Manga are many things: culture industry and ‘media mix’ component, instrument of ‘Cool Japan’ campaigns by the Japanese state, visual language of a global fan culture, and source of cute characters. But manga are also comics, serial graphic narratives for the most part; the related media specificity affects those representational capacities which primarily attract the interest of historians and gender-studies scholars. This volume assembles German and English-language essays in manga studies, that hark back to book chapters and conference papers for not comics-specific contexts. These essays do not employ manga as mere material for the study of culture or Japan, but rather query what aesthetic and cultural conditions as well as discourses call for consideration with respect to such employment. Manga itself takes center stage here.