Mechademia 2023

/ ahorbinski

I’ll be giving a talk at the Mechademia conference in Kyoto at the end of this month, hosted by Kyoto Seika and the Kyoto International Manga Museum. My talk, “Applauding the DJ: Historicizing the Postmodern in 1970s and 1980s Anime and Manga Fan Cultures,” is a very preliminary sketch of where I think I’m going with my next book project. One way you can think of the postmodern is as the aftermath of modernity.

Full conference details can be found on the Manga Museum website. I hope to see you there!

Thanks CasaCon!

/ ahorbinski

Thanks to everyone who came to my panel at CasaCon 2022 today! The con continues on Discord tomorrow and Sunday, and you can still register for free via Eventbrite.

I wanted to share the two videos that I played in my talk: the first, the dubbed opening of Astro Boy (the first comment is from someone who sang in the chorus for the song!); and the second, the footage from the 1982 meeting of the C/FO Los Angeles chapter. You can also read the article I wrote about early anime and manga fandom (in which I mistook Sandy, the Orange County C/FO chapter mascot, for Fanta, the LA C/FO chapter mascot. Whoops).

Now live from Mastodon

/ ahorbinski

At this festive season of the year, I should be thinking about what kind of cookies to make next. Instead, I’ve been watching Elon Musk destroy Twitter in real time. I joined Twitter in 2012 with my legal name account, and even earlier with a private one; it sucks being driven off a real digital home by a redpilled billionaire who, to add insult to injury, isn’t even a good poster.

But so it goes, until and unless we raise the top marginal tax rate to 70% again, anyway. I’ve joined Mastodon, and I’m now @horbinski@zirk.us. Eventually I’ll get around to deactivating my Twitter, and installing the social media widget for this site, but I figured I’d announce it here right away.

Wishing all of us a happier and better 2023.

CasaCon 2022

/ ahorbinski

I’m thrilled to say that I’ll be a panelist at CasaCon 2022 next Friday, December 16! My talk will be on “Early Anime and Manga Fandom in the United States” at 5pm Pacific/8pm Eastern (yes, I went with the longer title in the official schedule but clearly the shorter one is better).

You can see the full schedule for the event at the con website and register for free via Eventbrite. Hope to see you there!

Translation from 2B-dan in Mechademia 14.2

/ ahorbinski

I’m very pleased to say that the current issue of Mechademia: Second Arc contains a translation by me of a chapter from a book written by Yonezawa Yoshihiro and Shikijō Kyōtarō, 2B-dan: Gindama sensō no hibi (1983; Squad 2B: The days of the silver ball gun wars), specifically Chapter 3, “Putting a Hand into the Fountain of Knowledge.” Yonezawa of course is justly famous for his involvement with Comiket from its foundation when he was a college student to his death in 2006, and for the posthumous archive of his personal collection at Meiji University. This issue of Mechademia is themed around “New Foundations of the Otaku” and I’m very pleased to have found a home for the translation here–there are many great articles alongside my own contribution.

I was tipped off to the existence of this book by a Twitter user who has since apparently deleted their account. Never let anyone tell you that social media is exclusively bad.

Review of Fandom, Now in Color at Strange Horizons

/ ahorbinski

I was very honored to have the chance to review Rukmini Pande’s recent edited collection Fandom, Now in Color: A Collection of Voices for Strange Horizons, which has been my favorite magazine of speculative fiction for a long time. (Yes, because of the reviews.) It’s an important book that I think everyone in fan studies should read, and everyone who considers themself a media fan too. And I do recommend the entire special issue, dedicated to criticism, while you’re there.