Experiencing the Media Mix @Concordia University, or, A brief history of Otsuka Eiji's revisionary sketches part I

Well, I had this great blog post prepared about Experiencing the Media Mix at Concordia University, but somehow after I pressed Post, the whole entry vanished into the ether. Here is about half of it: 

Hello all! It's been a shamefully long time since I updated this blog. But honestly, unless you want the riveting stories of making dissertation deadlines (or not) and teaching a four-day-a-week language course (thrilling but mainly analog-based, although the digital pedagogies are ineresting), there hasn't been much to report in the way of Digital Media Studies around here. 

Well, there was my own talk at UC Irvine in November, on anglophone online K-drama fandom activities, and if you have never seen this community in action, www.dramabeans.com is a pretty great introduction. But my primary memory is of giving the talk in the grip of a high fever (speaking of infrastructural constraints), and of being grateful the students seemed actually interested by the material. Even the kid on the internet the whole time spent it noodling around on the site.Thanks, Irvine Kpop culture kids! 

But! Media Mix! Its analysis presents an intriguing set of problems, especially in the ways it forcibly requires addressing the construction and analysis of fandoms at a point of contention, that is, in the midst of the gift culture, and its shadow consumerism. The strategy originates in Japanese marketing strategies in the 1960s, with the release of Tetsuwan Atomu (or Astro Boy), and can be best summarized as a simultaneous multiplatform submersive worldbuilding approach, designed to evert the world of the product into the real or physical world, surrounding each person and transforming him (or perhaps even her) into a user/player/reader/watcher and eventually, believer/fan, of the work. Concordia University, in Montreal, had assembled a disparate, interesting group of scholars to address the Media Mix as an object of study, with daylong seminars, a “mixcade” demo, and a master class. OTSUKA Eiji was apparently instrumental in bringing this transmedial exercise in reality-saturation to fruition during his tenure in advertising at Kadokawa Books, a major Japanese publisher. A noted cultural critic and successful mangaka (he writes MPD Psycho and Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service), Otsuka-sensei was also our keynote speaker for the conference. And since Concordia University was kind enough to partially sponsor students from outside Québec, I very gladly went to hear what this fascinating roster had to say about the Media Mix, in all its iterations.  

I am ashamed to note here that my jetlagginess resulted in a sketchy recollection of the keynote’s finer points, on Saturday evening, after a full day of exploring the bouquineries, lunch at St-Viateur (whole wheat sesame FTW!), and hours spent catching up on Claymore, Monster, Bunny Drop, and other manga at the Grande Bibliothèque. But Otsuka-sensei’s reinvention of the beginnings of manga or animeticism were gripping enough to grab even my laggard attention: he posited that, instead of linking between ukiyo-e woodcuts and contemporary manga styles, the media theorists looking to discuss the development of the form should look to the piracy and exchange which took place during the war, when Disney’s Steamboat Willie and Eisenstein’s film montages combined with Riefenstahl’s scarily brilliant visual propaganda, as seen in Osamu Tezuka’s distinctively rounded line art and cinematically dynamic backgrounds. Otsuka presented the white lion cub I knew as Kimba (who lives down in deepest darkest Africa (Africa)) as Mickey in reverse, right down to the black ears. At least, I think that was the thrust of the argument, notable not least for the ways in which it destabilizes the manga style as a kind of quiet Japanese essentialism. This point becomes much more interesting after his (dare I say) INCENDIARY talk on Monday.  

Imma get back to that talk on Monday later; this entry is already huge. I'll leave you with these brief questions.

Questions: 

1. What methodologies work for analysis of the fan-built components of the media mix, especially if the fandom itself might be a component of the advertising strategies surrounding and grounding this eversion of the product into the physical or real world? Is it enough to tie production back into what Ian Condry is calling collective creativity? What else is warranted/could warrant the work of fandoms, accounting for mixed origins in both gift and debt? 

2. What is happening when Otsuka-sensei reclaims manga creation for Japan and its former colonial territories, yet also claims a history of piracy and montage for its animated origins? I really want to know what you think about this one. He's going to deliberately provoke media theorists in his Monday talk, so I'll post about that next. 

 See you in the comments? Hope so!