I am an independent scholar. This was my dissertation, and I always meant to publish it. I revised this so many times, but it is still largely based on the dissertation. I did a lot more reading for the book and more research during the book revision phase. Shout out to Mercari in Japan for sources! When I was doing my dissertation research, I lived in Tokyo. I spent a lot of time in the National Diet Library reading all of their periodicals, and many other books. Also, the National Children's Library, which is a branch of the Diet Library, that's in Ueno. I went there a lot, to look at some of their kashihon manga that the Diet Library has, which is held there. I also spent a lot of time at the International Manga Museum in Kyoto. I went to a lot of exhibitions too.

Another major place that I was spending time was the Yonezawa Yoshihiro Memorial Library at Meiji University in Tokyo. Yonezawa was one of the main organizers of Comiket for basically his entire life until his unfortunately early death in 2006. I took a tour at the library once, and I learned how he filled up his house with manga, and then when his house was full, he bought a new house, and when he died, he had 3 houses. And now that's all there.

Yonezawa was involved with Comiket from the beginning—the biggest fan event in the world— the dōjinshi event. I spent a lot of time there as well, reading a lot of what that they have in the archives. I also went into some libraries in the United States and spend a couple of months in Belgium, reading bandes dessinées, and looking at comics exhibitions there. When I was still a first-year student, I was certain about my dissertation topic, and it was very useful to have picked it so early because I did focus in new media in grad school, which gave me a lot of theoretical tools that I used while I was writing the book.

The content of the book changed a lot from the dissertation—somewhere between 85% to 95%. But the structure has been the same and half of the chapter titles stayed the same.

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