iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 26/09/2026

Huh, never realized that's what "NHK" stands for

National Hookup Program (NHK), 1948 (文書名:GHQ/SCAP Records, Civil Intelligence Section = 連合国最高司令官総司令部民間諜報局文書) (課係名等:Press, Publication & Broadcast Division) (シリーズ名:Central File, 1945-49) (ボックス番号:8617 ; フォルダ番号:9)

050

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 26/09/2026

They really seemed kinda concerned about this

130

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 26/09/2026

Looking through records of the US occupation of Japan to better understand censorship and publishing during that period, and came across this.

Special Report: Use of Kamishibai as Communist (文書名:GHQ/SCAP Records, Civil Intelligence Section = 連合国最高司令官総司令部民間諜報局文書) (課係名等:Press, Publication & Broadcast Division) (シリーズ名:Central File, 1945-49) (ボックス番号:8648 ; フォルダ番号:20)

170

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 26/09/2026

They seem pretty thin-skinned for how cynical they are

130

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 22/09/2026

I thought the snot bubble moved from Japanese animation (where it appears in the 1930s) to Japanese comics pretty late, but I came across it in this series from 1952, so it's been part of the manga repertoire at least since then. (Also saw it in a different serial from 1953.)

1183

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 17/09/2026

I recently read a claim that manga use snot bubbles to depict sleep in contrast to "Western comics," which use Zzz. Image unrelated.

3130

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 15/09/2026

They should have a "select all" button

041

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 13/09/2026

♫Nananananananana nananananananana Kamishibatman♫

0175

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 29/08/2026

I noticed a version of this scene from Tezuka's New Treasure Island in an older book from 1935. I wonder if Tezuka adapted it from that book or if both authors adopted it from somewhere else. Does anyone recognize this from some old animated film or something?

182

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 28/08/2026

Mesmerized by the coincidental alignment of these three で/て

180

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 28/08/2026

Since one can't prove a negative, I'm not sure how to *prove* that it's fake, but here's an episode from Yokoyama Ryuichi's Fuku-chan from 1938. Fuku-chan was one of the most popular manga of its time, and this specific episode was mentioned by a Japanese cultural critic as particularly funny:

220

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 27/08/2026

This author read Bringing Up Father books and found that the episodes in them are "all four-panel comics based on ki-sho-ten-ketsu." Pretty funny to see a term promoted online as a fundamentally Japanese, non-'Western', format used for a US comic.

191

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 21/08/2026

Sometimes a macron gets dropped and it doesn't matter. At other times a macron gets dropped and transforms yūjō 友情, "friendship," into yūjo 遊女, "prostitute."

"the principles of 'friendship, effort, and victory' (yūjo, doryoku, shōri) that propelled Shōnen Jump to industry dominance"

0132

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 18/08/2026

Wow that's crazy, I read a book published last year that predicted this

"As of the writing of this book, Jump is the only comics magazine that still barely has a circulation above one million, and by the time you are reading this, it will likely have fallen below that mark."

- Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics, by Eike Exner (sp?)

1114

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 11/08/2026

Check out this masked hound that's preventing me from getting work done while looking like it's auditioning for a Norakuro sequel

A formerly stray dog that looks like it just joined the Imperial Japanese Army and promote the invasion of China to schoolchildren lashes out at the viewer with her claws while still looking adorable

050

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 31/07/2026

Pearl Harbor episode of Matsushita Ichio's Suishin Oyaji (Father Promoter/Onwards Father), the Asahi Graph's replacement for Bringing Up Father. Image from a 1942 anthology of the strip.

1113

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 30/07/2026

Screenshot for reference in case quote gets detached or I get blocked:

Bluesky post by @sesmith.lol that says "HUGE congrats to my comrade horbinski.bsky.social for her EISNER AWARD for her fantastic book, Manga's First Century!"

