For those who might be unfamiliar with the french-speaking comics/manga scene, I think it's worth mentioning that french-speaking comics (aka "bande dessinee") had (and still have) a big presence and role in Europe, beginning with the world-famous TinTin. Several prestigious art-schools dedicated to sequential art exist in France, Belgium and Switzerland and have produced numerous best-selling artists.
Traditionally, a standard BD volume is published full-color, hard-cover, and has around 48pages for an average price of 20USD. In the past decade, however, french-speaking BD market has seen an enormous boom of manga titles, which was largely enabled by several french TV shows for teens that aired for several years in the late 80ties - early/mid 90ties and ran numerous cult anime series (such as Dragon Ball, Rose of Versailles, Knights of Zoodiac, Lupin the 3rd, Orange Road, Golgo 13, Galaxy Express 999, Captain Harlock, Sherlock Holmes, and a good hundred of others) with an excellent voice-dubbing, which led to the creation of a whole "Generation Manga" of hard-core anime fans who naturally enabled and devoured the paper manga boom that followed in the libraries.
Currently, every big BD publisher also has a manga-publishing line. Moreover, gradually more and more french-speaking and european artists inspired by the manga style started to create their own titles and be published in BD color format but with a heavily manga-influenced style.
One of the artists (Aurore) has just seen her first title "Pixie" (scenario by Mathieu Mariolle) licensed by Tokyopop and published in a smaller format, soft-cover, full-color in the US: http://auroreblackcat.deviantart.com/art/Pixie-USA-released-112832461.
This movement is definitely similar to the OEL movement in the US, although probably more of a blend between BD and manga than its american counterpart. So this is it for an ultra-fast introductory post! Let me know if you have specific areas/questions you would like to see covered (or if you have interesting stuff to add) :D
EDIT: Amy Kim Kibuishi, the creator of the lovely "Sorcerers and Secretaries" published by Tokyopop asked me the pertinent question of whether I had more european/manga hybrid titles to recommend.
And this definitely sparked my interest... because I don't really know much about them! So I am setting out on a crusade to discover the hybrids over Europe and bring them to light! :D
In that sense, I feel that I cannot close this post without mentioning the excellent work of Yishan Li, a chinese artist based in UK with already an impressive number of titles under her belt. I shall definitely come back to her work later on, but would just like to mention that you might well already know her, since she has taken over the "Adventures of CG!" in Cosmogirl from 2007 to 2008, the page strip started by Svetlana Chmakova: http://www.cosmogirl.com/funandgames/manga/
Cheers!
-tacto
No comments:
Post a Comment