Attention manga and kawaii–loving tweens! Now you can learn to create your own adorable manga artwork with this fun-to-read guide by award-winning middle-grade graphic novelist Misako Rocks! Misako is a Japanese manga comic artist who moved to the United States to pursue her dreams. With her online and in-person drawing lessons for children, and now with her Learn Manga with Misako series of books, she strives to help the next generation of young artists and readers bring their imaginations to life. Combining drawing tutorials with motivational messages that encourage artists to draw and think freely, How to Draw Kawaii Manga Charactersinspires kids ages 7 to 12 to unleash their creativity in the most entertaining way possible. This engaging and easy-to-follow book includes: Helpful tips on how to use the book Instructions for drawing a range of kawaii faces with different expressions and facial features A chapter on drawing different bodies, as well as poses Practice pages that allow kids to draw within the book Tips for adding color and shading to bring kawaii creations to life Worksheets, resources, and more Young artists everywhere will find inspiration in Misako’s remarkable story as they follow her warm, accessible instructions in pursuit of their own dreams. Find even more fun-loving manga instruction in How to Draw Kawaii Manga Fashion, also from the Learn Manga with Misako series.

Fascinating insights on what Japanese manga and anime mean to artists, audiences, and fans in the United States and elsewhere, covering topics that range from fantasy to sex to politics. Within the last decade, anime and manga have become extremely popular in the United States. Mangatopia: Essays on Manga and Anime in the Modern World provides a sophisticated anthology of varied commentary from authors well versed in both formats. These essays provide insights unavailable on the Internet, giving the interested general reader in-depth information well beyond the basic, "Japanese Comics 101" level, and providing those who teach and write about manga and anime valuable knowledge to further expand their expertise. The topics addressed range widely across various artists and art styles, media methodology and theory, reception of manga and anime in different cultural markets, and fan behavior. Specific subjects covered include sexually explicit manga drawn and read by women; the roots of manga in Japanese and world film; the complexity of fan activities, including "cosplay," fan-drawn manga, and fans' highly specific predilections; right-wing manga; and manga about Hiroshima and despair following World War II. The book closes with an examination of the international appeal of manga and anime.

Why are some things cute, and others not? What happens to our brains when we see something cute? And how did cuteness go global, from Hello Kitty to Disney characters? Cuteness is an area where culture and biology get tangled up. Seeing a cute animal triggers some of the most powerful psychological instincts we have - the ones that elicit our care and protection - but there is a deeper story behind the broad appeal of Japanese cats and saccharine greetings cards. Joshua Paul Dale, a pioneer in the burgeoning field of cuteness studies, explains how the cute aesthetic spread around the globe, from pop brands to Lolita fashion, kids' cartoons and the unstoppable rise of Hello Kitty. Irresistible delves into the surprisingly ancient origins of Japan's kawaii culture, and uncovers the cross-cultural pollination of the globalised world. If adorable things really do rewire our brains, it can help answer some of the biggest questions we have about our evolutionary history and the mysterious origins of animal domestication. This is the fascinating cultural history of cuteness, and a revealing look at how our most powerful psychological impulses have remade global style and culture.

This anthology has a cultural focus and addresses issues of race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality.

At the turn of the millennium, international youth culture is dominated by mainly two types of aesthetics: the African American cool, which, propelled by Hip-Hop music, has become the world's favorite youth culture; and the Japanese aesthetics of kawaii or cute, that is distributed internationally by Japan's powerful anime industry. The USA and Japan are cultural superpowers and global trendsetters because they make use of two particular concepts that hide complex structures under their simple surfaces and are difficult to define, but continue to fascinate the world: cool and kawaii. The Cool-Kawaii: Afro-Japanese Aesthetics and New World Modernity, by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, analyzes these attitudes and explains the intrinsic powers that are leading to a fusion of both aesthetics. Cool and kawaii are expressions set against the oppressive homogenizations that occur within official modern cultures, but they are also catalysts of modernity. Cool and kawaii do not refer us back to a pre-modern ethnic past. Just like the cool African American man has almost no relationship with traditional African ideas about masculinity, the kawaii shTjo is not the personification of the traditional Japanese ideal of the feminine, but signifies an ideological institution of women based on Japanese modernity in the Meiji period, that is, a feminine image based on westernization. At the same time, cool and kawaii do not transport us into a futuristic, impersonal world of hypermodernity based on assumptions of constant modernization. Cool and kawaii stand for another type of modernity, which is not technocratic, but rather 'Dandyist' and closely related to the search for human dignity and liberation.

An examination of the art in superhero comics and how style influences comic narratives.

In the last few decades, Japanese popular culture productions have been consolidated as one of the most influential and profitable global industries. As a creative industry, Japanese Media-Mixes generate multimillion-dollar revenues, being a product of international synergies and the natural appeal of the characters and stories. The transnationalization of investment capital, diversification of themes and (sub)genres, underlying threat in the proliferation of illegal audiences, development of internet streaming technologies, and other new transformations in media-mix-based production models make the study of these products even more relevant today. In this way, manga (Japanese comics), anime (Japanese animation), and video games are not necessarily products designed for the national market. More than ever, it is necessary to reconcile national and transnational positions for the study of this cultural production. The present volume includes contributions aligned to the analysis of Japanese popular culture flow from many perspectives (cultural studies, film, comic studies, sociology, etc.), although we have emphasized the relationships between manga, anime, and international audiences. The selected works include the following topics: • Studies on audiences—national and transnational case studies; • Fandom production and Otaku culture; • Cross-media and transmedia perspectives; • Theoretical perspectives on manga, anime, and media-mixes.