Category: Other

Manga With Disabled People

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This is a list I made for a “Diversity” panel at Sydney OzComic-Con in 2023. It stars manga/anime that has people with disabilities, and I tried to make them as diverse as possible and from a wide variety of genres.

Perfect World

A realistic romance manga about a girl who had a crush on the cool basketball captain in high school, though she never confessed her love. As adults, they meet again, but he is now a paraplegic in a wheelchair due to a traffic accident at university.

Love blooms, but there are many challenges to dating a paraplegic who has bedsores, gets random fevers, and is often in-and-out of hospitals. The male lead is also unable to go to the toilet without a catheter, not to mention the disapproval of the friends and family of the able-bodied female lead who feels she could “do better”.

Here’s a story that remains realistic about the challenges of a romance with a paraplegic, right down to the spells of depression the male lead gets where he believes he is being a burden to his girlfriend. The challenges don’t end there, not even as she later becomes his wife, and eventually the mother of their adopted child. A story about how being paraplegic is tough, but ultimately just another problem/challenge to manage in life.

Real

A sports manga about wheelchair basketball, by the same creator as the legendary basketball manga “Slam Dunk”.

This story skimps on the difficulties and social barriers to being a wheelchair basketball player in Japan, but is primarily a sports manga that is focused on the sport rather than on the fact that the characters are in wheelchairs. It’s nice to see a sports manga that just happens to be about a paralympic sport.

Full Metal Alchemist

A super-popular action-adventure manga/anime about the Eldric brothers, a pair of super-talented alchemists with a tragic past. The elder brother is Edward Eldric, a short-tempered action-hero who also happens to be a double amputee missing an arm and a leg due to an alchemy attempt gone wrong.

Edward uses advanced prosthetics when he fights, so people tends to forget he’s disabled, but there are many instances where his prosthetics break mid-battle and he is left helpless on the floor. Despite being one of the most powerful alchemists around, the only thing Edward can’t transmute is his arm/leg back.

The story isn’t about a disabled hero though. It’s about a hero who just happens to be disabled, and whose overwhelming talent, determination and personality is the star of the show.

The Ranking of Kings

The anime is the better version of this story, which is about Bochi the deaf-mute prince. The future king of a fairy-tale kingdom where kings are judged by their sword-fighting prowess, he finds himself at the center of a coup to unseat him so that his younger brother can become the king. Not all is at it seems, of course.

Bochi starts off as a weak deaf-mute, but ends the story as a powerful level 99 swordsman who is still a deaf-mute–just with many more friends than he had at the beginning of his journey. The best thing about this story is that while he acquired his deaf-mute status because of evil magic cast on him by another, the story does not try to solve his deaf-mute status through magic, even after the cause of the evil magic is nullified.

Bochi isn’t defined by being a deaf-mute, but by his intrinsic kindness, and the fact that his friends are one of the greatest sources of his strength.

A Silent Voice

This manga is very hard to read at first, because the main character (and male lead) is the bully of a hearing-impaired girl (the female lead). This story is as much about the dynamics of bullying among young, dumb kids as it is about the troubles of being a hearing-impaired person in Japan, and it’s important to point out that the male lead is not a sadistic sociopath.

Instead, he is an immature kid from a poor, chaotic family who can’t figure out that when he is bullying the hearing-impaired girl, his classmates are laughing AT him, not with him. They do nothing to stop him though, until one joke goes too far and the entire class turns on him. HE is now the target, and all the people he thought were his friends turned out not to be.

Years later, he has matured and is filled with regret. He has learnt sign language, and deliberately sets out to find the hearing-impaired girl to make amends.

With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child

A real-life story that was originally written to explain to Japanese society what Autism is, this is a fantastic look into what it’s like to be a parents of an autistic child in Japan.

It goes into great detail in explaining how autistic people see the world. Both enlightening and entertaining.

I Hear the Sunspot

A light BL manga about a broke college kid who gets a job transcribing class notes for a super-hot hearing-impaired classmate.

This turns into a cute male-male romance, but a lot focuses on the way people constantly make assumptions about disabled guy’s hearing AND his sexuality. It’s pretty breath-taking how people can say and do thoughtless things, whether it’s from jealousy, ignorance, or general cluelessness.

November Interviews

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“The Dreaming” is being republished in 2023 by IPI Comics, an imprint of Australian publisher IFGW Publishing! This story is a Lovecraftian take on the Australian classic “Picnic at Hanging Rock”, about twin sisters who attend a remote Australian boarding school where schoolgirls have been known to disappear.

The original story will have some minor rewrites/updates to suit a more modern audience, so it’ll have some new pages and redrawn art. There will also be a vol4, which will be a standalone story set in the same universe involving characters connected to some of the original characters, and hopefully the main storyline can continue in a part 2 after that.

Here is an interview with Soda and Telepaths about this, thanks to Anthony Pollock.

Here’s an interview with me from a while back, by Bettina Burger who is researching Australian Speculative Fiction. This interview was done before the rights to “The Dreaming” left the previous publisher, so what I say about “The Dreaming” will be different now that the circumstances are different.

I have an interview up with ALIA CYS Scoop, a newsletter for librarians. It’s on my work and also the Australia Comics & GN Database that I set up, and which is managed by ALIA librarians. Many thanks to Petrina for organising the interview and putting it up!

I have an interview with Jun Sugawara-san (and his translator Garrett Hudspeth) of Animator Supporters, who are a charity that supports underpaid animators struggling in the anime industry. Underpaying animators has been a long-time problem with the anime industry, to the extent where the industry could collapse, so here is Jun-san explaining why that happens.

This interview was conducted with a pre-prepared, bilingual Q&A document, so here is the full transcript with the original Japanese text. We didn’t cover the political aspect of underpaid Japanese animators, but that’s in the transcript. This interview was also hosted by the ACA, at their yearly Stanley Conference, many thanks to them.

FOLIO: Manga Fandom in Australia

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Happy New Year, everyone!

I want to let you know about a short comics-prose essay I wrote, called “Manga Fandom in Australia”. Click on the link to read it!

Page 1 of “Manga Fandom in Australia”
Page 2 of “Manga Fandom in Australia”

My essay, which was specifically written in comics-prose format (rather than comics format), is meant to be about the rather the under-documented Australian manga fandom. Why is it under-documented? The essay will explain why–at the end of the day, this country still maintains a fair amount of xenophobia towards Japanese-style pop culture.

This essay is part of a new government-funded Australian Comics academic project called FOLIO, which is spearheaded a group of Comics Studies academics at University of Melbourne, RMIT & UTS. This multi-year project aims to chart the contemporary Australian comics scene, and I hope to incorporate Australian game-comics like “Framed” and “Florence” into it as well in the next few years, which I am currently researching for my PhD.

Fundraising for WIRES

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Here’s an A4 piece of #AustralianBushfires charity art I did for the “Toons 4 Wildlife“ exhibition, to raise money for WIRES due to the horrific 2019 bushfires last year.

It’s organised by Mark from TIPPETTURES and The National Cartoon Gallery in Coffs Harbour, and the exhibition runs from the 22nd Aug 2020 ~ 25th Oct 2020. Please visit and buy a few prints to raise money!

Sales: If you want to buy a print of this, please contact the National Cartoon Gallery to arrange it. All proceeds will go to help Australia wildlife and WIRES.

This piece is an A4 digital piece, and its first print was sold on opening night. There will be more postcard prints made of it to further the fundraising cause, and be sold as part of collections.