I did a two-part interview with Iulia Faciu for her Otaku Academia website. Here’s part 2, about The Anime Encyclopedia and #TheMangaBible There’s other good stuff on there too – a dozen interviews so far with anime and manga academics from around the world!
Happy New Book Birthday to me! The Manga Bible is in the shops today. Of course, I’ll celebrate – but very quietly. Cake, no alcohol, no rushing from bookshop to bookshop to admire its gorgeous cover on the shelf and maybe sneakily move it into a more visible position. I can’t go into town and […]
Among the many fascinating questions at my Seed Talks in the West Country was one about the influence of comic art on Studio Ghibli. I’d talked about Takahata’s lifelong passion for French culture and about the many and varied Western influences on Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind, but there’s a limit to how […]
My lovely PR team at Octopus shot some videos of me to promote The Manga Bible and I thought it might be fun to share them. This one is all about why the book came to be. Thanks to Matilda, director and cinematographer, and Keiron and Emma for support and great company during the shoot! […]
When OH and I travel for Seed Talks, we love to look for comic shops and other places that sell Japanese items. There are loads of places that sell the latest gacha toys and other current stuff, and that buy secondhand comics and toys for resale. There are not so many that buy tempting older […]
I was absolutely thrilled to receive an advance copy of La Bibbia dei Manga – Gribaudo’s Italian edition of The Manga Bible. Just when that after-Christmas, no-more-exciting-parcels feeling usually kicks in, this gem shot through my letterbox and made my day. Many thanks to translator Paolo Silvio Poli for making my work accessible in […]
I hope everyone’s having a really good start to 2026 in spite of the political horrors around us. Even in an unstable world we can keep our creative energy going and get stuck into a project, old or new, while the year is still a notebook with lots of empty pages to play with. I […]
Look what came in the post from Paris – the perfect Christmas gift to myself. Now I can relive the Isao Takahata exhibition through Ilan Nguyen’s elegant translation of the original Japanese catalogue for Musée Européen du Manga et de l’Anime.
Before I sign off for the holidays, here’s an interview I really enjoyed doing, from the excellent Stone Bridge Podcast. Stone Bridge Press publish The Anime Encyclopedia, and published the first book in English about Hayao Miyazaki in 1999. The new edition, updated to include the most recent (never say the last!) Miyazaki film, is […]
The latest episode of The Anime Business is an interview Justin Sevakis filmed with me about a year ago: “The Anime Business – Helen McCarthy on Discovering Anime, UK Fandom and the Joy of It All.” It’s online here. It was fun to do and fascinating to watch. One of the best things about this […]