• This post is part of a on-going series called “Being a Professional Manga Artist in the West“. The first post is here.
• Buy my short story collection from Bento Comic’s Smashwords storefront @ US$4.99.

 

Part 5b: ‘Manga Comes in Book Form?!’

Sometime in 2010, I was asked by my old high school to come and do a workshop teaching their manga fans to draw manga. I was probably the only professional manga artist for miles around, and I do this from time to time, so I said yes. I ended up teaching a dozen or so aspiring manga artists, which was fun. They were bright girls from a prestigious private girl’s school, so they had interesting questions to ask.

It’s normal for someone to ask ‘How do I become a professional manga artist’ in these situations. I have a variety of canned replies to that. However, one of the other industry-related questions they asked threw me.

‘How do publishers make money if they put all their manga online?’

I had a horrible feeling about what they were really asking. They were undoubtedly reading all their manga from pirated sites like MangaFox, and not paying a cent for it.

By 2010, OneManga had been slayed by a coalition of publishers serving a cease-and-desist notice, but more pirate sites were popping up to fill the void. A lot of them seemed to be owned by the same entities, and were user-upload sites, meaning they could circumvent certain legal issues which may bring down similar sites. Either way, if there was a war against manga piracy going on, then that war has already been lost.

I gently let them know that while reading manga online wasn’t evil, you should always buy manga in book form to support the manga artists and their publishers.

Their reaction was one of astonishment.

‘Manga comes in book form?!’

Yes, this crop of 8th graders were amazed that manga originated on printed paper. They didn’t know that manga made of dead trees existed, and that you can buy them… somewhere. This workshop was happening in the middle of the library, and we were surrounded by scores of printed books. Somehow, that made it even more horrible.

Obviously, they then asked where they could buy their favourite series. Living where we were in Sydney, Australia, it was near impossible due to the lack of official translated copies available, so I tried to explain that yes, reading pirated manga online is bad but I understand if it’s the only option…

Wait a minute. So now I was defending the manga pirates? Why in God’s name was I advocating schoolgirls to read pirated online manga? Obviously I was doing it because they had no option but to buy the books, which wasn’t possible, but that wasn’t the real problem.

The real problem was that an entire generation of manga-readers have now grown up believing that manga is free on the internet. Some of them were completely unaware than printed copies of manga exist, and even if they were, they don’t have the resources or an interest in buying them. Even if they did, why buy printed manga, when there are thousands of free manga to read on the internet, accessible only by the click of a button?

I asked them whether manga is really popular at the school. They said yes. According to them, the school gives out laptops to the Year 9 students, who then spend all their lunch breaks in the library, taking advantage of the free wifi to read pirated manga online. I imagine the school finds some way to block porn sites, but they don’t block manga sites, because I suspect the school doesn’t really know or understand anything about it.

So there you have it, folks. No wonder manga readers stay the same age and never seem to grow any older. By the time this lot turns 18, they would have read more manga than some people would have in their entire lifetimes (at some point, I imagine they just burn out and lose interest). They’ve certainly read more manga than I have, and I’ve been reading it for over 30 years, though unlike some of them, I paid to buy my favourite manga.

Anyway, I walked out of that workshop feeling totally dispirited. To be honest, by then, I already wanted to do something different to traditional manga-style comics, but this spurred me on. I didn’t want to stop drawing in manga style, but it was clear that I needed some kind of change. I needed to keep drawing comics, but do it… differently. This meant that I had to change not only how I did comics, but also how it would be marketed.

*****

 

Next Monday, I will talk more about how “Small Shen” did in bookstores, and more about the significance of how it did.

• This post is part of a on-going series called “Being a Professional Manga Artist in the West“. The first post is here.
• Buy my short story collection from Bento Comic’s Smashwords storefront @ US$4.99.

 

Part 5a: ‘I Wanted 3 Days of Entertainment from a $10 Book’

Two incidents happened in 2010 that made me question what I was doing. Both involved my old high school.

Incident One was at a dinner party with my old high school friends, who I still see regularly. It involved my friend Serena (not her real name), who is a doctor working in a high-stress environment. She liked to read in her spare time, and she primarily read chic-lit and romance. She doesn’t read comics, but she bought a copy of ‘In Odd We Trust,’ because she was curious about it and interested in reading it. In our conversation, she mentioned to me that she read the book and liked it. Then, something weird happened.

In the middle of our conversation, Serena suddenly turned to my friend Lara and said something, and I paraphrase:

‘Don’t you just hate it when you buy a book for $10, and it only gives you an hour of entertainment? Normally when I read a book, it takes me two or three days.’

Lara looked baffled at what Serena said – she wasn’t even part of the conversation. The conversation then went someplace else, but the event stuck in my head. For hours after, I remembered this conversation, though it took me a few days to figure out what it really meant. When I finally understood it, I got pretty worried.

Serena was a prose fiction reader with money and time to burn, and she was used to reading prose books that gave her several days’ worth of entertainment for $10. When she read my graphic novel, she paid the exact same price for something that took only an hour or so to read, which must have baffled her. A $10 book gone in an hour is something comics and manga fans are used to, but Serena isn’t a comic reader, and doesn’t seem to care whether something is in prose or in comics. All she cared about was whether she was getting her money’s worth of entertainment from a book.

