ABSTRACT
This issue of whether Asia’s media diasporas have influenced established patterns of global mapping, raised by Yano in the previous chapter, has been a steady undercurrent of all selections in Part II. Now, in our concluding contribution, John Lent brings this important theme center stage. Where Yano looked at the outflow of a particular characterproduct from a particular nation, Japan, into a western nation, the United States, Lent studies a set of related media – comics, cartooning and animation – and their flow from numerous nations across Asia – in particular Japan, South Korean and India – and then outward into multiple nations in the West. What he shows is, first, a certain “Japanese style” that is taking root in cartooning throughout the world; but second, as a result of the growing influence of Korean and Indian comics (the latter of which feeds national communities sharing cultural traditions and language), one can speak of an “Asian imprint” coursing through the global diaspora of comic art.
