In my latest interview for the New Books Network, Frenchy Lunning discusses her book Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence . Cosplay, a portmanteau of “costume” and “play,” emerged from geeky Japanese subcultures to become a popular hobby, and even profession, around the world. Lunning dove into the reasons why people cosplay through interviews, pictures, and her own firsthand experience of cosplay events in America and Japan. She distills the essence of cosplay to performance and the negotiation of iden
The International Journal of Comic Art has just published an article of mine, “Satoshi Kon’s Opus through his Anime” (vol. 24, no. 2, Fall 2022), which means rather a lot to me. I hope you’ll pardon a bit of a digression for this one.
A decade ago, I presented a paper on the famed anime director Satoshi Kon at a regional conference of the Modern Language Assocation. Kon’s sudden death from pancreatic cancer in 2010 had shocked the anime world, and an array of tributes were produced in the immediate aftermath. By 2014, however, that wave had crested, and I was worried that Kon’s brilliant films would slowly be forgotten. So, I made one of my first conference talks as a Ph.D. student into my own small contribution to maintaining Kon’s lega