Folklore Forum

Power, Natsu Onoda. God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga. University of Mississippi, 2009. Print. 208 pp, 6 x 9 inches, 53 b&w illustrations, filmography, bibliography, index. $50.00 unjacketed cloth; $25.00 paper

Jeremy Stoll
Indiana University

In God of Comics, Natsu Onoda Power uses the framework of intertextuality to analyze one of the most important figures in Japanese comics and his work within the form. In the Introduction, the author points out the divide between English and Japanese-language studies of manga as pivoting on understandings of manga as either culturally unique or an evolving art. Overcoming this tension serves as the focus of Power’s analysis of Osamu Tezuka’s unique genius in the context of manga’s evolution as a form. (more…)

Dorson, Richard. Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers: Folk Traditions of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, 3rd edition, edited by James P. Leary. Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008 [1952]. pp. 371, index.  Paper $24.95.

Jodine Perkins
Indiana University

Based on five months of fieldwork conducted in 1946, Richard Dorson brings together a collection of folklore from the diverse inhabitants of Michigan’s Upper Pennisula (U.P.): young and old, lumbermen and miner, Ojibwa, Finn, and French. He selected this place, in part, because it was relatively close to his home in Lansing, although still a ferry ride away. He also chose the U.P. because of its isolation from much of the U.S., its cultural distinctiveness, and because both American Indians and European immigrants of many nationalities lived there. Furthermore, the U.P. was still fairly rural and poor due to the decline of timber harvesting and mining. To Dorson, it seemed that all of these conditions made this area fertile ground for finding folklore, particularly oral narratives, and indeed he did discover a “storyteller’s paradise” (2). (more…)