Mae Mai: September 04, 2005

Saturday, September 10, 2005

I'm off to a couple of shows. If any of you are in the area, please feel free to come join us at Corner Coffee in Indianapolis. We host an open mic night with a featured artist. This month's featured artist is tribal fusion belly-dancer, Carenza bint Asya. She and a couple of her students will be dancing to our original belly-dance music.

Until then I leave you with this image:

and this link:
http://hulkangry.com/images/hulk_vs_batman.htm

Friday, September 09, 2005

Manhwa invasion! (with a nod towards Manhua)

Pata of Irresponsible Pictures posted a link about the attempts of Korean comics publishers to break into the US market. The link was a thread at Manganews.net which focused on a series of interviews with ICE Kunion Imprint (a consortium of Korean publishers including Sigongsa and Seoul Cultural meant to bring Korean comics to the American market) at Internal Correspondence version 2 (ICv2).

Here are the links to the three part interview (August 4, 2005):

Interview with ICE Kunion, Part 1: The Decision to Enter the U.S. Market
Interview with ICE Kunion, Part 2: The Launch Pace, the Audience, and the Korean Market
Interview with ICE Kunion, Part 3: Korean IP Development; the UDON Role

Alot of interesting info here about the differences between Japanese manga and Korean manwha (for more information about Korean manwha please check my sidebar links under "International Comics Resources") including, but not limited to how the Korean companies operate and how much the Korean government plays a role in those operations (e.g. "Manwha" has become the official governmental designation for Korean comics as opposed to the other common phonetic spelling, "Manwa"). As Eric Ko says:

The Korean government is very into promoting comics as a medium, not as something that's just for kids. They're very involved. This particular spelling is official.

Ko also has something to say about the "manga is/is not comics" debate:

Essentially it's the same word. It means comics. Manga, manhwa, no matter how you spell it... How the Koreans do it is hwa. It's not always the same, it's just slightly different phonetics. If you look at it, it's all written the same. All the Asian people read the same two words. It means comics. It's just comics. It's the difference between Kleenex or tissue paper. They brand this thing. A lot of people say, "you have a Kleenex?" They mean do you have a tissue paper. It's kind of like now when they brand manga as Japanese comics, because it's a format. It's black and white, it has more pages than the standard American comic. That's how they do it. We feel a distinguished difference between Korean content and Japanese content. They're similar enough, but deep down there are many differences.

Essentially, the same two Chinese Han Characters (pinyin: hànzì), 漫画 (pinyin: mànhuà), are used in China, Korea, and Japan to refer to comics. The exception: often in Japan people usually refer to manga as "comics" (for more information about Chinese manhua check my sidebar links under "International Comics Resources").

The sheer size of the Korean/Asian market for manhwa is staggering:

How many new trade paperback volumes are published monthly in Korea?
[Eric] Ko: A lot. About 45 million tankoubons, or collected volumes, a year. That was in 2003, I believe.

How many separate titles?
[Charles] Park: Four or five thousand titles a year.

While that's nowhere near the size of the Japanese manga market, it's not something to scoff at. I'm just wondering when mainland China will join the proverbial bandwagon and try to enter the US market on a larger scale than Hong Kong companies have done in the past.

Speaking of Hong Kong comics--many thanks to Queenie Chan for pointing me in the direction of Lee Wai-chun and her 13-Dot Cartoons. As Miss Chan and the Lambiek entry both state, 13-Dot Cartoons was loosely based on Harvey Comics character, Richie Rich.

Running from 1969 to 1980, Miss Chan also says "it evolved completely in isolation from Japanese manga, resembling Old Master Q in its storytelling." Obviously Anthony Wong's Old Master Q, Lee Wai-chun's 13-Dots Cartoon, and other Hong Kong comics like Tse Ling-ling's "Sweet and Gentle" are quite different from the subject matter and style of, say, the more familiar Jademan comics from the late 80s/early 90s(in the US).

There's a whole world of comics out there beyond the US and Japan, so why not push all comics forward, eh?

Related Links:
Chinese comics struggling to find own style
Critiques of Gender Ideology: women comic artists and their work in Hong Kong (anyone with an account can always forward me a copy of this! ;) )
ICE Kunion Imprint website
Old Master Q website
Queenie Chan's The Dreaming (coming soon from TokyoPop!)
Queenie Chan's website
Tangerine Dreams (info about some Girl's Manhwa titles)

Thursday, September 08, 2005

RIP Koji Tano (1961-2005)

*edited (10-03-2005, 01:43 pm): thanks to Chris Goudreau (aka SICKNESS) for reminding me that there are alot more noise artists than just those on the west coast that knew Koji Tano. Don't ask me why I only referenced the Japan and West Coast artists as I'll only claim senility.

I had been out of the experimental/noise music scene for nearly a year (I needed the break) but was saddened to get this letter a few weeks back:

Dear everyone

i'm terribly sorry to inform you this sad news though,
Koji Tano (MSBR) passed away on July 31, at age 44,
because of carcinoma of the colon and rectum.

the funeral ceremony took place at a temple in Tokyo today (August 2).

i'm really speechless with sudden shock and sorrow.

