appearances

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).

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!

Baruch College Manga Symposium

/ ahorbinski

In belated updates, I wanted to thank everyone who attended the Baruch College Manga Symposium: Untold History of Japanese Comics in April. I spoke about “Norakuro and Friends: The Rise, Fall, and Triumph of Children’s Manga, 1916-1957.” Anne Ishii, the English translator of Gengoroh Tagame’s My Brother’s Husband, spoke about “From Niche to Mainstream: The Crossover Success of Gay Manga.” I want to thank Anne for a fascinating talk and also Prof. C.J. Suzuki for organizing the symposium and inviting me to take part in it. Hopefully I’ll be back in New York City soon.

Mechademia Minneapolis + 12.1, “Transnational Fandoms”

/ ahorbinski

Thank you to everyone who attended Mechademia Minneapolis at the end of September, and especially to those of you who came to listen to and discuss my paper “A Children’s Empire: The Prewar ‘Media Mix’ of the Kodansha Club Magazines.” After also giving this presentation in Kyoto earlier this year, I think I’ve finally figured out the next steps.

In the meantime, I’m pleased to confirm that I’m serving as the guest editor for Mechademia 12.1, “Transnational Fandoms.” We’re in process on the issue now, and I think we’re putting together a strong volume expanding beyond the usual sites in Japan and North America. I look forward to everyone reading it when it’s published next year.

Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture

/ ahorbinski

I’m very happy to say that I’ll be giving a talk at Sophia University in Tokyo next week, 15 June 2018. “Dual Legacies: MAVO, Manga, and the Avant-Garde in Interwar Japan” explores the role that the radical 1920s art movement MAVO played in the work of the two most influential mangaka of the 1930s, Yanase Masamu and Tagawa Suihô, both of whom were MAVO members.

The talk starts at 18:30 and is open to the public. Full details are on the ICC page. I hope to see you there!

Mechademia Kyoto + Comics Studies Society

/ ahorbinski

The schedule for the Mechademia Kyoto conference this weekend is now online, so I can confirm that I’ll be speaking on Saturday, giving my 2015 talk “A Children’s Empire: The Prewar ‘Media Mix’ of the Kodansha Club Magazines” a shiny post-PhD update. Registration is still available, and you should totally attend if you’ll be around.

I also heard yesterday that I received an honorable mention for the Comics Studies Society‘s inaugural Chute Award for Best Graduate Presentation for my talk  “Something Postmodern Going On: The Queering of the Manga Sphere in the 1970s,” given at the UC Berkeley CJS Graduate Conference last year. (The announcement initially said the mention had been given to my phantom twin brother, Andrew Horbinski, but he’s not the one with the PhD.)

I’m very grateful for the recognition, and I was also pleased to see that my Belgian colleague Benoît Crucifix has won the CSS Article prize for his article  “Cut-up and Redrawn: Charles Burns’s Swipe Files.” Sadly I have a prior commitment and won’t be able to attend the inaugural CSS Conference in August, but I hope to do so in the future.

Sirens Studio 2018

/ ahorbinski

Since there are apparently 15 tickets remaining, it seems like the time to mention that I’ll be one of the faculty members at this year’s Sirens Studio, the prequel event for the Sirens Conference. Join us in Beaver Creek, CO in October to take a deep dive into writing, reading, and career sessions with me and seven other distinguished session leaders.

My session is “Taking the Off-Ramp: Strategies and Practices for Changing Careers (Especially for Academics).” We’ll be talking about the increasingly common reality of changing careers and best practices for doing it.