If you're a regular ComicsAlliance reader, chances are you know a thing or two about manga, but what if you're an advisor to the president some day and you have to catch them up on Japanese comics in eight minutes in order to, I don't know, stop a volcano from erupting? Well good news! Manga expert and co-author of the stellar The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga Helen McCarthy has done the work for you as part of a history of manga lecture for D&AD! Now you can totally explain to this imaginary president that, with a little education, manga can be universal. "...Manga are really packages -- containers -- for hopes and dreams and fears and manga are where we decode our ideas about Japan against its own ideas," McCarthy says, "And we learn that decoding through the language of line, a narrative language that is quite different from words. But if we don't know its history, we won't see it clearly, we'll see it as 'alien' or 'other' and it actually isn't 'alien' or 'other,' it's actually much closer to home than you think." You can take in McCarthy's presentation and save the world from a completely hypothetical erupting volcano alongside a fictional future president after the cut. Your planet thanks you.

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