Eike Exner

Google Maps screenshot showing traveling time by private automobile as 2 hours and 21 minutes, and traveling time by public transit as 1 hour and 33 minutes.

How you can tell you're in a civilized city:

Do not worry. Once you're dead from eating too much glass, your loved ones with leave a bad review and the Market will Self-Regulate.

With all that communist red tape and burdensome government regulation out of the way, the Free Market can finally provide us with the necessary glass in our food.

That's really nice to hear, thank you very much for telling me

Nothing against any of these works! But given that I've written two articles and one book (well, one of the articles is in the book, so I guess more like one article and one book) on this exact topic and exact time period (turn of 20th century), it's a bummer to see my work omitted.

An alphabetically ordered "Bibliography" with no last names between "Ensslin" and "Gardner"

Oh come on, lol

Wow this sounds like my kind of jam.

Oh wow, I wish I were there, thanks for letting me know!

Congrats to you and those whom you'll be representing

an eerie parallel -> decides to delete eerie -> an parallel

The fact that one major power has been bogged down in a pointless war of conquest while tensions are high has an parallel in Japan's invasion of China in 1937, which would become one theater of WW2

The biggest piece of evidence against a direct connection is that I think Herge would've mentioned it, since he freely acknowledged other influences. Then again, he was rather racist, so maybe he felt differently about non-white influences...

What is Manga? A regular interrogation of what Japanese "comics" are and are not Nicholas A. Theisen

I think I first heard it from @academicality.bsky.social at whatismanga.wordpress.com. Not sure who came up with the theory.

Some seem to think I'm only interested in influence *on* manga, but that's not the case, as I hope my 2nd book shows. It's interesting though that some who love it when I talk about early US "influence" think it's crass commercialism when I talk about later manga influence on the US (*cough* TCJ)

Also I've come around to the theory that it's very possible that a Shochan no boken book or copy of the Asahi Graph reached Herge between 1923 and 1929 and helped inspire Tintin. The similarities are striking and publications circulated the globe already.

Which is a pity because Japanese comics were probably the most diverse in the world already before the 1940s and I think that should be acknowledged/examined, but as long as most see manga as some expression of the Yamato Soul or something, this would play into nationalist/orientalist narratives

I personally am hesitant to emphasize uniqueness or originality because I'm reluctant to play into the Japan Foundation and weeb narrative of manga as this amazing inscrutable thing that can never be fully understood, only worshipped.

I hadn't previously seen that translator's work through that lens. Will keep it in mind now. (Fwiw I think it's fair to say that Tezuka's main influence was Gottfredson; and one problem with Tezuka is that it's hard to find a good balance between portraying him as a sponge or singular genius.)

I think I see what you're getting at. The reification of "culture" as some eternal essence substituted for "race" I would say is still ongoing. I mean, Understanding Comics is still by far the bestselling work on comics and still gets cited with no critique of its Orientalism to be found anywhere.

Absolutely agree with the first part about "culture" being used as essentially a euphemism for "race." There are academic articles that claim that Asian brains process visuals differently (citing MRI scans even!) and that that's why manga is Different, for crying out loud. Just modern race science.

Do you have an example of this latter? My impression at least with regards to comics is that people rather treat Japan as the Fundamentally Different Other (which can be "influenced" but never just be the same, there always has to be an inscrutable Japanese essence to everything produced in Japan)

The argument I'm making has very little to do with culture. The (audiovisual) comics form should be understood primarily as a *technology* of modernity rather than a "cultural" form. Most technologies are created in one place and spread from there; that doesn't mean the place of origin owns it.

Saying that Bringing Up Father "influenced" manga is like saying that the automobile "influenced" Japanese vehicles. Or that sushi "influenced" American fish, leading American fish cuisine to develop into the California roll.

Maybe you could call it influence if graphic narratives had gradually shifted from narration to AV content. But that is not what happened (at least not in the countries I'm familiar with). In China, France, and Japan, the first successful local audiovisual comics all used the form from the start.

It is therefore incorrect to refer to the adoption of this form in Japan or anywhere else as "an influence on the development of manga/BD/whatever." The form *is* the form, nothing was "influenced."

I think it's fair to call this form "comics," but because using that term leads to tedious arguments (e.g., "oh, so if it doesn't have speech balloons, it can't be a comic??"), I also call it "audiovisual comics." Whatever you call it, all "comics" that use this form share a common ancestry.

This form, which is easily identifiable through its lack of narration and use of multiple panels, pain stars, motion lines, and speech balloons (and more), spreads across the United States, then across the world, especially in the 1920s.

There is an identifiable form of graphic narrative that emerges in New York around 1899-1900 by combining textless self-explanatory multi-panel cartoons with various transdiegetic content (e.g., motion lines and pain stars), including, most importantly, visually depicted sound.

"Educator and historian Eike Exner chronicles McManus’s Asian connection as one of the main American influences in the development of Manga."

I assume this is how people will summarize Comics and the Origins of Manga for the rest of my life, but that's not what I actually claim.

Probably should either just post in Japanese or explain what's going on in the picture. NHK asked random Chinese people on the street what they think of Japan, and they found at least one who has a positive image of Japan because he likes Japanese animation, comics, and video games.