently readable. I downloaded the book on a whim during a short train ride yesterday afternoon and ended up doing several loads of laundry just so I would have an excuse to sit on my kitchen floor all night and continue reading it.

The essays in Schoolgirl Milky Crisis can be divided into three main categories. The first and foremost category is insider industry information and gossip. The gossip includes tidbits such as how fan-run conventions fail to respect their guests from Japan and how a famous director with a name suspiciously close to “Ōtomo Katsuhiro” was almost physically kicked out of the company that distributes his films in Britain. The insider industry information contains all the behind-the-scenes nuts and bolts that fans often aren’t aware of, such as how property rights are acquired, how difficult it is to get a show on television, and how people end up becoming voice actors (apparently, voice acting is not a job anyone actually wants). The second category concerns information on foreign markets for anime in countries like China, Korea, the United States, and Britain – and also places like Finland and Estonia. I imagine that this category might be genuinely interesting for anime fans (especially those in the States) who see anime as existing only in their own country and Japan (and who aren’t freaks like me who read anime magazines in three different languages). The third category involves extended analytical essays that were originally delivered as public lectures. “Five Girls Named Moe: The Anime Erotic,” for example, is about the porn industry in Japan, and “Highbrow Skills in a Lowbrow Medium” concerns the issue of “translation” versus “localization.” In my opinion, these longer essays in particular make the book worth reading and are well worth the price of admission.

Unfortunately, there were several sections that I found myself quickly clicking through after the first four or five pages. One was the chapter on Chinese animation, which begins with a brief overview and then launches into extended plot summaries of all of the titles mentioned in said overview (none of which could be found on Google). Another was the essay included as the liner notes in the re-release of the 1961 film Mothra, which lists name after name after name of a cast and crew I knew nothing about. Name dropping and plot summaries are rarely interesting, especially when the names are relatively unknown and the plots belong to films that are almost impossible to actually get one’s hands on. Speaking of which, even reviews that were interesting and fun to read could become frustrating, as the anime industry in the West moves quickly (and older titles have a tendency to become rare). For example, I was especially impressed by Clements’s liner notes for the anime series Saikano (released in 2002 in Japan, 2004 in America) but soon found that I couldn’t rent it from Netflix or Tsutaya or watch it on legally streaming sites like Hulu or Crunchyroll. What’s the point of reading about how great an anime is if you can never watch it?

In any case, what keeps the reader going through sometimes tedious and occasionally disjointed material is Clements’s wry and amusing narrative voice and common sense approach to the topic at hand. To illustrate this, I’d like to quote a paragraph from an essay titled “The Measure of Tape: The Lost World of VHS,” in which Clements describes a fantasy he had after witnessing a distributor throw out all the old review copies of VHS tapes he had gone through the trouble of returning:

So I decided that was it. I was going to liberate VHS. I was going to hoard my review copies until my office burst at the seams, and one day a grateful university library would come along and open the Jonathan Clements Wing, packed to the rafters with PAL copies of obscure titles like Ambassador Magma, and errant NTSC dubs of Fatal Fury. Researchers would then come from far and wide to leaf through my collection of ancient Japanese-language Newtypes and make notes for their dissertations. And once every few years, when I needed to check a scene in episode #8 of Ushio and Tora, I would pop back and visit my old tapes, just for the day. That was the plan.

I think this serves as a fitting analogy for Schoolgirl Milky Crisis itself. Sure, some of the titles Clements discusses may be old and obscure, and sure, maybe nobody cares about foreign markets and industry information besides the people actually involved in the process, but the essays in Schoolgirl Milky Crisis, when read as a whole, succinctly track the history of anime in Asia and the West, bit by tantalizing bit. The writing style is engaging enough to keep the reader invested in the process all the way until the end. If you’re not an anime fan, you probably won’t have much use for the book; but, if you are a fan and haven’t checked out Schoolgirl Milky Crisis yet, I highly encourage you to do so.