Sincerely yours

Kazuyuki Kishino (KK.NULL)

I didn't know Koji Tano personally, but all of my friends in Japan and a number of the ~~west coast~~ noise artists [*worldwide] did. As anyone into noise knows, he was the "frontman" for the noise group, MSBR, and owner of one of the outstanding experimental music record stores and the MSBR Records label. His was the first store/label to sell copies of my noise releases in Japan.

What many didn't know is that Koji Tano was also an underground manga creator. A couple of his stories appeared in issues of Mason Jones' magazine of Japanese independant bands and culture, Ongaku Otaku. I wouldn't bother trying to order any of those directly from Mason right now as he's in Japan touring, though you might check Aquarius Records to see if they have any in stock.

Some of Koji's manga may also be found in the Wormhole mangazine published by Time Stereo (run by Detroit based noise/performance art troupe, and frequent collaborator with MSBR, Princess Dragon Mom). The art from the mangazine also made a tour of some Michigan based art-galleries.

If I can find my copies I might scan some of his work and do a sort of retrospective review of Koji's manga.

I found a short and uninformative review of the "The Fool Who Fell to Hell" from the second Ongaku Otaku issues:

The best thing in this issue, though, is the stunning manga story by Koji Tano of MSBR. "The Fool Who Fell to Hell" starts out as a reasonably typical paranoid-fantasy story (a sweaty homeless guy watches kids playing in the park and flashes back to hellish school days) before the bottom falls out (literally -- he falls in a hole down to hell) and the whole thing becomes surreal, grotesque, and not a little bit scary. The pix of the minotaur demon squashing damned souls with a huge cement block and then stuffing them all in his mouth is completely amazing. Hopefully there will be more to come in this vein from Tano, for this is unspeakably cool....

from:
monotremata.com review archives

If any of you are interested in hearing some of his noise, then please go to this link where I've been posting selective links related to Koji and his work.

short "manga vs. comics" addendum

This is going to be more of an update post for those interested in the manga/comics debate:

Jog gives a very nice blog/bulletin board round-up of the current O'Neill vs. Deppey debate I posted about here

While following that discussion, we got blindsided by responses to Rivkah Greulich's Pulse column:

Fanboy Rampage
Little Rivkah's Livejournal
Love Manga
Pseudomé Studio Projects forum TOKYOPOP And The Manga Industry

Lots more fun little Orientalist tidbits to be found.

Please also check out Derek Badman's review of Thierry Groensteen's Système de la bande dessinée when you get the chance, 'kay?

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

Śiva Nataraja

drawing of the Śiva Nataraja bronze sculpture at the Naltumi Isvaram Temple, Punjai, India (click image for detail)

Jon Silpayamanant
pencil
8 1/2 x 11
(2004-12-01)

more of my art:
http://noiseman433.deviantart.com/gallery/

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Manga isn't Comics isn't Manga isn't Comics isn't...

The debate still rages.

Spurred on by the piece that Pat O'Neill wrote in response to Dirk Deppey's, She's Got Her Own Thing Now, article about the shoujo phenomenon in the US, the line that got most people foaming at the mouth, "Manga are not comics," has spilled over into blogs as well as a number of forums.

Pat gets into some more detail in his latest post, Why Manga Isn't Comics.

I've made a few comments here, here, here, and here regarding Pat's analogy about the differences between Japanese kabuki and Euro-American drama. I posted [without commentary] some quotes/links to research and analyses of the difference between manga/Japanese art and comics/US (and European) art here and here (reposted here)

Queenie Chan asks the legitimacy/authority begging question:

"How much manga have the people on this thread actually read? And how much do you know about manga in general?"

I responded a little snarkily:

Ok, since we're quibbling about definitions in general--are you asking about Chinese Manhua and Korean Manwha as well? What about all the "manga" of India, Thailand Gahdoon books, Indonesian Cerita silat bergambar, Cambodian Salapak--do the Hong Kong Jademan comics count? The answer here could make the difference between a few hundred to a few thousand.

How am I supposed to count Shojo Beat and Shonen Jump, both of which I read regularly? Do we count each individual story or just the volume as a whole? What if these are the only "real" manga I read? Does this mean that I don't really know anything about manga because I only read hundreds of "derivative" manga from the other dozen or so Asian countries that produce their own manga?

Could we ask how much someone, that only reads Japanese manga, if they really know anything about manga? Does it really matter?

Is a tankōbon just one manga?

What about Western manga? We counting Nouvelle Manga? Bryan Lee O'Malley? Becky Cloonan?

I guess I'd just have to say it really depends on what you mean by manga, and how you want to define "knowledge about manga" relative to how manga itself is defined.

My [very abridged] summary is here.

See, these kinds of debates interest me more as a case study for Post-Colonial Criticism. And though I haven't yet done what I promised Jim of Double Articulation--I think he may forgive me as I start to articulate some things about this whole dialogue.

