Drawing Sex: Pages, Bodies, and Sighs in Japanese Eromanga

This article analyzes eromanga, Japanese pornographic comic books, in terms of the semiotic power of images to create an erotic fantasy space for the reader. Manga are a central part of media culture in Japan. Alongside and closely connected to mainstream manga, eromanga have become important as a negotiation space for new semiotic expression methods. At the same time, they have become a battleground for questions of freedom of expression and defending youth and women from sexual violence, especially as manga ‘otaku’ fan culture becomes increasingly globalized. Focusing on a selection of contemporary eromanga artists, we explore the visual imaginary central to eromanga, a system of visual techniques which stretches the boundaries of the comic panel and the human body into new shapes and forms. Drawing from Thierry Groensteen’s and Natsume Fusanosuke’s theories of comic semiotics and Nagayama Kaoru’s and Kimi Ritodrawing’s work in the developing field of eromanga studies, we argue that eromanga portray sexuality by intensifying the on-page material – layout, bodies, and sighs (sounds as drawn images) – creating a multiple layering of time and fantasy for the reader. Eromanga often employs techniques and ideas that estrange the boundaries of the human body as we usually conceive it. Eromanga artists draw on erotic fantasies subtextual to anime and manga as a whole, making them explicit. At the same time, eromanga feeds into the broader mainstream world of manga, making thus the analysis of eromanga’s semiotics essential to a more comprehensive understanding of manga.