There’s been a lot written about how to write reviews. Of course I mean for anime and manga. Most of these essays focus on writing for your audience, or creating spoiler-free zones, or formulating objective positions, or avoiding plot summary blather. However, I feel like there’s one underutilized method of critical inquiry that can be adapted and adopted for reviews of any media, and of course that is the academic methodology.

But what do I mean by an “academic review”? Well, put most simply, the fundamental form of academic writing is the literature review, and the social tenet that holds academic published research together is the citation. If you don’t understand this latter point, hit up Google Scholar, throw in a search term, and you’ll see that the “most important academic works” are those with high “cited by” counts.

Anyway, so how can we provide an academic bent to review writing? Well, there are technically already “academic reviews” available: simply pick up a copy of Mechademia and flip to the back pages, where you’ll find a host of critically insightful reviews of anime and manga titles. These reviews provide references to and citations of other academic texts, but tend to avoid other reviews from professional reviewers, other academics, or whomever.

The idea I would like to put forth in this short article, though, is that there’s another type of “academic review” that is not really used: reviews that reference previously-written reviews, as if the networks of reviewers mirrored the networks of academics that make up contemporary academic research matrices.

Looking through some criticism about writing reviews for anime and manga, once in a while I see authors writing, “So-and-so has already said enough about this title, so I don’t really have much more to say.” But I want to criticize these stances, because a reviewing author should take into account what others view about a piece of media, at the very least to inform his or her own opinion in the review-to-be-written.

I’ve been meaning to add more reviews of anime and manga titles to this blog, but I’ve continually taken the approach of writing critical, exploratory essays about the titles rather than mere reviews. So starting soon, I’m going to attempt to publish a few academic reviews on this blog that reference reviews currently written in the blogosphere.

Of course, I perceive an interesting gap in the current anime/manga blogging phenomenon, which is that there’s not much written about what both the Japanese- and English-language spheres are saying about a particular work. In the hopes that this will help (read: force) me to translate more Japanese writing about anime and manga, particularly from notable — though probably random — Japanese bloggers, I’m going to start writing reviews that reference the current discourse on Japanese popular media. Because that’s what academic is all about: creating, interacting with, and maintaining critical discourse about topics.

I hope that this will help foster greater communication between, or at least appreciation and understanding of, the Japanese and English fandoms.

I’d love to hear what others have to say about this referential approach: please leave comments! And hopefully I’ll have a review up in the next week or so. I’ll be starting with Asano Inio‘s relatively-unknown manga, Goodnight Punpun (Oyasumi Punpun).