The East Asia Comics Collection has grown over about ten years from a small initial gift to a robust resource for language learners, scholars of popular culture, and general readers. The collection now includes Korean manhwa (만화), Japanese manga (漫画), and Chinese manhua (漫畫/漫画). The purchasing strategy has partly been based on student requests (via surveys conducted by language instructors), and resulted in our acquiring popular series such as Jūhan shuttai! (重版出来!) and Sikkaek (食客).
We’ve especially focused on collecting LGBTQ+ stories from Japan as a result. The Penn Libraries was one of the first in North America to purchase the now-popular Japanese series Otōto no otto (弟の夫) by gay artist Tagame Gengoroh (田亀源五郎), which has since been translated to English as My Brother’s Husband and was serialized as a six-episode drama by Japanese broadcaster NHK in 2018. (In fact, we own many TV shows and movie versions of the comics in our collection.)
The East Asia Comics Collection continues to grow and can be found in its own area on the far west end of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center’s fifth floor. This location makes for especially easy browsing and reading: the Willoughby East Asia Seminar Room, where Japanese language classes meet several times per semester for reading practice, or tadoku (多読), is only a few steps away. This area of Van Pelt is also home to the East Asia stacks, where students can find contemporary fiction in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
All patrons should feel welcome to either read comics from the collection in the library or check them out to take home.
