All of the fan favorite world powers are back to... celebrate Christmas?! How will Germany react when he finally meets the famous Roman Empire only to discover he's exactly like his grandson? And what other hijinx will the Axis Powers get into? Volume 1 has sold more than a million copies in Japan and was released for the first time in English by TOKYOPOP in September, 2010.
Chinese-speaking popular cultures have never been so queer in this digital, globalist age. The title of this pioneering volume, Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan already gives an idea of the colorful, multifaceted realms the fans inhabit today. Contributors to this collection situate the proliferation of (often online) queer representations, productions, fantasies, and desires as a reaction against the norms in discourses surrounding nation-states, linguistics, geopolitics, genders, and sexualities. Moving beyond the easy polarities between general resistance and capitulation, Queer Fan Cultures explores the fans’ diverse strategies in negotiating with cultural strictures and media censorship. It further outlines the performance of subjectivity, identity, and agency that cyberspace offers to female fans. Presenting a wide array of concrete case studies of queer fandoms in Chinese-speaking contexts, the essays in this volume challenge long-established Western-centric and Japanese-focused fan scholarship by highlighting the significance and specificities of Sinophone queer fan cultures and practices in a globalized world. The geographic organization of the chapters illuminates cultural differences and the other competing forces shaping geocultural intersections among fandoms based in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. “This important collection complicates our understanding of fan practices, showing how national and regional factors play an important role in how media texts and identities are understood. It also shows how the Chinese-speaking world is home to dense and often conflicting modes of audience reception of cultural texts deriving from Sinophone, Japanese, and Western contexts.” —Mark McLelland, University of Wollongong “An exciting anthology by a talented group of emergent scholars whose vibrant studies offer fresh insights on the diverse practices and transregional flows of queer fandom in the Chinese-speaking world. Local in its specificity and transnational in its scope, this book highlights the creativity of queer fan practices while critically locating them within the political and social structures that produce them.” —Helen Hok-Sze Leung, Simon Fraser University
How have animation fans in Japan, South Korea, the United States, and Canada formed communities and dealt with conflicts across cultural and geographic distance? This book traces animation fandom from its roots in early cinema audiences, through mid-century children's cartoon fan clubs, to today's digitally-networked transcultural fan cultures.
This book analyzes the role of manga in contemporary Japanese political expression and debate, and explores its role in propagating new perceptions regarding Japanese history.
Kaminishi: Book One Michael Holden wakes up in an impossible reality: mid-nineteenth-century Japan, face to face with Shinjirō Kaminishi, a samurai warlord Michael has seen in a dream. Imprisoned by the warlord and interrogated about the future, Michael has no idea if what he's experiencing is real... and then he finds himself back in present-day America. Lord Shinjirō’s commanding presence and smoldering sexuality draw Michael again and again to the past, where dangerous information is revealed and Shinjirō's life is threatened. Through the mists of time and in the reality of modern Japan, Michael searches for the truth—and for the man who now owns his heart—Shinjirō Kaminishi.
Gon and his friends Leorio and Kurapika discover that they've underestimated the seriousness and variety of tests they will have to pass to become Hunters. First, the mad magician Hisoka almost kills them in a mock test, and then they are asked to cook gourmet food for some very discerning judges.
After blindly following the advice of fashion magazines and the like, Haruna fails to win the eye of any guy. Convinced that a coach is needed (just like when she trained for softball), she recruits cute upperclassman Yoh Komiyama to instruct her on how to make herself more appealing. Yoh agrees, with one catch: Haruna had better not fall for him! -- VIZ Media
Ohhhhh! Yotsuba's back! Today, Yotsuba was drawing Jumbo, okay? That's Daddy's REALLY, REALLY BIG friend. He's real nice and I guess a big baby. But he's too big to draw in Yotsuba's sketchbook! So Yotsuba drew Jumbo on the street in front of our house! Cool, huh? But Ena's friend Miura, who has wheels on her feet, said Yotsuba was bad at drawing...she's wrong, right? RIGHT!?
Grand in its scope, Asian Comics dispels the myth that, outside of Japan, the continent is nearly devoid of comic strips and comic books. Relying on his fifty years of Asian mass communication and comic art research, during which he traveled to Asia at least seventy-eight times and visited many studios and workplaces, John A. Lent shows that nearly every country had a golden age of cartooning and has experienced a recent rejuvenation of the art form. As only Japanese comics output has received close and by now voluminous scrutiny, Asian Comics tells the story of the major comics creators outside of Japan. Lent covers the nations and regions of Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. Organized by regions of East, Southeast, and South Asia, Asian Comics provides 178 black-and-white illustrations and detailed information on comics of sixteen countries and regions—their histories, key creators, characters, contemporary status, problems, trends, and issues. One chapter harkens back to predecessors of comics in Asia, describing scrolls, paintings, books, and puppetry with humorous tinges, primarily in China, India, Indonesia, and Japan. The first overview of Asian comic books and magazines (both mainstream and alternative), graphic novels, newspaper comic strips and gag panels, plus cartoon/humor magazines, Asian Comics brims with facts, fascinating anecdotes, and interview quotes from many pioneering masters, as well as younger artists.
