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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
That’s where I’m going – thanks to the brilliant PR team at Octopus. I spent an afternoon with them yesterday recording segments about The Manga Bible and they’ll be up on TikTok as soon as they’re edited, promoting the book ahead of its launch on 5 March 2026. It was lovely to try something new […]
The great Isao Takahata, without whom the Hayao Miyazaki we know would not exist, was and remains an influential figure in Japanese animation. Finally, a book in English explores his work and gives a clear picture of how and why he is so highly regarded by directors and animators. Editors Rayna Denison, David Desser and […]