Making visible the invisible Representing religious content in manga

Ghosts, spirits and ancestors have a central place in the Japanese spiritual imagination and are central to its contemporary popular culture. In visual narratives such as manga, both their way of depiction and their agency are the result of creativity, continuously in the making, at the intersection of the artist’s imagination and the representation’s legibility to its audience. This article explores representations of religious content as they move along the dynamic of tradition and innovation: in order to be recognized the religious content must be made visible by already existing tropes or iconographical rules which relate to tradition, but as new, creative and commercial medium it must contain something innovative, either in content or in form.