This chapter traces the historical and sociocultural contingencies in nam-ing Sinophone comics through the lenses of comics studies and Japanese studies. While contemporary Chinese and Japanese use the same word for comics, this word invites cultural particularization when romanized. Referring to Sinophone comics as manhua and Japanese comics as manga not only creates a certain distance from the broader domain of global comics and the field of comics studies but also risks obscur-ing historical intercultural exchanges within the East Asian region, as well as today’s diverging sociocultural positions (for example, between corporate, or mainstream, productions and ‘alternative,’ often publicly funded ones). Taking a discourse- analytical stance, the chapter surveys how the terms manhua and lianhuanhua are used in Anglophone Sinology and which equivalents for the latter have been utilized in Japanese before addressing how the cultural bricolage that characterizes Taiwan’s comics is made invisible by the label manhua. The final section of the chapter re-verses the intercultural vector and examines the recent surge of translated editions of Taiwan komikku in the Japanese market. The overall 

This issue is part of Project MUSE’s Subscribe to Open (S2O) program.The contributions to this volume are less engaged in studying “popular culture” rather than media, giving preference to materialities, affordances, pragmatics, and actors’ interrelations. Specific actors in specific situations and contexts come to the fore, as do specific events and experiences on the part of media users. Fans are recognized as producers of valuable knowledge, potent creators, and the researcher’s “teacher.” Sociocritical potential is found in forms of interactivity. To accommodate the focus on methods and their reflection as methodologies, the present volume is not structured along the lines of research objects or, more specifically, individual media. Consequently, contributions from the perspectives of game studies or anime studies are not grouped together. Instead, each of the three parts into which this volume falls presents a certain emphasis. The first part, titled “Research Methods and their Objects,” highlights most clearly how reflections on objects and methods constitute methodologies. The second part shifts the center of attention to “Media Texts and Formal Analysis,” while the third, and most diverse, part assembles considerations of “History, Semiotics, and ‘Grounded Theory’.”

Célébré comme le plus grand artiste de yōkai au Japon, Mizuki Shigeru (1922-2015) a longtemps été perçu comme étant trop ancré dans la culture locale pour susciter l’intérêt d’un public étranger. Mais aujourd'hui son imaginaire parle à des publics du monde entier.