[1] Lorraine Code, ed., Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories (London: Routledge, 2003), 219.

[2] Jason Thompson, “Moe: The Cult of the Child,” Comixology, July 9, 2009; Amelia Cook, “Moé, Misogyny and Masculinity: Anime’s Cuteness Problem–and How to Fix It,” The Mary Sue (blog), September 7, 2016.

[3] Karen E. Dill, How Fantasy Becomes Reality: Seeing Through Media Influence (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 5.

[4] Tonari no Yamada-Kun was also adapted into the animated feature film Hōhokekyo Tonari no Yamada-kun (My Neighbors the Yamadas) by Studio Ghibli, in 1999.

[5] Significant CGDCT yonkoma manga series include Azumanga Daioh (1999-2002), Sketchbook (2002), Lucky Star (2004), Hidamari Sketch (2004), Potemayo (2004-11), Working!! (2005), Sweet Valerian (2005), Yurumates (2005), Hetalia: Axis Powers (2006), A Channel (2008), K-On! (2007-12), Kill Me Baby (2008), Yuyushiki (2008), Shiba Inuko-san (2010), or Wakaba Girl (2010-13).

[6] Thompson, “Moe: The Cult of the Child,” para. 13.

[7] Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Harvard University Press, 2007), 213.

[8] Rina Arya, Abjection and Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in the Visual Arts, Film and Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 116.

[9] Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 238.

[10] Ngai, 239.

[11] Kobayashi-san Chi no Meidoragon, 13 episodes, directed by Yasuhiro Takemoto and produced by Kyoto Animation, aired from 11 January to 6 April 2017, on Tokyo MX, TVA, ABC, BS11. 

[12] Mari Kotani, Memories of Youth: A Feminist Perspective on Otaku, interview by Patrick W. Galbraith, Book section of The Moe Manifesto, 30-37, June 24, 2014, 32, 34.

[13] Akira Asada, “Infantile Capitalism and Japan’s Postmodernism: A Fairy Tale,” in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian, trans. Kyoko Selden (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 1989), 276.

[14] Tomiko Yoda, “The Rise and Fall of Maternal Society: Gender, Labor, and Capital in Contemporary Japan,” in Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present, ed. Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2006), 246.

[15] Elizabeth Legge, ‘When Awe Turns to Awww... Jeff Koon’s Balloon Dog and the Cute Sublime’, in The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, ed. Joshua Paul Dale et al. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 142.

[16] “Puni Plush,” TV Tropes, accessed July 26, 2017.

[17] Floor-chan, “Japanese Mimetic Words: PuniPuni ぷにぷに,” PuniPuniJapan (blog), October 12, 2014, paras. 9-10.

[18] Debra Occhi, “Wobbly Aesthetics, Performance, and Message: Comparing Japanese Kyara with Their Anthropomorphic Forebears,” Asian Ethnology 71, no. 1 (2012): 109–32.

[19] Occhi, 113.

[20] Patrick W. Galbraith, “‘'Otaku’ Research’ and Anxiety About Failed Men,” in Debating Otaku in Contemporary Japan: Historical Perspectives and New Horizons, ed. Patrick W. Galbraith, Thiam Huat Kam, and Björn-Ole Kamm (London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 26.

[21] Takashi Murakami, Toshiki Okada, and Kaichiro Morikawa, “Otaku Talk,” in Little Boy: The Art of Japan’s Exploding Subculture (New York; New Haven: Japan Society, Inc. / Yale University Press, 2005), 166.

[22] Dorothea Frede, “Plato’s Ethics: An Overview,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2016 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2016), "4.1 Happiness and the desire for self-completion" para. 1.

[23] Thompson, “Moe: The Cult of the Child,” para. 12.

[24] “Yurui,” Web Japan, September 5, 2006.

[25] DukeWomenStudies, 2012 Sixth Annual Feminist Theory Workshop - Roundtable, 2012, 38:50-39:40.

[26] Joshua Paul Dale et al., eds., The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness (New York: Routledge, 2016), 6.

