Transnational girlhood and the politics of style in German Manga

Abstract

ABSTRACTJapanese manga has long existed in Germany. Nakazawa Keiji’s Barefoot Gen, for example, was translated in 1982. During the 1990s manga began increasing in popularity, and by 2007, 70 percent of all comics sold in Germany were manga. The most striking element of the German manga boom, however, is not the wealth of manga translated into German, but the German manga – or Germanga – produced by young artists, most of them women, in the German language. While the German genre initially featured many of the same conventions of its Japanese origins, it has since evolved to differentiate itself from the manga tradition in significant ways. Today, German manga is a hybrid form that possesses elements from both the German and Japanese cultural contexts. This article examines this category of German manga with a focus on the role of women artists in its development and themes, specifically analyzing the work of Christina Plaka and Anike Hage. Investigating questions of national and transnational culture in conceptions of gender, sexuality and feminism in shōjo-manga, this article seeks to understand both the dominance of manga in the German comics scene as well as the emergence of German-language shōjo-manga as a political act.