Welcome to Morning, Roo! My name is Cee. It’s a pleasure to meet you.

I started Morning, Roo in 2014 as a broad ‘hobby’ blog, writing about a variety of interests before carving it into a more focused venue. Today, it is home primarily to manga discussion, with a wide range of articles from detailed analyses, to reviews and assorted musings, exploring manga history, technique, content, form and anything in-between. Not wanting to hang up all my hats, I still enjoy composing the occasional film critique, and continue to pen an ever-growing collection of original haiku, which I hope will offer a glimpse into the more whimsical and rapt mind of this author.

I have been an avid reader of manga for the past fifteen years. My interests are broad, with no ties to any particular genre, demographic, or style, but I am especially fond of the works of Taiyo Matsumoto. I worked as a moderator at MyAnimeList for four years, curating the manga database between 2011 and 2018. In 2023, I began a project spotlighting oneshot manga, with the goal of reading and reviewing fifty-two short stories, one for every week of the year.

Film has been a life-long passion of mine and I have a specialist interest in Japanese cinema. In 2018, I wrote my MA thesis on heterogeneity and transnationalism in the cinema of Shunji Iwai, exploring the director’s distinctive aesthetics and challenging the narrow framework his films have often been viewed through in English-language academia.

My other interests include music, photography and hiking. I am a diehard fan of singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey, and listen often to bands Sigur Rós, alt-J, Metric and MAMAMOO, to name just a few. I enjoy exploring coastlines and rivers, which is where I love to take photographs, otherwise I like to spend my free time reading, if not manga, then poetry or fiction stories.

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Thank you dearly for stopping by and I do hope you’ll pop in again from time to time.