[27] Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), 30.

[28] Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 253.

[29] Mikio Igarashi, Bonobono, vol. 1 (Bamboo Shobo, 1987).

[30] Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 255.

[31] Kagami Yoshimizu, Lucky Star, Vol. 1 (Cypress, Calif.: Bandai Entertainment, 2009).

[32] Kiyohiko Azuma, Azumanga Daioh 1-4 (Houston, Tex.: ADV Manga, 2003).

[33] Totan Kobako, Sketch Book 1-12 Set (MagGarden, 2003).

[34] Lucky Star, episode 1, “Tsuppashiru Onna,” directed by Yamamoto Yutaka and produced by Kyoto Animation, aired April 8, 2007, on Chiba TV, KBS Kyoto, SUN-TV, and Tokyo MX.

[35] Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 265–67.

[36] Ngai, 161.

[37] Ngai, 259.

[38] Ngai, 272.

[39] Ngai, 273.

[40] Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (1979): 50.

[41] Krauss, 60.

[42] “Kishōtenketsu,” Using Narrative Structures, accessed July 26, 2017.

[43] Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 272.

[44] John Oppliger, “Ask John: Is the Moé Boom Really Dying?,” AnimeNation (blog), August 30, 2010.

[45] Joshiraku, “Yonmai Kishō, Musashi Hakkei, Shimobe no Adauchi,” directed by Mizushima Tsutomu and produced by J.C.Staff, aired August 10, 2012. Based on the manga by Kumeta Kouji (story) and Yasu (art), published by Kodansha.

[46] Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Gard and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6, no. 5 (1939): para. 4.

[47] Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 281.

[48] Jonathan Jones, “Do Damien Hirst’s Dots Really Matter?,” The Guardian, December 11, 2013, sec. Art and design, para. 2.

[49] Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 271.

CGDCT is an acronym for “cute girls doing cute things,” a genre which has come to be associated with one of the more pervasive and problematic phenomena in twenty-first-century otaku culture: moé. Complaints about CGDCT and moé range from their stultifying effect on the otaku industry, i.e., their dumbing down of the epic or tragic mode in sci-fi and battle manga, to accusations of misogyny and pedophilia. This is because, 1) CGDCT is typically written by male authors for male readers, calling to mind Laura Mulvey’s famous aphorism “woman as image, man as bearer of the look.”[1] And, 2) CGDCT casts are almost exclusively composed of loli characters, a cuter and rounder type of bishōjo that looks pubescent or pre-pubescent no matter how old she is, diegetically. Such visual and behavioral infantilization of characters in CGDCT animanga results in the overall decrease of the series’ artistic age, prompting critics like Jason Thompson or Amelia Cook to raise “anti-moé” questions regarding the genre’s misogynistic undertones, despite its apparent benignness.[2] After all, media psychology has taught us that a comic, TV show or videogame is never “just” a comic, TV show, or videogame, for “mass media are a persistent and pervasive influence in our lives and… their influence is meaningful.”[3] Spectatorship is, among other things, an act of ethical responsibility.

CGDCT is entangled with the format of yonkoma manga (“four-panel manga”), a Japanese equivalent to the comic strip. Yonkoma manga is typically composed of four vertically arranged panels of the same size, with a reading direction from top to bottom, and right to left. [Figure 1] Often, two or more yonkoma come together side by side to form a larger narrative arc. For instance, in Figure 2, from Ogataya Haruka’s Potemayo (2004-2011), the first yonkoma strip introduces the elements of narrative continuity, with the second picking up where the first left off by “transferring” a comical element from one strip to the other—in this case, the cute Potemayo locked inside the household refrigerator. Thus, the two strips of fours panels each create a more extended narrative consisting of a total of eight panels. This technique allows for relatively complex narratives to be created by juxtaposing a potentially unlimited number of comics strips, with the story gradually unfolding in multiples of fours (4x2, 4x3, 4x4, etc.). Recent yonkoma manga, e.g., Wakabayashi Toshiya’s Tsurezure Children, make plentiful use of narrative continuity among comic strips, with each set of four panels serving more as rhythmical punctuation in an ongoing story than as individual one-liners.

