Manga

I have a huge soft spot for manga. There was a time where I’d grown tired of the usual Super Hero output from the Big Two, but we didn’t have an easy outlet for indie publishers like we do now. Manga provided all those genres that used to exist in the USA in the 1950s, but disappeared as the decades passed and the market consolidated. Sure, now we’re starting to have more high school-based western comics like Morning Glories, In the Woods, and Deadly Class, but it was manga, particularly Shoujo that showed us it could be done. (There are some high school Shonen, but the drama of high school seems to be best captured by Shoujo).

note on all the image scans: they are correct manga-style so they are read right to left Spend enough time doing critical readings of media and you come across the assertion that all media tells you about the culture it was written in. Sometimes, as in contemporary media, this is easy to tease out. Other times, as with science fiction, it’s by extrapolation. So I thought it might be interesting to re-read Love Hina, by Ken Akamatsu, as a way to to understand Japanese culture. Part One can be found here. ...

note on all the image scans: they are correct manga-style so they are read right to left Spend enough time doing critical readings of media and you come across the assertion that all media tells you about the culture it was written in. Sometimes, as in contemporary media, this is easy to tease out. Other times, as with science fiction, it’s by extrapolation. So I thought it might be interesting to re-read Love Hina, by Ken Akamatsu, as a way to to understand Japanese culture. I think it works well as it is the only manga I have which is set in Japan and does not have fantastical elements. It’s not that Ranma ½ can’t teach us about Japanese culture (in fact, I’d like to explore it in a future post - especially comparing the fact that Ranma is written by a woman and Love Hina by a man), but it’s going to be skewed by the fantastical gender-bending (and species-bending) aspects. ...