With a start, I realised what Serena was trying to say.

She was trying to tell me she felt ripped off.

She probably couldn’t bring herself to say so to my face, which resulted in that weird exchange over dinner. Truth is, prose readers are used to value for money. If they buy a book and didn’t get what they think their money’s worth is, they’re unlikely to buy it again, even if they liked the book. Sure enough, Serena never bought another one of my books again, even though she liked the first one.

This made alarm bells ring in my head. If people were counting on comic adaptations of prose best-sellers to fill their coffers, things could get troublesome very soon. Imagine a prose reader buying a YA book called Sexy Creatures for $10, becoming a fan, and then going on to buy the manga adaptation of Sexy Creatures, also for $10. The first reaction to reading the manga Sexy Creatures would probably not be ‘Oh, nice pictures,’ but rather: ‘where’s the rest of the damn story?! I paid $10 for this!!’ Remember, prose readers want stories. They like pretty pictures, but the story is their first concern.

*****

Anyway, this incident shook me, but it didn’t shake me quite as badly as the second incident, which I’ll talk about next Monday.

• This post is part of a on-going series called “Being a Professional Manga Artist in the West“. The first post is here.
• Buy my short story collection from Bento Comic’s Smashwords storefront @ US$4.99.

 

Part 5: Comics-Prose with ‘Small Shen’ (2011-2012)

In 2010, I was winding down in terms of illustrating for Dean Koontz. I was on the way to doing three books with them already, and I was looking for a change, which amazingly, did come at the right time. A nice lady called Kylie Chan approached me at a convention, and asked me to do a graphic novel version of a short story she had written called ‘Small Shen.’ It was the prequel to her best-selling Chinese fantasy series called ‘White Tiger,’ which had sold very well in Australia. I was about to draw the third ‘Odd Thomas’ book for Dean, so I had to push her back, but I eventually started working on ‘Small Shen’ in 2011, for Kylie’s publisher Harper Collins Voyager.

‘Small Shen’ was different to all the other manga I’ve done – it’s actually a mix of prose and comics. This may sound a highly unusual step, but Kylie was very supportive, and I also have other reasons to go into this mix and experiment with the format of comics. Part of the reason was because I also felt that comics, my own work included, was getting stale. The other reasons are far more complex, and it has to do with a mixture of economics and issues with production.

For folks who are wondering what “comics-prose” is, I have a few sample pages here. It’s basically a mix of prose and comic panels, arranged in a way that mixes the two together into a single, seamless, INTEGRATED narrative. Here’s some pages from “We are the Pickwicks” below.

“Comics-prose” is both comics and prose. If you ask me, it leans more towards comics than towards prose, in terms of execution (if not reading experience, which is different for everyone). For those who want to read stories told in this style, here’s more:

• “We are the Pickwicks” (10 pages)
• “Small Shen” (Written by Kylie Chan, chap1-3)
• “Legend of Zelda: The Edge and The Light (312 pages)

 

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*****

Either way, working in comics-prose has been fun and exciting, and I’ve since discovered it to be a new and complex way of visual story-telling. But first, I should FINALLY tell you about two minor events that shook me up in 2010, and how it made me question the path I’ve been on (which will be next Monday).

• This post is part of a on-going series called “Being a Professional Manga Artist in the West“. The first post is here.
• The discount period is over, and the price has returned to normal. Buy my short story collection from Bento Comic’s Smashwords storefront @ US$4.99.

 

Part 4c: Manga Bit-Parts of Media Empires

The Yen Press story is significant. When I first did ‘Odd Thomas’ with Dean, it was one of the first times something like this has been done. By ‘something like this,’ I mean a best-selling author taking one of their best-selling series and doing a manga/graphic novel version of the work. The ‘Odd Thomas’ books I did were prequels, not adaptations, but it didn’t matter – the point was that ‘Odd Thomas’ was a brand, just like Dean Koontz is a brand-name author, and brands have customers that are eager to buy more of that brand.

After the success of the first ‘Odd Thomas’ book, however, it seemed that publishers realised that there was money in making manga adaptations of best-selling prose stories. The prose fiction market was far larger than the manga market, far more established, and with far deeper pockets. What better way was there to make money, than to make manga versions of prose best-sellers and sell them to a pre-existing fan base? It was safe, risk free money – much like how movie studios make movies out of books or comic book superheros. These were ready-made audiences with money, and much easier than developing a new property from scratch.

Again, I was aware this was going on, but perhaps I didn’t realise it would become common. With the GFC and piracy, getting original manga published was becoming harder and harder, as publishing houses could not take new risks on an author when there were better, safer money to be made elsewhere.

 

 

I had originally started off illustrating for Dean Koontz in the hope that it would also help my career, but due to the economic crisis, it hasn’t been the case. It seems the GFC has permanently changed the way publishing houses did business, but there are two other reasons too, as I discovered in 2010.

*****

Next Monday, I’ll be back to talk about changing the way I did comics. After my stint illustrating for Dean Koontz, I would be working for another best-selling author – but this time, I wasn’t doing “comics”, but something slightly different: “comics-prose”.