Lecture
Onwards to noble death! War representation in the manga of Shigeru Mizuki
- Rik Spanjers (University of Amsterdam)
- Date
- Wednesday 26 November 2025
- Time
- Serie
- Leiden Lecture Series in Japanese Studies
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 0.02
Please note that this talk will be held in Dutch
In a close reading of Mizuki's graphic novel Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths (1971), Rik Spanjers investigates the different drawing styles that make up the depiction of the past in this work. Using the work of Fredric Jameson, Ernst Gombrich and Thierry Smolderen, Spanjers shows how Mizuki's diverse graphic styles work together to convey Mizuki's unique view of war, as a mangaka and soldier. Mizuki appears to be able to map out the contradictions that marked the lives of the Japanese soldiers and therefore their victims like no other. The combinatory nature of Mizuki's historical representation also makes it possible to zoom out from Mizuki's work to war representation in a broader sense. Spanjers opens up Mizuki's pages as collages in which different ways of depicting war are juxtaposed and brought into dialogue with each other. In this way, Mizuki's manga becomes a window from which the history of war representation can be critically examined.
About the speaker
Rik Spanjers is an assistant professor in cross-media and television studies at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on war representation in comics and animation. In addition to his research into the depiction of World War II in comics, Spanjers worked together with Erin La Cour and Simon Grennan to compile the Key Terms in Comics Studies (2022).
