The Dreaming: Slogging on…

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All is quiet on the Western front…and I’ve been spending WAAAAY too much time on YouTube.com. Ever since I got an account there, I’ve been collecting clips from Hong Kong martial arts movies. I’ve always been a huge fan of martial arts movies – namely the Asian variety spearheaded by the likes of Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao. This isn’t violence, folks, this is poetry in motion. Martial arts movies have more in common with sports like ballroom dancing than they have to do with sports like “Ultimate Fighting Championship”. What rocks with YouTube is that people post up clips of the fighting sequences only, instead of me having to plough through my DVD stock to reference certain scenes. If I ever find myself drawing a manga involving some form of martial arts (as I certainly will one day), here’s a wonderful well of inspiration of draw from.

 

The Dreaming: Nothing much happening, though I’m about a third of the way through Chapter 13. The thing will be all completed by the end of August, for a November release. And then I’m going to dive right into the last book!!

 

Shoujo-bashing again?: What’s with all the concern over shoujo lately? There’s this, this, this, and this floating around on the internet. After reading all of it, I would say that the concern seems to have originated in some popular shoujo romance manga, and the fear that it would somehow infect the minds of the young girls reading them. People are worried that some of the dominant-guy, submissive-girl relationship set-ups in most shoujo romance will cause young readers to use them as a template on “how to run a relationship”. Fair enough, except that when I think of shoujo manga, the first thing that pops into my mind is “Magic Knight Rayearth”. Definately shoujo manga, though containing strong fighting girls with some romance, and a whole lot of adventuring. I can list some more examples, but there is no need.

My point is: are you sure it’s a “shoujo” thing, and not a “genre” thing? In my experience, most romance stories aren’t teeming with strong role models, male OR female. I’ve read both shounen and shoujo romance, told for both male and female audiences, and I’ve NEVER felt like imitating any of the people in most of them them. A typical romance story is a fantasy in itself – it’s not meant to simulate real-life relationship issues. A story that simulates real-life relationship issues isn’t a “romance” story; it’s in another genre altogether. Most teenage girls are aware of this. Therefore, any young girl who attempts to use what she learned from “Hot Gimmick” in real life probably has serious self-esteem issues in the first place – and would have probably gotten into an abusive relationship with or without reading said manga.

And last of all, what about all the teenage girls who have NO interest whatsoever in reading pure romance stories whatsoever? I’ve always knew there were many of these out there, but it was only after “The Dreaming” came out that I realised how many of them there were – girls who read grisly crime thrillers, mystery, and/or horror and enjoy it thoroughly. They may or may not be interested in romance, or perhaps they like fantasy or science-fiction (romance is usually not why they read these genres). Girls, without a SINGLE bit of interest in pure romance stories, just like myself. Are these girls not worthy of interest or discussion? Are their interests not worth blogging about? Instead, volumes and volumes are written on some fabled demographic, of questionable size – Girls Who Read Romance Shoujo Manga And Nothing Else.

I ask because I just came back from the NarutoFan forums, with it’s legions of shrieking fangirls who live, breathe and drink “Naruto” (Girls probably make up to 50% of the Naruto fanbase). They all probably fantasise about becoming really powerful female ninjas, and romancing equally powerful, handsome male ninjas – which is a pretty good fantasy to have. Now, “Naruto” is a shounen manga, but the discussion we’re having is the effect manga is having on young female minds, no? And the discussion has leaned towards shoujo manga, because it’s assumed that young girls tend to read shoujo, right? Well, NarutoFanatics prove one thing – young girls are just as likely to have power fantasies as young boys. And girls who are inclined towards power fantasies will seek in out in whichever manga provides it, which is usually not shoujo romance. So if you’re worried about impressionable young girls, keep in mind that only a small percentage of them are impressionable in the way that people ought to be worried about. The majority are probably too sensible to take it seriously, or would rather be given a fantasy world where they can be a powerful adventuress and go butt-kicking with alot of handsome warrior-types.

Okay, rant off.

