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““We’re off to outer space, we’re leaving mother Earth, to save the human race,” the opening lines of the theme song to “Yamato” and “Star Blazers” went, but modern audiences seem more interested in escapes into inner space and saving themselves. Part of this is simply due to changing tastes and styles, inevitable in any youth-oriented medium, and part to how even the most radical subcultures inevitably get co-opted—witness how hip-hop and punk, so edgy and threatening in the eighties, morphed into mainstream pop. Days after Matsumoto’s death, a column about the artist expressed concern about how “cold and cynical many recent anime seem to be.” But is this a criticism of the current crop of animators and fans—or a reflection of Japanese society itself?”

Without komaga (literally “panel pictures”), there would have been no gekiga. Moreover, because by the mid 60s gekiga had become lingua franca in comics for adolescent boys and young men, and because without gekiga it is unlikely that the “cinematic” would have become the obsession that it did amongst manga critics and historians, one could also say that without komaga neither manga or its discourse would exist as we know them.

Despite this, komaga’s creator, Matsumoto Masahiko (1934-2005) has only recently been resurrected from the archive. Yet still has his work barely registered within the mainstream of manga scholarship, which remains stubbornly Tezuka-centric in focus.

The Major, or Motoko Kusanagi, is the protagonist of each incarnation of the Ghost in the Shell manga-anime-merchadise franchise. If you care to google, Motoko Kusanagi is autocompletes to “a man” and “is hot,” then “in bed with a boy” and “in bed.” For a science-fiction philosophy character named for her military position, we (the audience — although I don’t limit this to those who have experienced the fiction, as the Major is iconic) sure are caught up in thinking about her gender and sexual status. Why could that be?