Henry Jenkins Interviews Researchers of Otaku

Henry Jenkins, under whom I had the good fortune to study at USC, today published the final piece in his three-part series of interviews with the editors of the recently-published book, Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World (Feb. 2012, Yale University Press).

The series is well worth checking out by anyone interested in the field:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

“Animalized” Otaku and the World of Moé

Not my room. Just FYI.

It’s Christmas Eve, and for a certain segment of the population, that means we have plenty of time on our hands to spend in front of our keyboards, ensconced in a fluffy menagerie of images, books, and other media. As such, I’ve been doing some thinking, particularly about upcoming journal articles/conference presentations and where I’d like to take my research in the future.

Doujin Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction

I recently managed to wrap my claws around Takeshi Nogami’s latest work, Keiko Kato North Africa Military Photos 1943 (加東圭子戦場寫眞記録1943).  It is, of course, a doujinshi (independently-published book), released only at this year’s summer Comic Market event (Comiket, for those not fluent in otaku jargon).  It’s a fascinating text, and I’ll run a proper review later, but for now I’m primarily interested in its status as a book — that is, as a singular physical object consisting of bound pages printed with ink.  That such objects are especially revered within otaku culture can help shed additional light on one of the current challenges within the anime-studies field: establishing how, exactly, we should approach the topic of otaku consumption.