Letter from the Editor

Abstract

Like many of its youthful participants, cosplay scholarship is effectively in its teens, with academic approaches only really dating back to the mid-2000s. Prior to this, most publications on the subject both offand online were fannish contributions or generalized texts. Examples include Michael Bruno’s pieces for Glitz and Glitter newsletter in 2002, Takako Aoyama and Jennifer Cahill’s Cosplay Girls: Japan’s Live Animation Heroines (2003), and Robert Holzek’s “Cosplay: The New Main Attraction” (2004).1 Though still mined as useful sources by researchers to this day, they lack methodological and theoretical foundations. Then the first academic articles began appearing, including Therèsa Winge’s formative “Costuming the Imagination: Origins of Manga and Anime” in the first volume of Frenchy Lunning’s flagship journal of Japanese popular culture studies, Mechademia (2006).2 Articles rapidly followed on cosplay’s relationship to gaming and conventions, the motif of the doll, and site-specific studies in the United States as well as Taiwan, with the first published photographic monograph, Elena Dorfman’s Fandomania, appearing in 2007. Since then the initial trickle has turned into a slew, with myriad aspects of cosplay practice being essayed in article, chapter, reference, and monograph form. Despite having come of age in recent years with the publication of a series of academic monographs—Winge’s Costuming Cosplay: Dressing the Imagination (2018); Paul Mountfort, Anne Peirson-Smith, and Adam Geczy’s Planet Cosplay: Costume Play, Identity and Global Fandom (2018), and Lunning’s Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence (2022)3—this current issue of the Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture is, to my knowledge, the first journalized special issue dedicated to cosplay. Given these