The Dreaming: Conflux

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YouTube.com has done wonders for my life. I have GOT to stop watching the “Naruto” anime there – it’s SO addictive, and they’ve got all the episodes (as well as gazillions of music videos dedicated to Sasuke). I’ve read the manga and I’ve resisted all efforts to be sucked into watching the anime thus far, until YouTube came along anyway. Now anyone who’s ever wondered what the fuss was about “Naruto” can now see for themselves, though I was surprised by the Japanese voice-acting for some of the characters. Naruto was always really annoying in the manga, but his voice actor made him sound completely… loveable!! And then there was Sasuke’s voice, which was bizarrely… deep for a 13-year old. Naruto’s meant to be older than Sasuke, so it was very peculiar. You can’t complain about the quality of the voice-acting though; just the casting. All Naruto would-be fans, I suggest you catch “Naruto” before the copyright holders catch YouTube. They’ve got the entire set of “Dragonball Z” and “Bleach” episodes online as well!

 

OzComic 24 hour challenge: This is exactly what it says. It’s the Australian 24 hour comics challenge!! It’s on the Queen’s Birthday weekend, and I’m giving away an original piece of art for it (as a prize). This is the first time I’ve given away an original piece of art, and it’s this one:

 

Valkyrie Girl - lines

Which is the original inks for the illustration you see below (scroll down, folks).

 

Conflux: It’s Conflux this weekend, Australia’s largest Sci-fi (and other things) convention. It’s going to be on at Canberra, and I’ve wrangled myself onto a few panels there. Those who are going will already know, but I’ll post up what for and when:

Time and Panels:

  • 10am Saturday – Dark Fantasy Atmosphere and Mood
  • 3.15pm Sunday – Comics Philosophy and Spirituality
  • 4pm Sunday – Manga style drawing workshop
  • 10am Monday – Anime and feminism

 

The Dreaming: I’ve finished Chapter 11 – three more chapters to go!! I posted some more samples up on my site, though none from chapter 11, because that’s a pivotal chapter.

 

Illustrations: I’m currently doing some illustrations for a company, and this is the first one. It doesn’t quite have a name, except that I was asked to do an “Anime Girl”, and so this is my half-naked Valkyrie anime girl with big-eyes. Poshua, when she saw this picture, she couldn’t believe I was doing something so fan-servicy, and while I agreed with her, I just saw it as an opportunity to practice rendering skin tones.

 

Valkyrie Girl

 

I like complex renders of anatomy, and now I can finally understand why some superhero artists draw impossibly-proportioned characters in their pin-ups and sequential art. Rendering the human body by carefully showing the contours of the muscles and bones is fun. However, it’s NOT quite the sort of thing alot of women artists like to do. Alot of women prefer lighter, pastel colours and all… but I’ve always had more masculine tastes anyway, so perhaps that isn’t so unexpected. What I should make clear, however, is that I dislike impossibly-proportioned male and female characters as much as the next woman. I see alot of good muscle-rendering by illustrators, but haven’t seen an awful lot that I find appealing, and it wasn’t until that I saw Kim Hyung-Tae’s art that I even remotely wanted to emulate such a thing. But then, Kim’s guys look like girls and his girls look like porn stars. That I didn’t want to emulate.

I wanted her to look athletic, but not muscular, which meant I had to tone down the way I rendered her skin a bit. Originally, she had turned like out a muscular super-heroine, which I (and most women) found very unappealing. Oddly enough, men never seem to find muscular cartoon women particularly unappealing. Probably because they see nice rendering and think “nice rendering!”. Poshua and I had a discussion about how men tend to be more fixated on “technically good art” than women are, which makes alot of sense. Just compare a well-rendered men’s manga, which has infinitely more detail than the best-rendered women’s manga. That has nothing on the quality of the manga itself, but it does give some small indication of what readers tend to fixate on. But anyway, I decided there must be some middle-ground out there where a woman can look athletic without looking like a man, and that was what I attempted with her.

Overall, I think this picture’s okay. The only part I really liked was probably the tattoo on her thigh, but it’s my first real illustration job, so perhaps I’m asking too much of myself. I certainly hope I improve as I do more though illustrations though (I need it!).

The Dreaming: On Girls Reading Shounen…

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I believe I wrote something on this LJ about the topic before, but it’s been a long time and I can’t remember. Maybe it was someone else’s LJ.

