American superheroes, manga cuteness and the Filipino child: the emergence of glocal Philippine comics and picturebooks

Abstract

This article brings together conceptual blending and glocalisation to investigate the dynamic interrelations between text and image and East and West in Philippine comics and picture books. Comics, picturebooks and manga are some of the most concrete examples of conceptual blending in literature, for all are multimodal media in which images and texts communicate different information and interact to create a third story. Furthermore, these genres increasingly borrow from one another’s grammar, resulting in hybrid graphic narratives. In the Philippine texts examined in this article, new images of identity emerge from two blending processes: the negotiation of text and image, and the glocalisation of Western picturebooks and comic book techniques and the Japanese manga style. This article explores how the blending of Eastern and Western story scripts and aesthetics grounded on Philippine ideologies of subjectivity produce glocal Philippine comics and graphic novels and represent a ‘glocal’ childhood that transcends cultural borders.

Keywords:

• conceptual blending
• glocalisation
• globalisation
• subjectivity
• Philippines
• comic books
• picturebooks

Notes

^1. In the English language, the country is spelled ‘Philippines’ and the people are called ‘Filipinos’. The variation in /Ph/ and /F/ is a consequence of having been colonised by both Spain and the USA. The country was named ‘Filipinas’ to honour King Felipe II, but when ownership of the colony was transferred to the Americans after the Spanish-American War, it was renamed ‘Philippines’. ‘Filipino’ refers to citizenship as well as to the national language, which is composed of the Tagalog dialect, Spanish words and a few English words. In the Filipino language, the country is called ‘Pilipinas’ and the people ‘Pilipino/a’.

^2. For example, Trigun (Nightow 1996–2008) is a Space Western, and Inuyasha (Takahashi 1996–2008) is a time-slip fantasy that blends the school story and Japanese folklore, and is set in feudal Japan.

^3. In response to criticism that the cultural dominance of Japan in the region was a ‘generic form of cultural imperialism’, Ching (1996, 182) asserts that such statements ‘ignore the possibility of multiple readings of these cultural texts by the people and underestimate their abilities to negotiate and construct meanings within their own particular cultural contexts’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna Katrina Gutierrez

Anna Katrina Gutierrez received her PhD in English from Macquarie University, Australia. Her interests include multiculturalism, empathy, cognitive criticism, and the interactions between East and West in literature, film and graphic narratives for children and young adults. Her publications include an article in the journal International Research in Children’s Literature and an essay in the edited collection Subjectivity in Asian Children’s Literature and Film.