 Yonkoma was initiated in the early 1900s by the founding fathers of manga, Kitazawa Rakuten and Ippei Okamoto, influenced by the political caricatures of Frank Nankivell and Frederick Opper. [Figure 3] After World War II, Hasegawa Machiko’s yonkoma manga Sazae-san, became extremely popular, running in the national newspaper Asahi Shimbun for nearly thirty years. Sazae-san’s focus on the everyday life was carried on by Ishii Hisaichi’s Tonari no Yamada-Kun, later renamed Nono-chan, a yonkoma manga which continues to run to this day, also in Asahi.[4] [Figure 4] Despite the tendency towards the cutification of characters observable from Kitazawa’s naturalistic representation to Sazae-san’s cartoonish features and Nono-chan’s bloblike appearance, there is a notable stylistic shift in CGDCT yonkoma series from the 2000s, which are otaku-oriented rather than circulating in mainstream newspapers.[5] [Figure 5] The yonkoma format is also associated in Japanese comics with omake, meaning “extra,” referring to bonus materials included at the end of manga or anime (e.g., cut scenes, actor interviews, etc.). When omake are presented in yonkoma format, characters are removed from their original contexts and reframed in comical, trivial, or non-canonical situations. For instance, Figure 6 is an omake of the supernatural thriller Death Note, demonstrating how even manga with dark adult themes can become CGDCT-like through the use of yonkoma.

As Thompson puts it, “It’s no surprise that one of the manga formats which has embraced moé is four-panel manga, which, like traditional American comic strips, trades on a similar set of clichés: reassuring domestic situations, the warmth of family, and cute characters who never grow old.”[6] But unlike the cute protagonists of comic strips such as Peanuts, Garfield or Calvin and Hobbes that bear a stylistically varied cartoonish cuteness oriented towards satire and caricature, loli allow little formal variation to convey their particular brand of cuteness. While this aspect might appear cosmetic, the result is that CGDCT is thoroughly gendered feminine and dislocated from the generalistic sitcomish or satirical feel of comic strips whose main protagonists are male. In other words, CGDCT is not just a question of themes and setting (e.g., Azumanga Daioh’s Sakaki loves cats like Garfield loves lasagne) but of the loli and girl-girl relationships as a site of affective flatness within the patriarchal order. The flatness of femininity is something that literary critic Sianne Ngai traces back to psychoanalysis:

The stereotype of women limited to the sphere of “minor” affects is sexist, but it is not merely sexist. Instead, the longstanding connection between femininity and states of undifferentiation (including, flatness) imbues female characters with negativity that only they can perform. In this context, a young girl or woman‑child character is particularly useful due to their double alienness, as they represent not only the nonmale but an infantile regression opposing “the seriousness of the paternal realm in their emphasis on childlike play and subversion.”[8] Ngai identifies this, for instance, in Isabel’s character from Herman Melville’s novel Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852), whose “excruciatingly childish language” seems to “inhabit an entirely different signifying register”[9] from the protagonist Pierre, an intellectual “fully indoctrinated into the symbolic order of language and patriarchal law.”[10]

This “excruciatingly childish” register is often found in CGDCT animanga, for instance, in the recurring dojikko “ditzy girl” archetype. Historically, ditzy girls and comic strips are intertwined, starting with Bécassine, a comic strip about a young Breton housemaid first appearing in the French girls’ magazine La Semaine de Suzette in the early twentieth century (1905-1908). [Figure 7] Being a provincial girl in the sophisticated Parisian household of the Marquise of Grand Air, Bécassine (whose name means “fool” in French) commits countless blunders played for the laughs of the magazine’s urbanite readers. Despite the schadenfreude derived from Bécassine’s misadventures and the readers’ corresponding sense of superiority, Bécassine’s representation throughout the series becomes more benign, and she remains to this day a beloved character of Franco-Belgian comics.

