Between the late 1980s and early 1990s, interest in the cyberpunk genre peaked in the Western world, perhaps most evidently when Terminator 2: Judgment Day became the highest-grossing film of 1991. It has been argued that the translation of Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s manga Akira into several European languages at just that time (into English beginning in 1988, into French, Italian, and Spanish beginning in 1990, and into German beginning in 1991) was no coincidence. In hindsight, cyberpunk tropes are easily identified in Akira to the extent that it is nowadays widely regarded as a classic cyberpunk comic. But has this always been the case? When Akira was first published in America and Europe, did readers see it as part of a wave of cyberpunk fiction? Did they draw the connections to previous works of the cyberpunk genre across different media that today seem obvious? In this paper, magazine reviews of Akira in English and German from the time when it first came out in these languages will be analysed in order to gauge the past readers’ genre awareness. The attribution of the cyberpunk label to Akira competed with others such as the post-apocalyptic, or science fiction in general. Alternatively, Akira was sometimes regarded as an exceptional, novel work that transcended genre boundaries. In contrast, reviewers of the Akira anime adaptation, which was released at roughly the same time as the manga in the West (1989 in Germany and the United States), more readily drew comparisons to other cyberpunk films such as Blade Runner.

Often, works of art are praised for their “presence”. What exactly this term means, however, is less frequently specified. In this article, presence is defined as a trait of an artwork to cause the vague and possibly subconscious feeling in a viewer that a depicted figure is a living being that is really there, although the viewer is aware that this is not actually the case. By means of an extensive literature review, this article provides criteria for the assessment of presence in any work of art. A methodology for applying these criteria is presented, which is put to the test by assessing the degree of presence in the cover art of the New Wave band Blondie's first six albums (1976-1982). The results of this analysis are then compared to two test samples: other New Wave album covers, and Heavy Metal covers.

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Maya hieroglyphic script (300 BCE-1500 CE) is a semi-deciphered logographic and syllabic autochthonous writing system from the Americas and is one of the most signicant writing traditions of the ancient world. Because of its incomplete state of decipherment, complexity and variation in graphematics, and partially lost lexicon, transliterations cannot be used within the encoding. The project Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Mayan approaches this challenge with an encoding strategy relying on stand-o markup, which is enriched with additional information sources. Using dierent formats (RDF, XML) and standards (CIDOC CRM, TEI P5), the inscriptions are encoded in a multilevel corpus: (1) a tei_all-compliant schema dening values and rules for the encoding of the text's topological and structural features, (2) a "Sign Catalogue"

Up until the late 1980s, Japanese anime had gone mostly unnoticed in the west and it fell to cyberpunk film, specifically Katsuhiro Ōtomo's Akira (1988) and Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell (1995), to change the western perception of animated films forever. Seen in the west mainly as children's films, adult animated films were not unheard of but never had the same success or 'coolness' that Akira brought to western viewers. As Michelle Le Blanc and Colin Odell note: "Akira was fundamental in changing audience perceptions of what animation was and, importantly, what it had the potential to be" (9). And while Akira introduced western audiences to adult anime, followed by a wave of controversies regarding violence and overt sexual content, by the time Ghost in the Shell hit the screens, audiences worldwide had become appreciative of Japanese anime.Christopher Bolton argues that Akira "marks the beginning of a Japanese renaissance in long-form theatrical anime for more adult audiences […as well as] the beginning of the latest and largest anime boom in North America" (17). Ghost in the Shell, however, is a "popular and critical