I’m STILL on freeze in “The Dreaming”… my editor and the art director has been VERY busy for the last 2 weeks, so I’ve been putting my energies in preparing for an academic symposium hosted by Monash University next week. I’ve been invited on a panel there to speak about non-Japanese manga to an audience of Japanese researchers, so I’m putting together my paper for that to be presented. My paper is titled “Adopting Manga: From Hong Kong to America”, and ofcourse will showcase my work and art (including pages from “The Dreaming). It’s still very interesting, because it’ll be attended by manga scholars from Osaka university and also some Japanese manga artists. I’m presenting on the same panel as Avi and Kenny, the founders of Oztaku, which is an Australian manga anthology. (http://www.oztaku.com)

 

Announcement: Here’s the abstract for my paper titled “Adopting Manga: From Hong Kong to America”, to be presented at the Manga Symposium @ Monash, 4-5 March. MELBOURNE.

 

Adopting Manga: From Hong Kong to America

By Queenie Chan
http://www.queeniechan.com/
ironmice@hotmail.com

 

This paper covers the artist’s own personal experiences, from the long-running manga fandom in Hong Kong to the newly-developing American scene. Hong Kong, like many other Asian countries, has been importing Japanese manga and anime for a long time, starting from the 1970s and reaching it’s peak in the 1990s. The proliferation of the material means that it has long since become a part of youth culture, with people in their 30s and 40s continuing to read it as well as a new generation of artists springing up. This acceptance of manga is an interesting contrast to the American scene, where a stigma still remains in mainstream society towards reading “comic books” of any sort. Since 1997, manga has exploded onto the scene in America, aided by televised anime shows, and reaching a previously unexplored demographic: teenage girls. While looked upon by the mainstream as a sort of fad or peculiarity, the success of manga means that American companies are not satisfied with continuing to do translations. They are instead looking to nurture non-Japanese artists and to create a competing industry. One of the companies currently doing this is TokyoPop, which the artist is working for to create “The Dreaming”; a manga with a distinct Australian flair.