Japanese Comics and Banal Nationalism

I thought it would be interesting to study “banal nationalism” in comics popular among Japanese children. But I’m not so sure any longer. Yes, there are a few comics that explicitly incorporate (inter)national themes (e.g., comics about soccer); however, most comics do not contain references to nationalities. Their dominant themes are ethics and morality—friendship, fairness, good and evil, etc. So, if I study the comics, I can understand representations of the nature of the social world to which children in Japan are exposed. To delineate what is distinctly Japanese about the representations, however, I will need a comparative perspective; for instance, Indian comics of the Mahabharata and American comics of superheroes.