Update: I believe Kinokuniya’s have restocked “The Dreaming”! 😀

The Dreaming: Sold out at Kino’s and King’s in the middle of December, and for those who don’t want to go to Chatswood or Parramatta, Phantom Zone has courier!! Apparently more stock is coming in either January or end of January for alot of places, Borders included. And ofcourse, the book is still for sale online. I’ve still got my list of Australian bookstores up, and the latest preview chapter for the book is still up on the TOKYOPOP site.

I’m currently working on book 2, and I hope to draw as fast as I can. Not least because it’s not nice to make people wait for a whole year with a cliffhanger ending. There’s been a change in the working procedures though – book 1 was written without any scripts, only chapter summaries, but the process-cycle from TOKYOPOP has officially changed for book 2. Now, for all books, a full script and thumbnails for the book is required before anything is started. Which is fair enough, though I find it difficult because up until now, I’ve never written a script in my life. It’s hard to have to change the way I work, and it feels like an extra step, but then it’s necessary. And while I initially found it difficult to get used to, it’s not as bad as I thought it would be.

Writing a script has shown me something interesting. Looking at the completed script, I find that the information contained in the dialogue and written descriptions are less than 50% of what the final product will be. Then does that mean that the pictures are over 50% of the final product? Not so. There are manga out there with no words, but we’re not talking about something with no words – this is a series of pictures that is MEANT to be embellished by words, and something like that WITHOUT words makes up less than 50% of the final product as well. So, that leads to an interesting and tongue-twisting conclusion: that the entirety of a manga contains more than the sum of its parts.

Words + Pictures + Something Mystical = Completed Manga

Aussies read this!: Exciting news from my editor Carol and from Avi Bernshaw, the editor of “Otazku” magazine based in Melbourne. TOKYOPOP has signed a distribution partnership with Funtastic Ltd in Australia! I’m not quite sure what it involves, but it’s bound to be a good thing.

Manga Bandwagon: The Park and Barb Show over at Silver Bullet Comics has listed out a bunch of manga titles that are recommended reading. Amongst them are old favourites, and “The Dreaming” also gets a mention!

Video Gaming News: The game Chaos Code is still scheduled for around March for completion, and I must say we’re getting there. At FKDigital, we’re now officially doing some backgrounds, and I swear to god, there are some FANTASTIC background artists from that company. Namely the guys doing the character animations, and even the programmer can animate a squirrel really well. I started doing a background too, a high-tech gameshow background for a cyborg character, and while I started off sucking, but seems to be improving. It’s taken me 5 working days to get to 2/3 of completion, and while it was an ego-deflating experience, I’m beginning to find that I can use Photoshop to paint now. And the picture’s starting to look pretty good. Up until now, I’ve had ZERO idea on how to use Photoshop, and while it’s been a steep learning curve, I’m so glad I can at least do SOMETHING in Photoshop now without feeling like a complete outsider. Golden Rule: If all else fails, use the dodge tool.

Something that Defies Economic Rationality: I like to study economics (oh how boring she is!), and something from an old Publisher’s Weekly article struck me as a fascinating example of weird human behaviour. The article is actually about Powell’s books, a good company I occasionally order from, and how they deal with their growth in manga. The paragraph that struck me the most was this:

But Powell’s has had to rethink other assumptions as well. Manga are typically fast, disposable reads, and there’s little to prevent customers from reading a series right through at the store. To discourage this, Powell’s used to shrink-wrap each volume. “We would polybag everything,” Donaghy says. This helped to prevent damaged books, but it also prevented potential buyers from getting a feel for what those titles were like. A few years ago, a sales rep at Viz promised to replace any Viz title ruined by an overzealous browser if Powell’s would agree to stop the shrinkwrapping. Surprisingly, sales increased dramatically.

So, part of the reason why manga is selling so well is because none of it’s shrink-wrapped, and anyone can sit there and read to their heart’s content? Strange, but true. Actually, my theory was whether manga story-telling is easier to get into than Westen comics story-telling, thus prompting more people to browse and freeload manga at stores than Western comics (NOT in any way saying that one form is better than the other). Normally, you’ll think that manga sales will suffer because people read them standing there and don’t buy it, but oddly enough, this paragraph proves being able to read everything beforehand has ZERO effects on sales.

Anyway, I started asking this question because I get emails from teenagers (median age: 15) saying they got into manga/anime because some of their friends were into it, but they were unconvinced. Out of curiosity, they eventually sneaked into the manga section and started reading, and because they could do it for free, they in the end finding something they liked enough to convince them to start like manga as a whole. I say to these teenagers – HURRAY!! Good on your for having an open mind and a willingness to experiment.

