ABSTRACT
This chapter is bookended by early and latter-day "internationalizations" of manga studies. It recounts the "four stages" of manga discourse in Japan that Berndt treats, by her own admission, perfunctorily and fill in a number of gaps in her account. The chapter discusses the point to the necessity for expanding the manga studies temporal window to include, at least, Rakuten, Ippei, and Tezuka Osamu in the critical discourse that "begins" in the 1960s. It intends to present a "history" of manga studies as wildly divergent along a number of paths that periodically overlap and persist even as later critical movements appear to obviate them. Kitazawa Rakuten turns this notion on its head: manga is what resists Japanese essentialism and does so by drawing upon an entire world of comic art. Manga is a matrix of possibilities as wide as the world, not a representation of any one particular idea.
