ABSTRACT
For young people encountering Japan, the image is not of economic or business prowess but one of popular culture: manga, anime, computer games, fashion, and music. Hence, students and fans live in a convergent media environment where they occupy multiple roles as fans, students and "produsers" of Japanese cultural content—a scenario not anticipated by educators in the 1980s. Many students bring a wealth of knowledge of Japanese popular culture genres to the classroom and are no longer the blank slates of yesteryear. There is a long history of young people's engagement with comic book art in the United States, going back to the development of serialized comic strips in broadsheet newspapers of the 1920s. The moral panic surrounding Fredric Wertham's book and subsequent establishment of the Code not only put a dampener on the development of comic book art in the United States but also reinforced the stigma that there was something dangerous and anti-social behind reading comics.
