Posthuman Blues

I find Japanese pop-culture uniquely repugnant, yet fascinating as a postmodern spectacle. What on Earth is the appeal of "manga" comics? The artwork is bland and the plotting, from what I can tell after thumbing through a few representative titles, diffuse at best. The heroines of manga are big-eyed waifs that defy ethnicity (not to mention biomechanics). There's something obscurely prurient about this stuff; manga characters seem to embody the repressed libido of an entire subculture. (For an alarmingly good science-fictional take on this, read Richard Calder's "Dead Girls" trilogy. It's about a nanotech plague that turns women into sadomasochistic quantum-mechanical "gynoids." You'll like it.)

There's even a thriving population of real-life cartoon avatars (predominantly female, as far as I can tell) who adopt the personae of manga characters through a Web-fueled movement known as "cosplay" (short for "costume play"). I was alerted to this phenomenon when my Mars website started receiving tons of hits from a site in Italy. I checked out the site; it's managed by a girl infatuated with "cosplay" who lists Cydonia (home of the "Face on Mars") as a "favorite place" on her personal profile.

Several months back, William Gibson remarked on his blog that one of his favorite magazines was "Giant Robot," which is devoted exclusively to Japanese pop. I found "Giant Robot" in a Borders and it's indeed great: a gallery of uncorrupted absurdity. Japanese consumer culture is like some cross-cultural fever dream in which Hello Kitty figures as nothing less than a minimalist deity. But a deity of what, exactly?

Update:

A while ago I was attempting to track down the origin of a meme that had infected the art departments of major book publishers, causing them to produce an anomalously high number of book covers depicting small plastic figurines and stuffed animals. (This can be verified by digging through the Posthuman Blues archives.)

I now think I have a possible "fix" on the meme's vector: none other than The Cure's album "Wild Mood Swings," which featured a crude sock-puppet on its cover. The covers of the singles from "Wild Mood Swings" comply with the same theme; I personally own the single for "The 13th," which features a wind-up, drum-playing panda bear. (I've discarded the cover; otherwise I might have realized the significance sooner.) The singles for "Mint Car" and "Gone!" continued the "antique toy" theme.

My best guess is that graphic artists in the publishing industry found the Cure covers whimsical and "borrowed" the concept after several years of incubation.

(Does this make sense or is my brain swimming in near-toxic levels of dopamine?)