exner.bsky.social Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

exner.bsky.social

@ben_towle @DominoComics Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer (despite its unnecessarily pretentious title) does a great job of explaining this shift with lots of evidence and in a pretty concise way (it's mercifully short for an academic text). One of the most influential things I've ever read.

exner.bsky.social

@RJRodriguezDL @marcbernabe @CapitanUrias Someone on Instagram pointed out that Go Nagai used a similar effect copiously in Devilman and there's even an instance in a 60s Tezuka story. This particular effect, blurring the leg vertically, which is then copied in Dragonball appears to have been popularized by Tsubasa tho..

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exner.bsky.social

I'm enormously grateful to @KathrynTanaka18 for her tremendous kindness in helping me access the picture stories Okamoto Ippei created for the magazine Ryoyu in the 1920s (which include adaptations of Max and Moritz and other stories by Wilhelm Busch!). https://t.co/b6V6NOE5pm

exner.bsky.social

Read Jonathan Clements's Anime A History and learned a lot, but I'm puzzled why the book claims that "buraun-kan" is a pejorative for TV meaning "the brown screen" when in reality it's "Braun tube," after the inventor of the cathode ray tube...

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exner.bsky.social

One of my favorite lines in Ron Stewart and CJ Suzuki's new Manga - A Critical Guide, discussing the Cool Japan initiative: "Reveling in one's own coolness and telling others how cool you are is not the best way to persuade others that you are cool." https://t.co/B9G2VrPEZT

exner.bsky.social

@OhsakaRin You might like Oleg Benesch's "Inventing the Way of the Samurai" which talks about the invention of bushido. It's quite fascinating how something that is always portrayed as some kind of deeply rooted Japanese spirit was largely created out of thin air in modern times.