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hello! this is my first post and a test post!

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Moment-to-Moment With Tobio's Death

Good Evening Blog,  Before taking this class, I’ve never really gotten the chance to critically think and analyze comics and manga before. When I've read comics and manga in the past, I really just paid attention to the story and the pretty art. But, after reading Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, I’ve come to realize that like all other art forms, there are deeper reasons why a comic artist chooses to draw in a certain style and how they choose to present their ideas.  This is especially true in Tezuka Osamu’s Astro Boy. The way that Osamu has chosen to use specific techniques in his panel-to-panel has helped to bring out crucial points in his manga. In McCloud’s book, he names 6 different types of paneling that are used in comics and manga: moment-to-moment, action-to-action, subject-to-subject, scene-to-scene, aspect-to-aspect, and non-sequitur. I feel that one of the best scenes in Astro Boy is Tobio’s death. Not because Tobio died, but because the way that ...

Some Notes on Japanese Culture: Hidden and Hyped

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Squash! Identity in Swallowtail Butterfly

Good Morning Blog, One of the first things I noticed in this movie was the collection roles of identities presented. For example, take Glico.Glico was born in China, so part of her identity is Chinese. She now lives in Japan, so another part of her identity is Japanese. And finally, she lives in Yentown, which has its own identity as Yentown. Many other characters in the movie also share this “Third” identity.  Even though Glico has three cultural identities, she really only identifies with two: Chinese and Yentown. Interestly, Yentown, though it is in Japan, is not considered Japanese by the Japanese natives due to its overwhelming large population of foreigners. Identity is something that is fluid, but the Japanese here have created borders on what it means to be “Japanese.” This is the same thing with one of the other characters in the movie, the man who proposed the idea of “Third Culture.” The man has American parents yet he was born in Japan. He has grown up livi...