Paper “Art History, Japanese Popular Culture and the Tokyo 2020 Olympics” published
Posted: December 23, 2021 Filed under: shop talk | Tags: anime, art history, awards, comics, Japanese culture, manga, Olympics, PhD, publication, sports, talks, Tokyo 2020, video games Leave a comment
It already feels good to get a PhD thesis completed and submitted, and defended. But the icing on the cake was to receive the ‘August-Grisebach-Preis’ of the Institute of European Art History at Heidelberg University for one of the two best dissertations of the year! Along with the award came the honour of giving a speech at the semester opening of the Institute in October. Usually such a speech would be a summary of the thesis, but I thought it would be more interesting for both the audience and me if I talked about a different topic (that still is loosely related to that of my thesis).
When I received the news in early August, I was engrossed in the Olympics, and I felt that as an expert on Japanese pop culture, I might have an interesting thing or two to say about the manifold ways in which manga, anime etc. were present at that event. At the same time, I wanted to make some statements about the place of (Japanese) pop culture in (European) Art History, and discipline-specific approaches to it. Perhaps that was a bit of a tall order for a twenty-minute talk, but I’m still happy with the way it turned out, so I decided to translate it into English, add some footnotes and publish it on Humanities Commons: https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:43623
(This also marks the first time that I deposited something on Humanities Commons. So far, I’m very pleased with it.)
Here’s the abstract:
Spectators of the 2020/21 Olympic Games were frequently confronted with references to Japanese popular culture, particularly at the opening and closing ceremonies. However, these references to anime, manga, video games and other visual media were often so subtle that they were easy to miss unless pointed out and explained by television commentators. Art historians should not shy away from engaging with such objects and images.
Defender
Posted: July 31, 2021 Filed under: shop talk | Tags: blogging, comics, manga, PhD, The 650-Cent Plague 1 Comment
There has been an unusually long silence on this weblog, but for a good reason: two months ago, the evaluation reports for the PhD thesis I had submitted in late August 2020 arrived at long last, and then I had to prepare for my viva voce a.k.a. oral defense a.k.a. disputatio – which I passed on June 30. Hooray! (Or should I say, yatta!)
However, my journey towards a PhD is far from over, as I still need to turn the thesis into a book. I’m already negotiating a deal with a publisher, and when the book is available I’ll make sure to advertise it here. In the meantime, regular blogging (at approximately 1 post per month) will resume shortly, so stay tuned.
PhD thesis “The Early Reception of Manga in the West” submitted!
Posted: September 4, 2020 Filed under: shop talk | Tags: blogging, comics, manga, PhD, The 650-Cent Plague 2 Comments
These are three copies of the thesis, mind you. It doesn’t span three volumes!
After many long years in which there seemed to be hardly any progress at all, my dissertation about English and German manga translations in the late 1980s and early 90s is now completed. Last week I submitted it to Heidelberg University.
When I started this weblog in 2012, I had thought it was going to be a ‘watch a PhD thesis grow’ type of journal, but I quickly abandoned that idea and blogged about all kinds of other things instead. So even if my journey towards a PhD is slowly but surely coming to its end, The 650-Cent Plague isn’t going away. Regular readers might have noticed that the posting frequency has recently slowed down from two posts per month to one. Nevertheless, I still enjoy writing these blogposts and I’m already looking forward to the next instalments of the regular series, such as the horror manga review for Halloween, the year-end best-of list in December, the Women’s History Month theory post in March, and the Warren Ellis politics post on May 1.
Plus, if and when my PhD thesis gets turned into a book, rest assured that you’ll read about it here.
Poll: Manga Readership Before 1994 / 1997
Posted: November 2, 2019 Filed under: shop talk | Tags: comics, manga, PhD Leave a comment
I’m conducting a short poll on manga readership outside of Japan (primarily in English-speaking countries) before 1994. If you have read any manga back then, please take a minute (or five, but it probably won’t take longer) to participate: https://forms.gle/UFmaXR35mrBxPE97A
Please note that there is a German version with different reply options; residents of German-speaking countries who have read manga before 1997 are asked to use this one: https://forms.gle/syHfF1Ew1CukdXAy7
The poll closes on December 15, 2019.
Thank you!
Article “Has Akira Always Been a Cyberpunk Comic?” published
Posted: August 7, 2018 Filed under: shop talk | Tags: Akira, comics, conference, cyberpunk, genre, German, Katsuhiro Ōtomo, manga, PhD, publication, reception, science fiction, US Leave a comment
Earlier this year I gave a talk at MSU Comics Forum, and now a journal article based on that talk has already been published:
Has Akira Always Been a Cyberpunk Comic?
Arts 7(3), https://doi.org/10.3390/arts7030032
Here’s the abstract again:
Between the late 1980s and early 1990s, interest in the cyberpunk genre peaked in the Western world, perhaps most evidently when Terminator 2: Judgment Day became the highest-grossing film of 1991. It has been argued that the translation of Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s manga Akira into several European languages at just that time (into English beginning in 1988, into French, Italian, and Spanish beginning in 1990, and into German beginning in 1991) was no coincidence. In hindsight, cyberpunk tropes are easily identified in Akira to the extent that it is nowadays widely regarded as a classic cyberpunk comic. But has this always been the case? When Akira was first published in America and Europe, did readers see it as part of a wave of cyberpunk fiction? Did they draw the connections to previous works of the cyberpunk genre across different media that today seem obvious? In this paper, magazine reviews of Akira in English and German from the time when it first came out in these languages will be analysed in order to gauge the past readers’ genre awareness. The attribution of the cyberpunk label to Akira competed with others such as the post-apocalyptic, or science fiction in general. Alternatively, Akira was sometimes regarded as an exceptional, novel work that transcended genre boundaries. In contrast, reviewers of the Akira anime adaptation, which was released at roughly the same time as the manga in the West (1989 in Germany and the United States), more readily drew comparisons to other cyberpunk films such as Blade Runner.