Interestingly, one recent popular CGDCT anime series, Kobayashi-san Chi no Meidoragon (Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, Kyoto Animation, 2016),[11] about a dragon called Tōru who turns into a humanoid girl and works as the personal maid of a female office worker called Kobayashi, reproduces a similar setting to that of Bécassine. Namely, the culture shock between Kobayashi, who works a boring “nine to five” job, and Tōru’s supernatural (and, sometimes, violent) world: for instance, Tōru cleans Kobayashi’s apartment by destroying all her furniture and then bringing it back with magic, or she cooks and feeds Kobayashi her tail. [Figure 8a, b] Nevertheless, the differences are plain to see between Bécassine and Meidoragon. Not only does Kobayashi unabashedly play on the girls’ sexy-cute appeal (unlike Bécassine, who is resolutely non-sexual), but the backdrop of social stratification that underlines Bécassine’s professional relationship with the Marquise is dissolved in the former, where Kobayashi’s relationship to her maid is founded upon equality and affection. This aspect of hierarchical dissolution is an essential characteristic of the CGDCT genre.

If, as feminist critic Kotani Mari writes, “Otaku are the outsiders of salaryman society,”[12] CGDCT reimagines Japan’s “infantile capitalism”[13] transformed into a literal playground, removed from the coercive forces of the male-centric corporation. Namely, CGDCT disavows the social stratification and work ethic underlying Japan’s collective capitalism—the pillar of the country’s postwar economic miracle—by removing authority figures from their traditional roles as supervisors or educators. Teachers behave like students and police officers are more interested in playing video games, reading manga, and getting drunk than in enforcing the law. Parents are often lovable losers with no moral authority over their daughters. Even when conforming to more typical parental images, they remain surgically separated from the rigid schedules of a traditional “salaryman” jobs, working at home as translators, writers, or designers (e.g., Koiwai in Yostuba&!). High school students are also cut off from the reality of Japanese youths, whose lives are subsumed to the country’s ruthless education system. And unlike situation comedies both in Japan and the West, that embrace “middle-class domesticity and material comfort of the privatized family life,”[14] CGDCT focuses on schoolgirls instead of mothers and other family members, shifting away from private homes as primary settings to school grounds and classrooms, where the girls meet and socialize.

The overall impression is one of affective flatness or shallowness, even when characters work hard to achieve their goals or run into (always momentary, never extreme) emotional turmoil. Because of this, while series like Azumanga Daioh, Lucky Star, or K-On! present the reader with well-rounded protagonists with strengths, weaknesses, and individual drives, these qualities often go unrecognized by critics. For instance, in the CGDCT yonkoma series Azumanga Daioh, an “event” can consist of a character simply following eye floaters with her look for four panels, [Figure 9] and strong affects are often directed at shallow or overtly cute and girly objects (e.g., pets, ribbons, etc.). [Figure 10] Indeed, CGDCT series reinforce their “dumb aesthetic”[15] by rendering characters in puni plush style, the most extreme type of moé cute caricature with maximum roundness and deformation.[16] [Figure 10] The puni refers to the onomatopoeic word punipuni (ぷにぷに), meaning “squishy,” used to describe the squishiness of chubby cheeks, arms, or animal paws.[17] The suggestion of formlessness exuding from the puni style has prompted the appearance of the derogatory term “moé blob,” for characters that lack any distinct physical or personality feature beyond a high percentage of otaku-catering cuteness.

