68 Real, Serious Books About Anime and Manga

|240x180px|Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, on FlickrMuch as I love all the anime and manga blogs out there, they don't help to legitimize fandom as much as actual published books. Especially scholarly ones. And so, I present a list of over 60 real books intended to deepen anyone's appreciation of anime and manga.

Note: This includes both books I've read and books in my "To Read" pile, so naturally I don't have much to say about the books I haven't read yet.

About Manga

 * Paul Gravett's Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics — A shockingly complete survey of the manga field in Japan over the last half of the 20th century, covering a wide variety of genres and manga-ka. Want to understand manga? Start here.
 * Yoshio Kawashima's How to Read Manga — Gloom Party — Japan's weird. This book re-prints a gag manga, along with a translation of the words and the cultural references embedded in the comic. It's a great insight into Japanese humor, artistic expectations, and culture.
 * Sharon Kinsella's Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society
 * Brigitte Koyama-Richard's One Thousand Years of Manga
 * Antonia Levi's (ed) Boys' Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre
 * Jennifer S. Progue's Straight From the Heart: Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shojo Manga
 * Fred Schodt's Manga! Manga! — The first English-language book on manga, this is an extensive overview of the medium, from its early days prior to 1900 through the 1980's.
 * Joseph Steiff's (ed) Manga and Philosophy
 * Jason Thompson's Manga: The Complete Guide — A comprehensive encyclopedia of all manga that's been published in North America. Including porn.g
 * Jason Yadao's The Rough Guide to Manga — Billed as a guidebook to manga history, popular manga-ka, styles, techniques, and genres.
 * Masami Toku's Shojo Manga! Girl Power!

About Anime

 * Steven T. Brown's Cinema Anime
 * Brian Camp and Julie Davis's Anime Classics Zettai!
 * Dani Cavallaro's Anime and Memory
 * Dani Cavallaro's Anime and the Visual Novel: Narrative Structure, Design and Play at the Crossroads of Animation and Computer Games
 * Dani Cavallaro's Anime Intersections: Tradition and Innovation in Theme and Technique
 * Dani Cavallaro's Magic as Metaphor in Anime
 * Jonathan Clement and Helen McCarthy's The Anime Encyclopedia
 * 'Ian Condry's Soul of Anime: 'Collaborative Creativity and Japan's Media Success Story''
 * Patrick Drazen's Anime Explosion!
 * Lois Gresh and Robert Weinberg's The Science of Anime: Mecha-Noids and AI-Super-Bots — Takes a look at the popular scientific concepts in anime, and how realistic they are.
 * Brigette Koyama-Richard's Japanese Animation: From Painted Scrolls to Pokemon
 * Thomas Lamarre's The Anime Machine — "Presents a foundational theory of animation and what it reveals about our relationship to technology," according to its University of Minnesota website. Very heady, but fascinating.
 * Helen McCarthy's 500 Essential Anime Movies
 * Susan Napier's Anime: From Akira to Princess Mononoke and Anime: From Akira to Howl's Moving Castle — A collection of Napier's scholarly essays on various aspects of anime, from Hayao Miyazaki's children's movies to hentai. The latter book is an expanded version of the former.
 * Colin Odell and Michelle Le Blanc's Studio Ghibli: The Films of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata
 * Andrew Osmond's Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist
 * Zilia Papp's Anime and Its Roots in Early Japanese Monster Art
 * Gilles Poitras' The Anime Companion — This is an encyclopedia of Japanese terms and concepts commonly used in anime, from shrine maidens to bullet trains. Particularly helpful for the fan who wants to know exactly'' what a particular term means.
 * Gilles Poitras' Anime Essentials — Haven't read it, but it's apparently a new fan's guide to anime. Describes the major names in the industry, information about Japan, getc.
 * Simon Richmond's Rough Guide to Anime — A handbook to anime's history, major works and creators, and technical terms. High-level but provides a lot of context.
 * Joseph Steiff (ed) and Tristan Tamplin's (ed) Anime and Philosophy
 * Mark Steineberg's Anime's Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan — Focuses on the toy merchandising side of the anime business, starting with the heavy use of in-show advertising and promotional tie-ins for the original 1963 Astro Boy TV series.

Osamu Tezuka

 * 'Philip Brophy's Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga (one available used for $200!)g'
 * Helen McCarthy's The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga — A beautiful, full-color book that both re-prints hundreds of Tezuka's artworks and provides an impressive biography of the man.
 * Natsu Onoda Power's God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-WWII Manga — A biography of Osamu Tezuka, an analysis of his works, and an excellent overview of the manga industry and its cultural impact in Japan throughout Tezuka's life.g
 * Frederik L. Schodt's The Astro Boy Essays — A collection of essays Fred Schodt wrote about Astro over the years, massaged into book form. An excellent description of Astro and Tezuka's life, at a level of detail not achieved in other Tezuka biographies.g

Hayao Miyazaki

 * Dani Cavallaro's The Anime Art of Hayao Miyazaki
 * Helen McCarthy's Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation
 * Hayao Miyazaki's Starting Point: 1979-1996 — A collection of Miyazaki's autobiographical essays about his career, basically from Future Boy Conan to Princess Mononoke.g

Mamoru Oshii

 * Dani Cavallaro's The Cinema of Mamoru Oshii
 * Brian Ruh's Stray Dog of Anime: The Films of Mamoru Oshii

Miscellaneous
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 * Hiroki Azuma's Otaku: Japan's Database Animals -- Translation of a Japanese book about otaku mental models, and how they relate to postmodern theory. Heady, philosophical stuff, and some of it hard-to-believe, but I thought a lot while I read it.
 * Christopher Bolton (ed), Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. (ed), and Takayuki Tatsumi's (ed) Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime -- An analysis of Japanese science fiction, with a heavy focus on anime
 * 'Robin Brenner's Understanding Manga and Animeg'
 * Philip Brophy's ''Manga Impact: The World of Japanese Animation
 * Stephen Brown's Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual Culture
 * Martha Cornog and Timothy Perper's Mangatopia: Essays on Manga and Anime in the Modern World
 * Roland Kelts' Japanamerica
 * Antonia Levi's Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation
 * Frenchy Luning's (ed) Mechademia volumes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 — A scholarly journal covering Japanese pop culture, anime, manga, etc. Includes many articles from various scholars and thinkers in the field. Each volume focuses on a different theme.
 * Mark M. Macwilliam's (ed) Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime
 * Susan Napier's From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Mind of the West
 * Susan Napier's The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: The Subversion of Modernity — An older, scholarly tome; note that used copies go for $50 on Amazon.com as of this writing.
 * Fred Patten's Watching Anime, Reading Manga — A collection of Fred Patten's essays, covering the many decades in which he's been a manga and anime fan. A fascinating look at both the Japanese and the American anime and manga fandom and industries since the 1970's.
 * Mark Schilling's The Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture — Explains many of the pop culture references seen in anime and manga
 * Fred Schodt's Dreamland Japan — A sequel of sorts to Manga! Manga!, this book broadens its scope somewhat beyond just manga, while also delving deeper into the topics introduced in the first book.
 * David Stahl's (ed) Imag(in)ing the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film — Contains several articles about anime relating to Japanese post-WW2 trauma (man, imagine what they'd make of Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms). Unfortunately, it's US $180 at last check.
 * Saito Tamaki and Hiroki Azuma's Beautiful Fighting Girl -- An analysis of the phenomenon of cute girls kicking tail.
 * Jolyon Baraka Thomas's Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan

Got anything to add? Let me know in the comments!g

(This is a living document; as I find more books, I add them to this list.)

Imag(in)ing the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film