From Analog to Digital, Between Love and Hate

The Birth of Manganime Fandom and Industry in Argentina

Abstract

In the early 1990s in Argentina, comic book fandom entered a new phase when anime hit cable TV, changing the media landscape, reception practices, and popular culture. The ensuing development of a local industry around Japanese pop culture was then shaped by an antagonistic relationship between the old and the new, as well as by a series of broader transformations that are characteristic of late capitalism: deterritorialization, digitalization, transmediatization, and customization of experiences.

In this paper, we approach the case threefold: First, on the publishing side, a fixed exchange rate regime with the USD ushered both local production’s terminal crisis and the birth of a specialized retail circuit based on imports from Spain, Mexico, and the United States, mostly superhero and Japanese comics. The dominance of this secondhand glocalization ended when a local upstart, Ivrea, made headway at the turn of the century with a heavily glocalized manga line that influenced the development of local fandom. Secondly, said fandom’s performativity at media industry events: The rise of big events such as Fantabaires (1996-2001) acted as the backdrop to a clash between the old guard of comics fans and the newcomer otaku. The latter counted many women among them, thanks to fan practices such as cosplay, which brought a change into stereotypically masculine socialization spaces. After Argentina’s economic collapse in 2001, manganime events became smaller and more frequent, complemented by a nascent fan-made merchandising economy. The third crucial factor is online sociability. With the spread of Internet access throughout the 2000s, cable TV’s broadcasting logic yielded to post-broadcasting. The fandom’s socialization practices shifted from live events like conventions to forums and social networks, super-places that allowed the development of new sex-affective subjectivities. Along with previous fan practices, new digital materialities (fan art, fan fiction) generated means of prosumption and sociability that continued to blur the line between cultural imports and local production.