The folks at Pseudome posted up an interesting article of Matt Thorn’s. Matt is pretty well known – he’s an associate professor at Kyoto Seika University, and has been studying shoujo manga for over 20 years. He’s an avid fan, and there is no better person to talk to than him about shoujo manga in general, but I was surprised to see him lambast contemporary shoujo manga (or rather, shoujo manga editors) in the way he did.

Now, I’ve never been a huge fan of shoujo manga – I grew up reading and liking my “DragonBall Z”. I didn’t start reading shoujo manga in earnest until I was in my 20s, and by then I was too old for alot of 80s and 90s shoujo; even the critically acclaimed shoujo manga of the past few years. “NANA” bored the bejesus out of me. “Fruit Baskets” was cute and uninteresting. Nodame, from “Nodame Cantabile”, is a talented dimwit. But whether I like the stories or not, it doesn’t change my respect for shoujo as an institute. Nowhere else in the world would you find a cultural phenomenon as dedicated to women’s entertainment as shoujo manga and it’s offshoots. So I felt genuine sadness when I heard the news of “Margaret”, one of the oldest shoujo magazines around, struggling with low sales and cancellations.

This is a matter of grave concern. Weekly and biweekly magazines are the life-blood of the manga industry – how well they sell and what stories they carry can influence the direction of the industry. Most manga magazines have suffered a drop in sales since the early 90s, including front-runner “Shounen Jump”, but then shounen magazines have always outsold shoujo magazines. “Shounen Jump” may not sell 6 million copies anymore, but it’s not losing any readers. Instead, they’ve been gaining readers, mostly female. This isn’t a big surprise to someone who grew up reading shounen, but from the sales of the shoujo magazines, it seems that girls are either abandoning them to read shounen, or abandoning manga altogether. This has been happening for quite a while, and it’s the cause for alot of debate. We all know shounen is unapologetically aimed at boys, just like shoujo is unapologetically aimed at girls. Why is it that shounen is gaining girl readers, whereas shoujo hardly ever attracts male readers.

I have several theories for that, and one of them is that shounen is no longer unapologetically aimed at boys. It hasn’t been aimed purely at boys for a long time, and you can clearly see the delineations should you compare a 70s “Shounen Jump” with a contemporary one. The drawing styles have completely changed, for one. No more thick-eyebrows gekiga, rough edged art. There are less simpering, idiotic female characters. There is often romance, and large ensemble casts. And most of all, there are alot of pretty boys – bishounen and biseinen that only used to be found in shoujo. In other worlds, shounen manga has consciously become more gender-neutral in its appeal, by appropriating what used to make shoujo manga appealing to girls. If you were a girl and you weren’t all that INTO girly-romance, you’re just as likely to read shounen manga with cute male leads than you would read shoujo. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the shounen audience. Shoujo to this day has not done anything to attract a male audience, but if it tries, we’ll all end up with this unisex of an androgynous teen manga look.

The second reason for the rise of the female shounen readership may be the yaoi doujinshi subculture. Girls like to draw dishy young men in bed with other dishy young men, and the shounen magazines offer a very good selection of dishy young men for this purpose. “Prince of Tennis” comes to mind – it’s definately a shounen sports manga, but take one look at the (many) male characters in it, and you know the yaoi fans have descended on this title long ago. This is good enough reason for the yaoi fans to want to read “Prince of Tennis”, no matter how bad it is, and I guess some of this fuels the shounen magazine readerships. Certainly, professionally-drawn “Boys Love” has also been a sizeable part of the shoujo market since the 90s, but I don’t think it has much to do with the doujinshi market. As far as I can tell, girls buy BL manga, but they don’t draw doujinshi based on them. In fact, the most popular doujinshi tend to be based on existing shounen series.

