Manga in America: Transnational Book Publishing and the Domestication of Japanese Comics

Description

Japanese manga comic books have attracted a devoted global following. In the popular press manga is said to have "invaded" and "conquered" the United States, and its success is held up as a quintessential example of the globalization of popular culture challenging American hegemony in the twenty-first century. In Manga in America - the first ever book-length study of the history, structure, and practices of the American manga publishing industry - Casey Brienza explodes this assumption. Drawing on extensive field research and interviews with industry insiders about licensing deals, processes of translation, adaptation, and marketing, new digital publishing and distribution models, and more, Brienza shows that the transnational production of culture is an active, labor-intensive, and oft-contested process of "domestication." Ultimately, Manga in America argues that the domestication of manga reinforces the very same imbalances of national power that might otherwise seem to have been transformed by it and that the success of Japanese manga in the United States actually serves to make manga everywhere more American.

Casey Brienza is Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Centre for Culture and the Creative Industries at City University London, UK. She is also editor of Global Manga: "Japanese" Comics without Japan?

Since Fred Schodt, Leonard Rifas, Toren Smith, and a few others introduced manga to the US more than 30 years ago, the books have had huge impacts on the publishing, content, and audiences of American comics. Brienza (City Univ. London, UK) thoroughly covers this transformation in Manga in America, dipping into, and sometimes lingering on, topics such as cultural production and other theories, history of manga in the US, licensing and negotiating rights, home-based labor, and digital manga publishing. The author takes pride in her meticulous research approach, devoting a detailed appendix to describing how she interviewed 70 people working in various positions in 16 publishing companies in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Toronto; the extreme care she took in preserving their anonymity; her ethnographic research at comic cons, book launches, etc., purposely as a "semi-outsider"; and her use of social media and other sources. She makes reading easy by organizing material well, with categories of her own creation; presenting parts of interesting conversations held with informants; critically processing information; arguing her points; and revising earlier notions she held. Manga in America is, without a doubt, the most important scholarship on the subject and, hopefully, will be an exemplar for comic art scholarship. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals. * CHOICE * Brienza's groundbreaking research contributes greatly to the literature on consumption, globalization, cultural production, and much more. Her writing is witty, funny, and accessible ... The book has something for everyone-the scholar, the industry worker, the everyday fan and consumer, and the person who is just trying to understand what exactly is ''manga.'' * Publishing Research Quarterly * If one has any interest in this category of books, it can be very beneficial to educate yourself about just how you get to hold them in your hands. I heartily encourage everyone to read Manga in America. * More Bedside Books *