083

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 22/07/2026

Your Monday mornings face are for thinking hands again

120

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 18/07/2026

The right-wing mind is a wonder to behold. The book reviewed here is John Dower's War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, in which the author goes to great lengths detailing Japanese war crimes, but also quotes racist and exterminationist rhetoric by Americans.

Two star review of John Dower's War Without Mercy that says: "This book seemed to be hell-bent and determined to paint the United States, white America specifically, as racist warmongerers who were out to wipe non-whites in the Pacific off the face of the Earth. I had trouble staying focused on the material because it was so saturated with a racial setting. I'm not too surprised by Dower's sentiment, considering his wife is Japanese. But, this is the typical style of book that is being pushed in academia. Sigh."

161

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 10/07/2026

young me on weekends in tokyo

Fuku-chan and friends on the "train" (mosquito net), with Fuku announcing, "next stop: nichome"

061

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 10/07/2026

Never would've guessed that Korean would be the first language that work of mine would be translated into. And yes, that is the cover of the book on comics history that my article is included in why do you ask workroompress.kr/product/2197...

Korean text mentioning an "Eike Exner" and books on "manga"

071

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 08/07/2026

Honored and happy to find out that Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics has been named one of two runners-up for the SHARP Book History Book Prize: sharpweb.org/grants-prize...

Highly Commended

Literature’s Refuge: Rewriting the Mediterranean Borderscape (Princeton University Press) by William Stroebel takes its readers on a fascinating journey of textual recovery, of refugee and diasporic literature resulting from the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange of 1923. The texts and languages violently displaced from their geographical and cultural moorings have nevertheless survived in scraps and fragments and ultimately find ‘refuge’ in Stroebel’s book. Stroebel is an inventive, self-reflective critic who looks for effaced narratives ‘in the cracks’ of history. Literature’s Refuge makes a remarkable intellectual contribution across languages and boundaries and exudes the sense of new work being done in new ways.

Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics (Yale University Press) by Eike Exner offers a richly researched and engagingly written account of Japanese comics, tracing Japanese comics from the late 19th-century through to the contemporary, with an excellent sense of the global manifestations of this form. The formal evolution of manga remains largely untheorised, and its publishing infrastructure understudied. Exner’s book is a substantive corrective. Balancing cultural history with close attention to particular titles, Manga will become an indispensable resource for anyone working within comic studies, and an eye-opening introduction for those new to the field.

5314

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 07/07/2026

Huh, I'd never seen ン・ん used as an initial N sound before. (From Tagawa Suiho's Madono Yukio-san in Shojo Kurabu, 1937). Nnaaruhodo.

163

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 07/07/2026

Yay! Very grateful to @cssorg.bsky.social for the Comics Studies Society's 2026 Article Prize. Read the now-award-winning article here: seika.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/20001...

Certificate of Comics Studies Society 2026 Article Prize

0131

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 03/07/2026

Our government is now misusing postal service funds to run advertisements for AI

United States Postal Service: Effective AI (heart emoji) starts with Smarter Strategy

130

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 25/06/2026

Oscar Jacobsson's Adamson used to advertise an at-home printing device in 1931 in Shonen Kurabu, the magazine that serialized Tagawa Suiho's Norakuro.

1123

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 25/06/2026

Episode 13 of "Panta's Adventures," from 1934, by "Natsukawa Hachiro" (Yanase Masamu, who was being persecuted for his leftist politics and started to use this alias in the 1930s). 1) "First a tsunami and now an earthquake." 2) "This time the ground rising up instead."

1103

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 23/06/2026

Why is every Youtube video like this now

Shitty youtube thumbnail with two AI-generated-looking children in old-timey European dress, separated by a neon-blue DNA helix. The video is titled "DNA Reveals the BASQUES Weren’t Who We Thought"

040

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 22/06/2026

Japanese bookseller in 1941: "The comics form works best for children. It's because it's like watching a talkie." Me in 2026: "I'm always saying this!!"

