Does the book give any references for this claim? It sounds quite strange to me. Manga are sometimes referred to as "comics" ("komikku") in Japan, but the word "manga" is much more widely used. "Komikku" is sometimes used to refer to non-Japanese works, such as American comics or European strips, as opposed to Japanese works, or as a blanket term for all types of comics, or as a slightly more "posh" way of referring to Japanese manga -academics sometimes do this.

As with every terminology issue, these aren't rules, of course. Terms are ofen used interchangeably. And the author of the book is correct in pointing out that manga-related Japanese terms are often given a different meaning by non-Japanese readers, so we should always be careful. But I think it's quite safe to say that in Japan, the word "manga" is in far wider use than the word "komikku" to indicate Japanese manga.

By the way, is "Mil Años de Manga" the book by Brigitte Koyama-Richards? I think we have the English edition of that one lying around somewhere at work, if it's the same book you're reading, I could check it out directly.

Cheers,

Nele


Claudia Márquez wrote:
> Hey i was reading this new book i got. It is called "Mil Años de Manga" (Thousend years of manga).
>
> In the intro of the book they explain the meaning of the word manga. And it says something like this:
> "The term manga has evolved and the only ones who still use it are the ones who were born before the war, who gave the meaning of "satire or critic politic character that is publish in the prense". For the after generations the word manga refers to the stamps of Edo era and not the comics. For refearing to the last ones they just use "comics", that groups mangas of all kind.
> Paradoxically in occident we have choose the term manga, that is in disuse in japan."
> (its a rough translate to english of the text)
>
> So i thought in japan they used the word manga to refer all type of comics, not just the ones maked in japan. And not the word comics.
>
> Someone can clarify me what is the word that it is used in japan?

Ah yes, I've got the original French edition here. She does say exactly that. The word "komikku" is used in Japan, certainly, but absolutely not to a degree that one could say it eclipses "manga" entirely, as Koyama-Richard suggests.

By the way, I haven't read the book in depth, but I don't quite agree with her assertion that all questions about the origins and nature of manga can be resolved by studying "ancient Japanese culture". Would we claim that all questions about the origins and nature of Flemish comic strips can be answered by looking at medieval Flemish painting? Of course there will be some resemblances, some degree of influence, but to say that centuries-old drawings are the direct ancestors of contemporary manga seems rather exaggerated. Just my opinion, of course.

Thanks for pointing out that terminology snafu in the introduction!

Nele


Claudia Márquez wrote:
> Thanks a lot for the explanation. Well the book has the bibliography in the end, but not exactly were did they took the info for the intro.
>
> And yes. "Mil años de manga" was written by Brigitte Koyama-Richards.

Sorry for the late reply! Yes, I don't think it's very useful to try and draw conclusions about manga based on some aspect of Hokusai's work. Hokusai may have made the word "manga" famous, but his drawings can't be having much impact now on a different art form that developed centuries afterwards. Today's manga and Hokusai's sketches are both part of Japan's long tradition of visual storytelling, but that's about it as far as connections go, I think.

Cheers,

Nele


> But in the part it talks about Edo era and Hokusai. The book says he can be consider as the predecessor of manga. Im guessing the author was just refering to the "manga" word, not the style, cause i dont see the connection between his work and what is manga today. Right?
>
> Nele Noppe wrote:
> > Ah yes, I've got the original French edition here. She does say exactly that. The word "komikku" is used in Japan, certainly, but absolutely not to a degree that one could say it eclipses "manga" entirely, as Koyama-Richard suggests.
> >
> > By the way, I haven't read the book in depth, but I don't quite agree with her assertion that all questions about the origins and nature of manga can be resolved by studying "ancient Japanese culture". Would we claim that all questions about the origins and nature of Flemish comic strips can be answered by looking at medieval Flemish painting? Of course there will be some resemblances, some degree of influence, but to say that centuries-old drawings are the direct ancestors of contemporary manga seems rather exaggerated. Just my opinion, of course.
> >
> > Thanks for pointing out that terminology snafu in the introduction!
> >
> > Nele

Welcome, Mienad!

Small legal whine: the site only links to material, of course, but it can't guarantee that the videos linked were uploaded legally. Just needed to mention that so we're clear what we're dealing with ;)

mienad lumaad wrote:
> If you're bored and you want to have something new then be an anime fan. watch anime online stream free at www.animeez.com

Yup, here he is: http://onepiece.wikia.com/wiki/Pandaman

Hello everyone, I just removed a few links and a post that advertised a new scanlation chapter. Links that aren't strictly related to manga research are perfectly welcome here -the more interesting stuff, the better, and a great deal of immensely relevant manga news just doesn't come from academic papers. Interesting information on scanlation as a concept is great as well. Advertisements for individual scanlations, however, are not only rather irrelevant to the group's purpose (forgiveable in itself, none of us is relevant 24/7) but could potentially get us in trouble as well. Please don't add such links. Thank you for your understanding,

Nele

Our manga research knowledge base saw its 4000th entry today. By way of self-congratulation, we bookmarked the site of Let's Manga's new manga lending library at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven as the magic number. Three fourths of the four thousand links point to academic information, the rest are noteworthy mentions of manga and/or other areas of Japanese popular culture outside an academic setting. A great thank you to all users and everyone who's helped out in one way or another. Let us know if you have any comments or requests for content or features, and good luck researching!

Nele
Let's Manga main site - http://japanesestudies.arts.kuleuven.be/popularculture

Developing tools for manga research is one of the main objectives of the Let's Manga project, and the tool we're most proud of is our online bibliography. There are nearly four thousand entries in the knowledge base at present. The vast majority of items center on manga, but we also bookmark interesting references to work on other Japanese popular media (such as anime) when we stumble upon them. We bookmark anything that may be useful for manga research, academic articles and books as well as non-academic news articles, blog posts, etc. that are insightful or fascinating enough to warrant a second look by researchers. Academic sources have the default tag 'academic', non-academic sources are tagged 'non-academic'. We bookmark items in any language we can read, meaning that the vast majority of entries are in English, followed by Japanese, plus a smattering of entries of German, French, Dutch, and other European languages.

We recommend first browsing the tag list for the subject you need, then doing a full-text database search to make sure you find every reference (you can do both on the right-hand side of the 'bookmarks' page).

Please let us know how useful the knowledge base was to you -we're always on the lookout for ways to improve on what we have. Suggestions for entries are of course very welcome. If you're interested in contributing entries to the database directly, just join the Diigo group and bookmark away.

In the two years we've been working on a bibliography of manga studies, we've always saved books in LibraryThing and articles and other online material using social bookmarking services (first Furl, now Diigo). We never found a single service that could handle both books and articles/random online stuff the way we wanted it to.

But since keeping the bibliography split in two causes more confusion than it solves, we've decided to throw the books into Diigo as well. We won't get rid of LibraryThing, but anything saved there goes into Diigo as well so that all items are searchable in one place. What we save in Diigo is the LibraryThing details page of each book, so clicking through or doing a full-text search of the Diigo bookmarks will turn up full bibliographic information.

Expect some three hundred new records in the next few days as we migrate the items already in the LibraryThing account. All helpfully tagged 'books' ;)