One can draw a parallel with the “wobbly aesthetics”[18] of yuru kyara, the local Japanese mascots with poor or unpretentious designs that transmit a “sense of instability that makes them all the more lovable, and one’s heart feels healed… just by looking at them.”[19] Both the squishy loli and the wobbly yuru kyara hinge on systemic healing, as opposed to capitalism’s systemic violence. Indeed, popular otaku Internet slogans such as “Loli is Love; Loli is Life” or “Flat is justice” establish a connection between the loli and moral or spiritual virtue (in the latter’s case, the reference to the loli’s flat chest may also index the affective flatness of the CGDCT genre). Considering that there is a longstanding view of the otaku themselves as failed men”[20] with a “dame-orientation—an orientation toward things that are no good”[21] (the Japanese word “dame” meaning “useless,” “hopeless,” “purposeless”), only rivaled by their stereotypical ugly appearance of greasy hair, goofy teeth, poor fashion sense, and so on, these slogans hint at the possibility of the otaku’s redemption through what Socrates, in Plato’s Symposium, calls “a desire of the needy for the beautiful and the good.”[22] CGDCT animanga is therefore tied to the sociocultural context of the otaku, not because loli characters represent the physical and moral opposite of otaku (i.e., that loli are beautiful and good, while otaku are ugly and bad) but because the loli reimagines the otaku’s dame-orientation as beautiful and good.

That is why CGDCT reframes flaws as adorable traits. Many loli characters are stupid, lazy, shy, awkward, apathetic, overeager, snooty, or unfriendly. In other words, in the universe of CGDCT where such flawed characters are lovable, it becomes acceptable—even desirable—to have “an emotionally stunted life and no job prospects,”[23] as Thompson describes the otaku in his article “Moé: The Cult of the Child.” Wearing glasses, hand‑hiding oversized sleeves, rain boots (i.e., pragmatic footwear used by children), clumsiness, or other childish “imperfections” are desirable insofar as they point to “relaxed,” “loose,” or “undemanding” (yurui) states, associated with slower-paced, easy-going lifestyles.[24] [Figure 12] Therefore, CGDCT cannot be reduced to a male sexist fantasy of mastery and domination but represents a systematic attempt to “loosen” the coercive if invisible forces of Japan’s salaryman society—and, today, of global neoliberalism, with its brutal ethos of human and environmental precarity and depletion. The value of a “signifying register” of looseness and slowness is not only therapeutic: it is political, in Lauren Berlant’s sense that these “disassociative genres” (in her case, referencing magical realism and science fiction, but applicable in my view to CGDCT) perform an affective time-out-of-joint, which does not (necessarily) have to be a blueprint for living.[25] To be sure, CGDCT represents “badly” the problems and experiences of real teenage girls, but only in eclipsing them in favor of the cuteness of the woman-child, can the genre enact an out-of-jointness with the “malign velocities” of our time.[26]

Let us examine some examples of CGDCT yonkoma manga. As mentioned before, yonkoma are composed of rectangular modules whose existence precedes narratives, contrary to what is common in comics, where stories determine the location and dimensions of each panel. Moreover, the term yonkoma (“four panels”) pre-determines the number of panels used to tell stories, reinforcing their formal sameness, and resulting in a regular structure that seldom exists in different types of comic strips (for instance, Peanuts or Garfield greatly vary in terms of number and disposition of panels).  Even when two or more yonkoma are put next to each other, these assemblages are invariably multiples of four. When CGDCT aesthetics are applied to yonkoma, they can produce an impression of regressing to the panel’s original meaninglessness or, to put it dramatically, a return “to an earlier state of things,”[27] to the inorganic itself, as Freud famously formulated it in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920). While comic strips as a whole arguably tend towards “hermeneutical stupor,”[28] emphasized by an economy of means (eye-level shots, schematic or non-existent backdrops, cute standardized characters, etc.), CGDCT yonkoma manga often lack a discernible punchline. Unlike the overt gag-oriented feel of Sazae-san and Tonari no Yamada Kun, CGDCT is closer to the “looseness” of cute yonkoma manga like Igarashi Mikio’s Bonobono,[29] whose target audience are commuting salarymen “unwinding” from tension at work. Bonobono tells the adventures of a baby otter and its family and friends in the forest, only the concept of “adventure” is radically reduced to minimal meaning and movements, for instance, slightly changing direction while floating in the river. As Ngai puts it, in such cases, the story “progresses into a narrative of non‑progressing.”[30]