Read the article online for free at http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/7/3/32.
Fun fact: this is my 10th publication (not counting reviews, translations, and articles related to my library ‘day job’)! Find them all here: https://www.bibsonomy.org/cv/user/iglesia
Upcoming talk: Has Akira always been a cyberpunk comic?
Posted: January 27, 2018 Filed under: shop talk | Tags: Akira, comics, conference, cyberpunk, genre, Katsuhiro Ōtomo, manga, PhD, science fiction, US 1 Comment
In less than a month, I’m going to participate in a panel on cyberpunk comics at Michigan State University Comics Forum. Here’s the abstract for my paper, which is closely connected to my PhD research:
Between the late 1980s and early 1990s, interest in the cyberpunk genre peaked in the Western world, perhaps most evidently when Terminator 2: Judgment Day became the highest-grossing film of 1991. It has been argued that the translation of Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s manga Akira into several European languages at just that time (from 1988 in English, from 1991 in French, German, Italian and Spanish) was no coincidence. In hindsight, cyberpunk tropes are easily identified in Akira to the extent that it is nowadays widely regarded as a classic cyberpunk comic. But has this always been the case? When Akira was first published in America and Europe, did readers see it as part of a wave of cyberpunk fiction? Did they draw the connections to previous works of the cyberpunk genre across different media that today seem obvious? In this paper, magazine reviews of Akira in English and German from the time when it first came out in these languages are analysed in order to gauge the past readers’ genre awareness. The attribution of the cyberpunk label to Akira competed with others such as the post-apocalyptic, or science fiction in general. Alternatively, Akira was sometimes regarded as an exceptional, novel work that transcended genre boundaries. In contrast, reviewers of the Akira anime adaptation, which was released at roughly the same time as the manga in the West (1989 in Germany and the United States), more readily drew comparisons to other cyberpunk films such as Blade Runner.
Article “The Task of Manga Translation: Akira in the West” published
Posted: January 26, 2016 Filed under: shop talk | Tags: Akira, colouring, comics, conference, flipping, geography, Hildesheim, Katsuhiro Ōtomo, manga, PhD, publication, reception, translation Leave a comment
My conference paper from 2014, which so far had been only published in German and in print, is now available online and in English:
de la Iglesia, Martin 2016, ‘The Task of Manga Translation: Akira in the West’. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship 6(1), http://dx.doi.org/10.16995/cg.59
There’s also a PDF version.
Abstract:
Translated editions of Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s manga Akira played an important role in the popularisation of manga in the Western world. Published in Japan between 1982 and 1990, editions in European languages followed as soon as the late 1980s. In the first US edition (Epic 1988–1995) the originally black and white manga was printed in colour and published in 38 issues, which were designed not unlike typical American comic books. The first German edition (Carlsen 1991–1996) marked the beginning of Carlsen’s manga publishing efforts. It was based on the English-language edition and also printed in colour, and combined two American issues in one.
This article analyses the materiality of these two translated editions with a focus on three main issues – the mirroring (or ‘flipping’) which changes the reading direction from right-to-left into left-to-right, the colouring of the originally black and white artwork, and the translation of different kinds of script (sound effects, speech bubble text, and inscriptions or labels) – before concluding with a brief examination of their critical reception.
Conference paper “Akira im Westen” published
Posted: July 4, 2015 Filed under: shop talk | Tags: Akira, comics, conference, German, Hildesheim, Katsuhiro Ōtomo, manga, PhD, publication, publishing, reception, translation 1 Comment
Last year at a conference on “the translation and adaptation of comics” in Hildesheim, Germany, I gave a talk on the first English and German editions of Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s Akira . The conference proceedings have now been published as a book, albeit with most of the papers in German, including my own. I’m working on making an English-language, Open Access version of my talk available soon. Anyway, here’s the bibliographic data:
de la Iglesia, Martin. “Akira im Westen.” In Comics. Übersetzungen und Adaptionen, edited by Nathalie Mälzer, 355-373. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2015.
The ISBN of the book is: 978-3-7329-0131-9
Upcoming talk: “Akira im Westen”
Posted: August 29, 2014 Filed under: shop talk | Tags: Akira, comics, conference, German, Hildesheim, Katsuhiro Ōtomo, manga, PhD, publishing, reception 3 Comments
I’m looking forward to present some more preliminary results from my PhD research, more precisely on Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s manga Akira and its first English and German editions, at a conference on “Übersetzungen und Adaptionen von Comics / The Translation and Adaptation of Comics” at Hildesheim University, Germany, from October 31 – November 2, 2014. Information on where to read this paper to follow.
“Early manga translations in the West” conference paper published
Posted: July 15, 2014 Filed under: shop talk | Tags: comics, Comics Forum, conference, Kozure Ōkami, Leeds, manga, Manga Nihon Keizai Nyūmon, PhD, publishing, reception Leave a commentIn November last year, I gave a talk at Comics Forum in Leeds on “Early manga translations in the West: underground cult or mainstream failure?”
That paper is now online at the Comics Forum website: http://comicsforum.org/2014/07/14/early-manga-translations-in-the-west-underground-cult-or-mainstream-failure-by-martin-de-la-iglesia/.
If you always wanted to know what my PhD research is about, this is the place to go.
Unfortunately, Dark Horse didn’t give me permission to use images from Lone Wolf and Cub in my Comics Forum paper…
The 650-Cent Plague 