Straight from the Heart by Jennifer S. Prough

The first section takes up Hagio’s “outer world” and describes the formidable challenges she faced in composing The Heart, both from the world and from her own family. The following study takes a personal approach, attempting to analyze The Heart in the context of the author herself, both in terms of her biographical circumstances and inner psychology.

Although The Heart is highly regarded, even worshiped, by fans of manga, scholars have been slow to give it due consideration as an important document of social history, especially of women’s social history.

This thesis discusses The Heart of Thomas (1974), the representative shōjo manga (girl’s comic) of Moto Hagio, who is often called “The Magnificent Mother of shōjo manga” or “The Goddess of shōjo manga” and was the first shōjo manga creator to win a Meadal of Honor for artistic achievement from the Japanese government. However, we found different proportions of usage for particular schemas within each genre, which implies that each genre constitutes their own ‘‘dialect’’ within this broader system Our results find that most of these graphic schemas recur in both genres of manga, and thereby provide support for the idea that there is a larger Japanese Visual Language that pervades across genres. Our study first described and categorized 73 conventionalized graphic schemas in Japanese manga, and we then used our classification system to seek preliminary evidence for differences in visual morphology between the genres of shonen manga (boys’ comics) and shojo manga (girls’ comics) through a corpus analysis of 20 books. We argue that these graphic schemas belong to a larger ‘‘visual vocabulary’’ of a ‘‘Japanese Visual Language’’ used in the visual narratives from Japan. The visual representations of non-iconic elements in comics of the world often take diverse and interesting forms, such as how characters in Japanese manga get bloody noses when lustful or have bubbles grow out their noses when they sleep.

Straight from the Heart by Jennifer S. Prough