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On Manga Page Layouts

A Very Old Paper on The Poe Clan

Girls and Women Getting Out of Hand: The Pleasure and Politics of Japan's Amateur Comics Communi

Tell me what you think of Takako Shimura

Who's to judge Tezuka's rivals?

Before the Forty-Niners

The Magnificent Forty-Niners

Heart of Thomas Errata

Do Manga Characters Look "White"?

Take Two (Or Was It Three?)

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About Committee Chair Rachel Balzora Thorn

A photo of Rachel from her college days, from around 1987. She is sporting a shoulder-length bob, and has a her shirt buttoned up to the top. She is looking down, and smiling shyly.

Rachel Balzora Thorn was born May 12, 1965, in Pennsylvania. At the age of twenty, she chased a girl to Japan, only to learn that that girl had herself chased a girl to Japan. But she found a new love in Japan: shōjo manga. She/Her," please.

Note: Don't be fooled by the photo; it's thirty years old.

rachel@kyoto-seika.ac.jp

On Manga Page Layouts

In 2018, I made a thread on the evil birdsite about page layouts in Japanese comics. It got a lot of retweets and reactions, but since I...

A Very Old Paper on The Poe Clan

This is a paper I wrote in 1989, when I was an M.A. student in East Asian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a...

Girls and Women Getting Out of Hand: The Pleasure and Politics of Japan's Amateur Comics Communi

I'm often asked about this paper I wrote in 2003, because a lot of people are interested in what we used to call yaoi and now mostly call...

Tell me what you think of Takako Shimura

First, a couple of things. You may noticed I've changed my name. Here's how and why. Since coming out as transgender of couple of years...

Who's to judge Tezuka's rivals?

Today's post is a translation of a post I made to my Japanese blog a year ago. I think it's relevant to my post of a few days ago. (Names...

Before the Forty-Niners

Since I recently ranted on Twitter about the Magnificent Forty-Niners (here, here), and specifically about how glorifying them diminishes...

The Magnificent Forty-Niners

No, not the Eighteen-Forty-Niners of the California Gold Rush. The Nineteen-Forty-Niners, who created the golden rush of girls' comics in...

Heart of Thomas Errata

To everyone who has already purchased or ordered my translation of Moto Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas, please note that there are numerous...

Do Manga Characters Look "White"?

While I'm still trying to put together a coherent intro to the main theme of this blog (to wit, the decline of shōjo manga), I've decided...

Take Two (Or Was It Three?)

Way back in the early days of the World Wide Web, I created the Shōjo Manga Home Page. I was pretty good at maintaining it throughout the...

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