Many CGDCT series are worthy of the Seinfeldian epitome of a “show about nothing.” The following examples are taken from the animanga series Lucky Star,[31] Azumanga Daioh,[32] and Sketchbook,[33] all of which are CGDCT series about the daily life of high schoolgirls. For instance, in the first chapter of Lucky Star, published in December of 2003, the protagonists have an in-depth discussion over a total of sixteen panels about the best way to eat a Japanese chocolate cornet—a kind of pastry cone filled with chocolate custard, in which the filling tends to leak through the opposite side where bites occur. [Figure 14] The anime adaptation of Lucky Star,[34] made by the Japanese studio Kyoto Animation in 2007, expanded these sixteen panels to an endless six-minute sequence where the girls discuss ad nauseam the taxonomy and eating techniques of different sweet and savory foods. The girls’ lengthy, quasi-scientific attention to such tiny matters, especially by brainy Miyuki, along with frequent lapses on the part of the protagonist, Konata, into the poorly spoken or loss for words (e.g., she describes the motion of eating an ice cream from as cone as “gui gui”), aligns with what Ngai calls the “stuplime,” a combination of sublimity with stupor. [Figure 15a, b, Video 1] Whereas the Kantian sublime arises as an initially dysphoric reaction to inconceivable quantitative or qualitative greatness culminating in catharsis,[35] stuplimity is an anti-cathartic experience in which the ascending momentum of the sublime is inverted or neutralized. For Ngai, certain types of “greatness” force subjects into a state of affective lack, arousing a counterintuitive connection between excessiveness and boredom or stupidity.[36] In a typically stuplime kind of “shocking boredom,” in this sequence from Lucky Star, the stuplime is brought about by modular operations of enumeration, permutation, and classification, in which the narrative rises and falls are barely noticeable in the story’s (non)progression.

Another example of stuplime cuteness is Azuma Kiyohiko’s Azumanga Daioh, a CGDCT yonkoma manga that often plays with very similar panels where action and dialogue are reduced to a minimum. In Azumanga Daioh’s most stuplime yonkoma strips, there is a sense of retardation, as if the narrative pace was slowed down to the point where the story becomes “stuck” and cannot advance. Often, this is associated with a dumbing down of the characters’ mental faculties. For instance, in Figure 16, the 10-year-old child prodigy Chiyo and Osaka, known for her mental slowness, ride first on an escalator (right), and then on an elevator (left). These actions, which are more non-actions requiring minimal movements, each occupy four panels, an extended duration reinforced by the sole dialogues where Osaka tautologically describes and nearly fails to differentiate their actions: “this is an escalator…”, followed by “this is an es… elevator.” On the other hand, in Figure 17 the four panels are practically the same, and a single, simple action—Sakaki petting Chiyo’s dog—is uncomfortably prolonged, frustrating both Chiyo and the readers. In these cases, like in Lucky Star’s chocolate cornet sequence, formal differences are usurped by modular differences.[37]

Furthermore, the repetitive format of yonkoma manga reinforces the characters’ compulsive repetitions. Throughout the series, Sakaki, who has a weakness for cute things (hence, her fondness for Chiyo’s dog) and cannot resist petting the neighborhood cats despite their inexplicable animosity toward her, is repeatedly bitten in a plethora of situations. Figure 18 shows various yonkoma strips where Sakaki gets bitten, demonstrating how its structural modularity reinforces both the sequence’s inexorability (the outcome of each comic strip is always the same) and Sakaki’s process of trial and error, recalling the procedural standardization of scientific protocols. Sakaki’s repetition of trauma also exemplifies excellently how CGDCT and yonkoma align with what Ngai calls “the stuplimity of slapstick comedy”[38] popularized in cinema by actors such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Like Chaplin and Keaton’s “accumulation of comic fatigues,”[39] in Azumanga Daioh, for the most part, characters are either out of time, i.e., in a state of lack of mental and physical activity or—as if rusty from the lack thereof—out of place, as they are subjected to a world inhabited by “things” that seem bent on resisting them, or otherwise highlighting their out-of-jointness. [Figure 19]

