Keimusho no Naka novel

            Simple but inspired parody of giant robot power-escalation anime and novel, particularly the Go Nagai Mazinger Z variety. With Earth under attack by the dreaded Zogelians, a mad inventor unleashes Dodekain, a 15,000–mile-high giant robot literally larger than the entire planet. Piloted by your typical hot-blooded hero, Dodekain demolishes the alien monsters by punching and slapping the Earth with his bare hands, in the process causing more damage than the aliens did.

Against the gods light novel

            In 1995, underground light novel artist Kazuichi Hanawa was convicted for possession of illegally modified model guns and sent to prison for the next two and a half years. His experiences provided the basis for Doing Time, a dreamlike documentary art comic. The book is not a true narrative; it jumps around in time, doesn’t show Hanawa entering or leaving prison, and doesn’t focus on particular characters, not even Hanawa himself. Instead, it describes every aspect of the prison in exhaustive detail, creating a sort of timeless mental blueprint, occasionally drifting into surrealism. From the opening page, “How to dress in prisoner’s clothes,” to the close-ups of grass in the prison yard, almost every item, room, and piece of furniture is meticulously described, especially the meals, which fill page after page. The book is far from an exposé—the author expresses guilt at how well he’s treated—and the prison comes off as a peaceful, strangely school-like environment, where the convicts are forced to enact counless little rituals of obedience: sitting the proper way, speaking the proper way, cleaning their cells, and so on. The heavily cross hatched, hand-drawn artwork gives equal priority to the people and the backgrounds, suitable for a book in which the setting dominates everything. The book also contains an essay and interview with Hanawa describing the circumstances of his arrest.

Read Gakusen toshi asterisk

            Dôjinshi became a major subculture in the 1970s, not long after the collapse of the 1960s underground comics scene and alternative novel magazines such as Com. College light novel clubs (manga kekyûkai) still needed an outlet for their works, and began to trade and sell books at conventions, such as Tokyo’s twice-yearly Comic Market (Comiket for short), which began in December 1975. Such college groups were the prototypical “dôjinshi circles,” small groups of friends who worked together on comics, often each contributing a short story. Unlike the gender-divided mainstream comic industry, dôjinshi conventions were attended by a mixture of male and female artists, with female groups in the majority. High school and college-age women, with less academic and career pressure (and fewer opportunities), had more time to draw than their male counterparts. In the 1980s, the spread of yaoi dôjinshi (see the YAOI section) and other pop-culture parodies attracted growing numbers of fans, and convention attendance rose rapidly. Today, Comic Market has an attendance of over 500,000 people, and smaller dôjinshi conventions, often based on particular shows or subsets of fandom, go on throughout the year.