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context: comics > sources
Manga! Manga! The World Of Japanese Comics by Frederik L. Schodt
Definitive, and likely to stay that way for some time. It was first written in the early '80s, before any real translations had reached the anglophone market, and I vividly remember the wow! factor of reading it then. Obviously some of its stats and facts are a bit outdated now, and the level of Western knowledge of Japanese comics has increased greatly.
It also has a foreword by Osamu Tezuka, which (time travel difficulties aside) strikes me as the equivalent of writing a book about theatre, then having Shakespeare write the introduction.