Similarly, in Kobako Totan’s Sketchbook, the story’s linear progression is continuously interrupted by the mistakes, misunderstandings, and noncommunication with which the protagonist Sora struggles daily. These range from tiny physical obstacles to the social inability of classmates, teachers, and Sora herself, resulting in a series of embarrassments, discomforts, and general awkwardness. For instance, Figure 20 shows a batch of variations on failing to open different types of packages, in which the division of actions in sets of four panels effectively breaks them down in regular intervals, serving as obstacles preventing a smooth narrative flow from starting point A (e.g., holding a package) to conclusion point B (opening a package). In the first yonkoma strip, Sora is not only unable to open an onigiri package by hand but fails to find the scissors she needs to open it. The next day, she buys both the onigiri (“rice ball”) and scissors, much to the store clerk’s bewilderment as he stares at the weird object coupling. After that, Sora is unable to open the packaged scissors themselves, resulting in an undignified outcome where the solution becomes part of the problem in a repetitive chain of small traumas. The following two yonkoma strips depict Sora’s struggle with a popsicle package, as she first opens it backward and then accidentally pulls the stick out of the popsicle. In all these cases, the punchline (i.e., the last panel of each yonkoma) is invariably a sort of formal resistance—unopened packages, odd pairs, incorrect forms—as readers progress towards non-progression of fatigues. Additionally, the visual and comical effectiveness of the sequence is enhanced by the page layout composed of four-panel comic strips, and the underlying principle emerging from it: the grid.

The grid is by nature “anti-natural, anti-mimetic, anti-real”[40] or, as Rosalind Krauss refers: “the grid extends, in all directions, to infinity. Any boundaries imposed upon it… can only be seen—according to this logic—as arbitrary. By virtue of the grid, the given work of art is presented as a mere fragment, a tiny piece arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger fabric.”[41] Therefore, the grid as an arbitrary fragment emphasizes the dissolution of the classical four-part Japanese narrative or poem structure known as kishōtenketsu (起承転結), i.e., introduction (起, ki), development (承, shō), climax or twist (転, ten), conclusion (結, ketsu).[42] [Figure 21] Indeed, while the single yonkoma strip retains the memory of these four parts of kishōtenketsu and therefore implies a progression, the accumulation of several yonkoma strips tends towards a regular progressionless grid. The yonkoma that I have shown so far, especially from Azumanga Daioh, exemplify a tension at the core of the CGDCT genre as a whole, in which the seemingly meaningful fragment, when repeated again and again in the same way, begins to dissolve into meaninglessness. As Ngai puts it, the stuplimity, in this case of CGDCT (and yonkoma in particular), “paradoxically forces the reader to go on in spite of its equal enticement to readers give up.”[43] It is no wonder that the popularity of CGDCT is often accused of having had a stultifying effect on the anime and manga industry,[44] in which science fiction had traditionally reigned with masterpieces full of action, tragedy, and pathos (e.g., Ghost In The Shell, Neon Genesis Evangelion, etc.).