Some people suggested the reason for this is because shounen manga often has larger casts than shoujo. This can’t possibly be true, because while “Prince of Tennis” has a large ensemble casts, other targets of yaoi artists have very small male casts. I take some recent Taiwanese yaoi doujinshi as an example. Taiwanese doujinshi has the advantage of being very attuned to what the Japanese doujinshi market is doing, and so they act accordingly. Thanks to Poshua bringing stacks of Taiwanese yaoi doujinshi into the workplace, it’s now possible to figure out a timeline for the popularly of certain shounen series. A few years ago, it was “Harry Potter” (yaoi doujinshi artists don’t necessarily work from manga, and they also do original work). Then came a huge wave of “Prince of Tennis”, and when everyone got bored with that, along came a stack of “Full Metal Alchemist”. Currently, the yaoi of the month is “Death Note” (or was, 2 months ago). The last two are particularly telling. “FMA” has only a hand-full of bishounen, a fraction of “Prince of Tennis”, while “Death Note” has only TWO yaoi-worthy males (and one of them looks like a freak). The fact that there are endless scenes of these same two guys in sexual situations shows that yaoi doujinshi artists aren’t attracted to shounen because of ensemble casts. The size of the cast has no bearing on who they choose to put into bed together. The qualities required seem to be based mostly on popularity in general society.

So does that spell doom for shoujo? Ofcourse not. As Matt said in his article, shoujo may currently be crippled by bad stories and formula plots, but there’s plenty of room for improvement. In the 70s, shoujo was mainly know for it’s innovation and its willingness to push boundaries – now, it just needs another dose of reactionary politics. Who knows what the future may hold? As Matt said, young Japanese are now more politically-minded than their parent’s generation, and if the editors know how to capitalise on that, they may win back their old readership. Only time will tell. I, for one, don’t want to see the market merge into something androgynous just to appeal to both sexes. There are advantages to appealing to only one gender, and you’re able to do things that you won’t if you were working in a mixed environment. And the existence of shoujo in the first place proves you can make money out of it too.

The Dreaming: Swamped…

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My god, have I been swamped by email and work. I never seem to have time to do anything anymore, including go online and surf forums. Oh well. At least I’m being productive, especially since I’ve picked up some illustration work. When I’m done with it, I’ll put it up. I also seem to get alot of email these days…so much that I accidently delete some of them. Infact, if you sent an email to me from the 1st May – 12th May, I suggest you send it again if you haven’t gotten a reply. These things happen at times.

 

Third Print Run: “The Dreaming” is in it’s THIRD printing, because of Scholastic ordering 45,000 copies for their book club readers. It was originally 30,000 copies, but then they increased it for some reason. On the other hand, the second printing of “The Dreaming” is for 7,000 books, and because of the smaller print size, there won’t be any paper dolls in this version. There will be an artist’s bio and a section called “Praise for The Dreaming” instead. That said, it’s too bad about the paper dolls, but the Scholastic version will have them.

 

Cover for Volume 2: I’m not sure whether it’s been approved or not. I haven’t been told that there’s anything wrong with it, but until it becomes “official”, I’ll just say that the art isn’t final. That said, there’s been an oddity happening with the colours. This is the second time I’ve used Photoshop to do a picture, and I must say I’m starting to get used to the “brush” function in Photoshop. I’m wondering whether the airbrush function is better in Painter though… definately it feels smoother, but Photoshop seems to work fine though. What IS certain is that while the picture was done in Photoshop, the colours look better when they’re opened in Painter. The one below is the Painter version.

 

"The Dreaming" vol2 - cover

This is the Painter version, which I like better, though these weren't the colours I originally picked.

 

The colours were different, even though both are CYMK. Is it because Painter has a different palette or something? I have NO idea. All I’m doing now is exporting the file from Painter into Photoshop format, and I find that embedding the colours into the picture works. As long as the user chooses the “embedded colours” option when opening it in photoshop, the file shows up with the correct colours. I’m just puzzled at why the colours can be so different.

 

Update: Many thanks, I’ve got the answer to the mystery Painter/PS question! I’m using Photoshop 7 and Painter 9, and the reason for the colour changes is the difference between colour preferences, namely “Adobe 1998” and “SRGB”. I think Painter 9 uses “SRGB” whereas Photoshop 7 uses “Adobe 1998”. This explains why the contrast levels in the Painter 9 picture was higher, because “SRGB” has a high level of contrast, but apparently duller colours. I haven’t messed around with either to know, but you can change the colours in Photoshop 7 to “SRGB”, though because I’m doing another illustration in Photoshop right now, I’m keeping them that way.