The Dreaming: Is out on the shelves, and online. I’ve still got my list of Australian bookstores up, and the latest preview chapter for the book is still up on the TOKYOPOP site. I’ve been told that “The Dreaming” has been sold out at Sydney’s Kinokuniya and Kings Comics, and that for Melbournians you can find it at Minotaur (see the list for details).

I’ve recovered from the worst of my flu, though I’ll probably have a residual cough for weeks. I also snuck some photoes of my Bangalore trip up on my LJ entry. But anyway, recently I’ve been interviewed by Kai-Ming Cha for Publisher’s Weekly Comics Week. For those who don’t know, it’s part of Publisher’s Weekly and you can subscribe to their email newsletter here. They on a one-week break so it’ll be out the week after, but it was a very fun interview and Kai-Ming asked some good questions. There is one question in particular that I replied in detail to, and which I’ve posted here for people’s interest.

As usual, it’s my opinion, so feel free to make any comments.

Question: On your website you have an essay that references the prevalence of Japanese manga throughout Asia, including Hong Kong, that has all but squeezed out local talent. There are other comments like this that have been made in countries like Thailand and China. With the strength of Japanese comics, local comics culture and style doesn’t seem to stand a chance. What are you thoughts on this?

You’ve just said my thoughts on this. *laughs* Local comics culture just doesn’t stand a chance, except for the nostalgia value of certain strips. Nostalgia does nothing though, besides recycling old material that may or may not be timeless, but if you’re not moving ahead and creating new material, you’re not expanding the readership for graphic literature. Mostly, if it can be said to be a “problem”, is that there isn’t a “manga culture” in whatever country the Japanese pop-culture juggernaut has colonised in the past 10-20 years. And it’s important to remember that manga comes attached with anime, video games, cosplay and J-pop; making it an all-consuming lifestyle that can be very appealing to young people. In theory, there’s nothing wrong with that because it should encourage said countries to develop their own comics, except that it’s not really happening.

Part of the reason is because manga that is read by children in Japan is exported and read by adults in other countries. Manga in Japan is very gender and age-conscious, so in theory, people over a certain age wouldn’t read certain kinds of manga (with exceptions ofcourse). Manga-reading Japanese adults read manga catered to their tastes, which are the sort of mature, adult-oriented (NOT meaning pornographic) manga that become best-sellers in their own right. Manga you barely see people reading overseas, because the 25 year-olds there are reading what 8 year-old Japanese kids are reading. That creates a bit of a problem in terms of choices for the 25 year-old casual manga readers who are tired of stories aimed at teenagers and want to read something more mature.

In theory, the companies can import the more mature Japanese manga and satisfy those readers, but in the Asian countries I’ve observed, it’s never really caught on. The trouble with salaryman and office lady manga, or seinen and josei manga, is that the latter appeals to more narrow, culturally-specific tastes. Teen angst and action-adventure is the same for teens everywhere, but people who have left high school don’t see salaryman manga as a reflection of their working experiences. Japan has a work culture and adult life that is culturally unique to that country, and other Asians who were casual manga readers as teenagers aren’t nearly as interested in salaryman or OL manga because from their point of view, it’s got nothing to do with their own lives. So the pool of casual manga readers shrink, leaving the young-at-heart to continue reading teen manga and riding the Japanese pop-culture wave.

This means that local comic artists are left to compete with teen manga for a readership that is adolescent at heart. None of them has been all that successful, because the Japanese do teen-oriented manga so incredibly well, and has multiple arms of the Japanese pop-culture machine helping out. There’s no reason for any local publisher to invest in local talent when they can get all the money-making franchises they need out of Japan, and they’re not interested in reaching out to older readers either. So in essence, you have a “manga culture” in manga-reading countries where unlike Japan, most readers are stuck in the “teen manga” phase. So the readership isn’t maturing at all, giving no incentive to produce mature works.

Afterthoughts: Sometimes the nationalism thing comes into it too. Some of Kaiji Kawaguchi’s work comes to mind – while it’s never stopped anyone from translating political/thriller manga in Asia, I find it uncomfortable to read manga about how the course or World War II may have been altered to have the Japanese win instead of the Allied Nations (and some such). These are clearly adult stories and not meant to be provocative to other Asian nations, but it shows a side of the nation that Chinese and Koreans particularly hate. World War II is a topic you rarely, if ever, see in shoujo and shounen manga, and perhaps for good reason.