A series that addresses this aspect is Joshiraku, itself a CGDCT anime about five young female performers of rakugo, a type of traditional Japanese comedic storytelling. In one of the episodes of Joshiraku,[45] the girls attempt to chronicle their summer vacation as yonkoma manga; however, when they apply the kishōtenketsu formula to their tale, they conclude that it is too dull and therefore can do away with some panels. After all, they tell themselves, not having a punchline is not a big deal, as many yonkoma manga do not. In the end, the girls decide to go for a “yonkoma” strip with only three panels, titled “Summer Vacation.” In this unconventional “yonkoma,” in the first panel, the girls say, “We’re going on a summer vacation,” in the second panel, “Then let’s go buy swimming suits together,” and the third panel shows the girls in swimsuits. The fourth and last panel is simply an empty black square, driving home the point that there is not enough story or contents in CGDCT to fill up a classic type of narrative. [Figure 22] The three-panel “yonkoma” in Joshiraku is followed by an even more radical experience: a one-panel “yonkoma.” Here, the girls are in a hot spring, and the four panels are reduced to four speech bubbles with appreciative expressions: “What a nice feeling,” “I’m glad we came here,” “This is the best,” “Fufufufufufu.” [Figure 23] It is as if the comic strip regressed to the singleness of the “original” panel, before of its modular repetition into four panels. In both these “yonkoma” strips the girls express only “low,” self-indulgent affects related to shopping and bathing in a hot spring, poking fun at the affective and hermeneutical flatness in the CGDCT genre, and suggesting that narrative (at least, linear narrative) occupies a peripheral or contingent role in its signifying economy.

Whereas grids generally work to flatten and deflate, this does not necessarily implicate a movement towards “hermeneutical stupor.” For instance, in the context of Western modernism, grids are often attuned with the avant-garde’s “advanced intellectual conscience,”[46] through the self-reflexive exploration of medium specificity of abstract and minimalist art. [Figure 24] In CGDCT, however, the grid is filled with the anticathartic, non-ironic flatness of feminine shallowness, “reconfiguring the experience of genuine repetition as one of a superficial and almost abject horizontality.”[47] An excellent example of the “stupliming” effect of CGDCT on Western grids is Superflat artist Mr.’s homages to Damien Hirst’s spot paintings. Mr.’s work generally relies on his trademark loli characters, whose template is the same, varying only in permutations of haircut, eye, hair and skin color, accessories, and decorative details. In some paintings and sculptures, these operations of repetition and variation extend in mise en abyme, as there are entire miniature worlds inside a loli’s eyes or hair. [Figure 25] Mr.’s spot paintings, made in the mid-to-late 2000s, are almost identical to Hirst’s originals, but Mr. replaces some spots with tiny loli heads. [Figure 26a, b] Other spots contain miniature scenes of “cute girls doing cute things,” like building a snowman (e.g., There May Be Lots of Bears, Merere, 20004), playing or walking around, or picturesque Japanese views of temples, fireworks, or the Tokyo Big Sight, where the Comiket otaku convention takes place (e.g., In Pools of Sunlight, 2009). The titles of these works are comically sentimental, cryptic or overly descriptive, as if they were excerpts from manga, like From Winter to Spring, In Pools of Sunlight or There May Be Lots of Bears, Merere, going against the grain of minimalist clinicalism in which paintings are often untitled or numbered within a series.

But why parody superstar Damien Hirst’s spot paintings, in particular? According to British art critic Jonathan Jones, the spot paintings are “a cynical epilogue” to “the great adventure that was 20th-century abstraction,” replacing “the tragic visions of a Rothko with self-mocking sitcom farce.”[48] Hirst’s spots are easily absorbed into the abject sphere of deflatedness of meaning and the intense passions associated with painting’s progress and grandeur, aligning with Ngai’s claim that “while the sublime traditionally finds a home in the serious modes of the lyrical, elegiac, or tragic, stuplimity could be said to belong more properly to the dirtier environments of… ‘bottom humor.’”[49] Therefore, Mr.’s spot paintings align with Superflat’s overall strategy of humorously “hacking” the Western art world, but they share a more profound affinity with Hirst’s abstraction—“cute” paintings doing “cute” things, in which “cute” is said is a sarcastic, mocking tone. The loli dwells in this (historically, feminized) shallow place of artistic “lack” of formal experimentation and innovation, a seemingly “cozy” kitsch and mass-cultural realm where individual characters are nevertheless revealed to be accumulations of fragments and information, to be tediously consumed and absorbed.

See in CUTENCYCLOPEDIA – Gakkōgurashi, Hamster & Poppy.

See in PORTFOLIO – Autumn & Yonkoma Collection.

REFERENCES in CGDCT.