Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how materiality shapes character representation as a form of semiotic practice on manga covers, revealing the relationship between material affordances and commercial imperatives that drives the production and circulation of meaning within Japanese popular culture.

Paper long abstract

Characters on manga covers represent the genres they belong to, visually communicating the type of narrative readers can expect. This is particularly evident in Boys Love (BL) manga, where character design encapsulates the genre’s romantic orientation as well as its affective and aesthetic sensibilities. However, within Japan’s contemporary and highly competitive market, BL manga covers must not only make use of characters to inform readers of genre affiliation but also to attract them to ensure commercial success. Rather than unpacking character representation in terms of gendered codes, as most studies have done, this paper turns to materiality, namely publication format and medium, to examine how it shapes the meaning-making of characters in the context of manga covers. Drawing on a social semiotic analysis of 580 BL manga covers and editor interviews, this study conceptualizes the meaning of characters along two dimensions, representational and interactional, corresponding to the cover’s dual functions to inform and to attract. First, it shows how publication format shapes representational meaning through the number of characters depicted. While the centrality of romance in BL conventionally prioritizes the depiction of two characters to inform readers of the main pairing, the presence of single-character covers reveals an alternative. This creates variation in strategies of informing across three publication formats. Second, it demonstrates how publication medium shapes the interactional meaning of characters. Through semiotic choices such as gaze, distance, and perspectivization, BL covers strategically deploy affect and aesthetic to attract readers, with their effectiveness varying according to whether the medium is print or digital. These semiotic choices reflect commercial interests, as producers negotiate the differing affordances of print and digital media while aiming for cross-platform effectiveness. To conclude, the discussion situates these findings within the recent resurgence of the shinsōban phenomenon, showing how commercial imperatives are materially realized through redesigned covers that reconfigure reader engagement with existing works. The implications of this research underscore the value of attending to materiality in analyzing how meaning is produced and circulated within the commercially driven backdrop of Japanese popular culture.