From Impressionism to Anime

July 8, 2009March 11, 2014 KathrynLeave a comment

From Impressionism to Anime

Title: From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Mind of the West
Author: Susan Napier
Publication Year: 2007
Publisher: Palgrave
Pages: 243

Let me start off by listing the obvious flaws of this book. First of all, the cover. It’s terrible. Whose idiot idea was it to take a crappy photo of crappy cosplay, run it through the “Impressionism” filter in Photoshop, and then put it on the cover of a book? According to the back cover, this monstrosity is the work of “Scribe Inc.” Shame on you, Scribe Inc., and shame on you, Palgrave, for letting them get away with it! Second of all, in a book primarily concerned with visual culture, there are surprisingly few illustrations. To be precise, there are ten, and only four of them are in color. This I am going to blame on the author, whose 2005 work Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle is also surprisingly under-illustrated (while other Palgrave scholarly publications have no shortage of well placed, high-quality greyscale images). Napier has no excuse for this, especially since the cosplay culture she details so lovingly is all about getting pictures of itself published. Third, Napier’s scope is very broad, but her treatment of her many topics is, perhaps unsurprisingly, shallow. I did not find this to be the case with Anime (despite many critical accusations to the contrary), but I’m disappointed with what I found to be the lack of sustained intellectual rigor in Impressionism.

Now that that’s out of the way, let me be something of a fangirl for a second and say that I love all of Napier’s work, Impressionism included. Napier always manages to choose the most fascinating things to write about, and she always does an excellent job of explaining why her chosen subject matter is interesting and important. Her analysis is apt, penetrating, and lucid, and her work does not suffer from any of the structural weakness found in a great deal of recent academic work – you always know what she’s trying to say, and her way of saying it is both logical and artistic. Although her theoretical background is rock solid (her bibliographies are a bit intimidating), she doesn’t blithely toss around big names and critical jargon. Also, you can tell that, even though she occasionally betrays a bit of light-hearted sarcasm, she has nothing but respect for the topics of her studies.

This attitude of respect is very important for a work like Impressionism, which deals with some strange and, depending on one’s perspective, almost contemptible subject matter. The book is divided into eight chapters (not including the Introduction and Conclusion). The first four chapters each take up a different aspect of the West’s fascination with Japan during the last two centuries. The first chapter covers turn-of-the-century Impressionists like Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh, who revolutionized the fine arts with a little inspiration from Japan, or at least the “Japan” of their imaginations. The second chapter goes into famous inter-war Japan enthusiasts such as Lafcadio Hearn, Arthur Waley, and Frank Lloyd Wright. The third chapter follows the antics of post-war American writers like Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Michel Crichton, and William Gibson, and the fourth chapter is all about how Western men perceive and interact with Japanese women in works like Madame Butterfly and Memoirs of a Geisha. The last four chapters, which I consider to be the true raison d’être of this book, deal with American anime fandom and all its various manifestations, from anime conventions to cosplay to slash fan fiction. Through all of this, Napier attempts to uncover the source of the West’s long fascination with Japan, all the while making astute references to the global political and economic climates during which this fascination has become manifest.

The first four chapters, while interesting, are, as I said earlier, somewhat shallow. Each topic that Napier covers in these chapters has been written about extensively by other scholars, a fact which she openly acknowledges. Her originality here lies in the fact that she documents what she sees as a trend, although she is cautious about saying that the various moments in the history of what I am going to call “Japan fandom” are directly related. The main point of interest for readers is the work that Napier has done on post-1980 American anime fandom, which is the culmination of many years of interviews and surveys. Mainly speaking through the voices of the fans she has contacted, Napier attempts to explain the appeal of contemporary Japanese popular culture to Americans, often in contrast to American popular culture. Although she offers no strong conclusion, the variety of insights Napier offers are invaluable.

My one real criticism of this study is that, although Napier hints at exposing the power relations underlying fan culture, she never really follows through. In other words, she is mainly concerned with the relation of fans to the world outside fandom (what she calls “the Muggle world”) and doesn’t delve into the hierarchies of power within the in-group of fandom itself. For example, I would have found an analysis of the term “weeaboo” (an American who loves anime so much that he or she wants to become Japanese) to be a pertinent addition to her discussion. Instead, Napier makes American anime fandom seem like something of a utopia; although she mentions the darker side of fandom by quoting scholars who bring up the concept of “fan pathology,” she never directly acknowledges that such a thing might actually exist in her own object of study.

Otherwise, I found From Impressionism to Anime to be a very satisfying read. It’s an excellent cultural study and could double as a perfect introduction to modern and contemporary Japanese history for someone considering pursuing the subject as an undergraduate – or simply as an intelligent, interested individual. Don’t let the cover fool you. This is actually a book you want to read!