JAPAN/CHINA: One Japanese comic publisher finds the next generation of manga artists in China

Record ID: 465568

  • Title: JAPAN/CHINA: One Japanese comic publisher finds the next generation of manga artists in China
  • Date: 2nd March 2011
  • Summary: BOOKSTORE WOMEN LOOKING AT MANGA MAGAZINE STACK OF MANGA MAGAZINE BIG SPIRITS MONTHLY12 PROMOTIONAL BLURB FOR L-DART'S KILLIN-JI ON MAGAZINE
  • Embargoed: 17th March 2011 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: China
  • Country: China
  • Topics: Entertainment
  • Reuters ID: LVA29187S58054R9F34S6XHRWVHO
  • Story Text: With only days to go before his comic strip series hit the bookshelves, 25-year old Liu Chong (pronounced liew-chong) was already keeping himself busy in his Shanghai offices working on the next installments of his fantasy history novel "Killin-ji" (pron: kee-lean-jee).
    His story is based on the Chinese historical novel "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", but his drawings are strongly styled after Japanese manga (pron: man-gah).
    In fact, Liu, who goes by the pen name L-Dart, is writing for the Japanese audience in a major Japanese manga magazine, "Monthly Big Comic Spirits".
    Like many Chinese of L-Dart's generation, he was brought up on Japanese manga.
    He taught himself how to draw in the Japanese style which initially his parents did not understand or truly approve of.
    For L-Dart this is now a milestone accomplishment in his career which his parents can be proud of.
    "Now that my manga is going to be published in Japan, it is like the showing of my results slip to my parents. I can now tell them that I have come a long way in my profession and I have gained some achievement. Also, there is a lot of potential for my career," L-Dart told Reuters in Shanghai ahead of his February 26 debut in Tokyo.
    Killin-ji will join a competitive market that is estimated by some at 406 billion yen ($3.6 billion).
    "Monthly Big Spirits Comic" is a new comer, a spin off from the more well known weekly version, but already sells 26,000 copies and targets mostly 20 - 25 year old males in Japan.
    While it is not common for Chinese artists to be published regularly in a Japanese comic magazine, it is not completely unheard of.
    "Chinese people have written for Japanese manga magazines in the past, but what surprised me about him is how close his manga was to the grammar of Japanese manga," said Takashi Hayakawa, editor of the "Big Comic Spirits" magazines.
    Manga culture has taken off beyond the Japanese borders and is especially popular in many parts of East Asia and some western nations, so it's no surprise that its artists and influences have also moved overseas - allowing people such as Hayakawa to mine a wealth of talent.
    That has prompted some Japanese media to caution that this is the beginning of the Japanese manga industry being outsourced overseas with cheap Chinese labour, like many other Japanese industries.
    Big Comic Spirits however defends these claims, saying it pays L-Dart the same rate as it would a Japanese newcomer to the industry.
    "We pay him exactly the same as what we'd pay a starting manga artists in Japan so we didn't really think of him because he was Chinese," Hayakawa said.
    While Big Comic Spirits' publishers Shogakkan declined to reveal how much that was, according to Yuriko Komura of the Manga Department of Tokyo Polytechnic University the industry average is usually about 10,000 to 12,000 yen (120 USD to 144 USD) a page. If he hits the jackpot and becomes famous that could go as high as 100,000 yen (1,200 USD), she added.
    But it also took some time from the moment L-Dart, who already had a following in China, to be noticed by the Japanese publishers and the moment he was ready for the Japanese audience.
    In that time Big Spirits Comic spent over a year with L-Dart training him the in-house style. L-Dart explains it was not easy at first as much of it was over emails and through translations. Eventually this process paid off.
    "When I interact with my Japanese publishers, there is a big language problem between us. For instance, if the (Japanese) editor had some thoughts, he would go through a translator to communicate with me. Sometimes, the translation might not be very clear. But through manga, he can draw something on a piece of paper and I can immediately understand him," L-Dart told Reuters who added he was not in it for the fame or the money.
    "My dream is to draw better. It is just that simple. I want to draw better and do more stories. I want to draw out every idea that I have inside my brain," L-Dart said.
  • Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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