2151

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 21/06/2026

Just learned that apparently by 1939 there was a book-length Arsène Lupin manga... Crazy to think about how many works from the 1930s and 1940s have been lost.

1122

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 20/06/2026

The same article/interview also features this fascinating image, which I'll have to look for next time I'm at the National Diet Library. It's an ad for "King Manga" in an industry newspaper, presumably paid for by King Features to advertise its comics to editors of Japanese periodicals.

061

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 20/06/2026

Some French people in 1937 were better informed about the origins of manga than most people today: (found by @juliapopek.bsky.social)

12 panel episode of the comic strip Bringing Up Father in the Japanese periodical Asahi Graph, reprinted in a French periodical.

2134

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 14/06/2026

I worried I might be having a stroke reading the highlighted phrase, very curious how this happened

Book passage that includes the phrase "Of not 'or' course,"

180

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 14/06/2026

Yeah, and weren't carrier pigeons an early form of the Internet, if you really, REALLY think about it?

I happened to be reading these books while visiting the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Admiring the art of the New Kingdom by day and reading the history of manga by the Nile at night made me wonder whether the processions of panels that adorn the tombs of pharaohs and Egyptian nobles were not, after all, the earliest form of manga? Were those layered silhouettes and the sunlight rays falling on Akhenaten and Nefertiti an early form of the depiction of motion?

180

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 13/06/2026

Help I'm a man and yet being mansplained to

This is Exner’s version of the manga origin story, and I don’t find it completely convincing. He thinks that it is a mistake to see the essence of comics as “a combination of image and text”, and eschews any connection between narrative comics and earlier traditions, arguing that the word “manga” was simply transferred from whimsical sketches to a different category of objects. He also treats as irrelevant centuries of sophisticated melding of text and image in the woodblock-printed books of the Edo period (1603– 1867). To my mind, what seems to have happened in the late nineteenth century is that Japan experienced a kind of media Reformation, in which woodblock printing was abandoned and typeset adopted instead. This entailed the introduction of a graphic template borrowed from foreign media, allowing back onto the page only “modern” imagery.

3140

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 13/06/2026

This is how a "property entrepreneur and expert on Japan" summarizes my new book for @thetls.bsky.social. Small problem: the book doesn't say that "Okamoto developed the concept of Euro-American cartooning in magazines such as Tokyo Puck," in part because Okamoto never worked for Tokyo Puck.

Imaizumi eventually passed on the baton to Yasuji Kitazawa, and later Ippei Okamoto, who developed the concept of Euro-American cartooning in magazines such as Tokyo Puck and the Asahi Shimbun daily newspaper. The spread of the phonograph in the 1890s encouraged the insertion of speech bubbles, and the rise of motion pictures rapidly advanced the artist’s concept of how a story could be told over multiple frames.

120

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 12/06/2026

Gee I wonder why on the eve of the SpaceX IPO, noted financial crimes facilitator PricewaterhouseCoopers is paying for sponsored content boosting the idea of "Data Centers in Space"

Instagram ad for a podcast by noted transphobe mag "The Atlantic," with the topic "Data Centers in Space," paid for by notorious crime facilitator "PricewaterhouseCoopers."

120

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 10/06/2026

I finished @zevhandel.bsky.social 's Chinese Characters Across Asia and wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of writing in East Asia. I expected the book to be fairly dry but it was a very enjoyable read, written for a general audience of non-linguists.

1113

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 09/06/2026

Don't you need to disclose when you're being paid to run content?

SpaceX also touted a $23 trillion market opportunity it says awaits its artificial intelligence offerings, adding it is the only company that can escape the limitations of earthbound businesses and use space to build AI compute capacity that it expects to draw ⁠enormous demand in the future.

110

Eike Exner @eikeexner.com · 09/06/2026

At least the Fortune piece shows why publications should want to have a human editor

while providing exemptions for "clearly non-hazardous and pose no credible threat to public health and safety."

010