My qualification about Orientalism still stands.

Namely, that Edward Said recognizes that there is a plurality of Orientalisms. He went to great pains in distinquishing between French colonial and British colonial Orientalism throughout much of his work. He spent a great deal of time articulating the difference between American Orientalism and the European colonial kind. This makes sense as most of the contact between the US and the "East" (at least at the time of the publishing of Said's seminal text Orientalism) happened to be in military engagements with Japan, Korea and Vietnam. So I think it's quite obvious that American Orientalism took a very different road than European colonial Orientalism.

And it would hardly do justice to Said's critical output to boil down the essence of his work to being a matter of only concerning the "Middle East." He spends a great deal of time analyzing texts regarding British India and China and French Indochina. Unless we want to say that all these vast geographic regions are just ostensibly Arab or Islamic (not that either of these are essential categories either), then to claim that Said's Orientalism is essentially about dar-al-Islam is being disingenuous at best, and at worst might indicate just a plain sloppy [mis]reading of Said's text(s).

And last but not least. Said's Orientalism can be read as a case study of his later work, Culture and Imperialism.

This "debate" is such a nice and seedy hotbed of Orientalist sentiment.

Afghanistan Comics

Well damn--I had just found this page/blog a few hours ago, but now PANGOLIN part en AFGHANISTAN blog seems to be MIA (Fichier Non Trouvé). The page had some interesting things to say about what is purportedly an educational Afghanistan comic.

The only image left is from the Comics Lifestyle page where I originally found the link to the Pangolin blog. Here's the comic page:

I was going to comment on the comic's usage of imagery rather than text within the balloons but as all the examples are missing with the page I'll just have to hope it surfaces later. I suppose if the comic was meant to be a learning aid, the use of images, rather than text makes some sense, especially if the work was intended for any largely illiterate audience.

'multipathed' comics

Jo Waite's 'multipathed' comic, Celeste, at the Eisenberg Gallery and Melbourne Museum of Experimental Art from 19/07/05 to 6/08/05. Images from the gallery may be found here.

For more 'multipathed' comics check out Scott McCloud's webcomics.

Monday, September 05, 2005

The Webcomic Hurricane Relief Telethon

This will be the one post of mine you see at all related to the Katrina disaster. I didn't even really blog about the tsunami incident which directed affected me because I have family in the area, so...

Click on this link to find out how you may contribute to the relief effort if you happen to be a webcomics/comics creator. The event will take place the week of Sept. 12 (actual dates to be announced later) and is hosted by Blank Label Comics. Link brought to my attention via The Johnny Bacardi Show.

Again, the website is:
http://webcomictelethon.com/

Toronto Research Group: Photo Fumetti

From the wikipedia entry for Fumetti we have:

In the Italian language, fumetti are all comics, not just photo novels (fumetti literally means "little clouds of smoke", in reference to speech balloons). Instead, Italians call photo-illustrated comics fotoromanzi. Fumetti are also popular in Spain and Latin America, where they are called fotonovelas, and in France. Fumetti have never been widely appreciated in the United States.

I didn't realize the term had been exapted for general usage in the US for "photo-comics." Anyway, I was just reading Marilyn Westlake's photo-comic, NARY-A-TIFF, in the vol. 2/no. 3, 1982 (the special "violence" theme) issue of Rampike and thought I'd do a little research on the history of photo-comics. Obviously, I've enjoyed Phoebe Gloeckner's work and the occasion silliness found in, say, Wizard Magazine (and I suppose I need to re-post my Adventures of Chinese Bizarro Spider-Man).

Lots of bizarre comics to be found in the Rampike magazine-which is understandable, given the "mission statement" of the publication:

Rampike is a forum for post-modern artistic and literary expression within a thematic format. Photo-copies of written submissions are welcome. Rampike is not responsible for the return of texts or photographs. Rampike is funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and by private sources. We would like to extend our special thanks to the Lewis Johnstone Gallery (London).

And with a contributor list (in this particular issue) that includes: Joseph Beuys; Dennis Oppenheim; William Burroughs; Vito Acconci; Nicole Brossard; b.p. nichol; Jupiter Larsen; Toronto Research Group; and the People's Republic of Poetry amongst many other experimental poets, post-structuralists and performance artists, this is one publication I would love to get more back issues of (I have only a handful right now).

This issue of Rampike actually credits Toronto Research Group in the index as the "author" of Photo Fumetti. This brings out an interesting dimension to issues of authorship. Were Nichol and McCaffery the "script-writers" with Westlake playing a documentary role? Or was Westlake the "artist" with TRG the subject (as well as being the ostensible authors)? As you can see from the image (I hope it scanned well enough) the piece is "written by & starring The Toronto Research Group" and "directed & photographed by Marilyn Westlake." The text in the word balloons contain obvious references to Nichol and McCaffery's collaborative work as TRG, but that could just as easily have been added by anyone familiar with their oeuvre.

In a publication like Rampike I wouldn't be surprised if issues of authorship are intentionally misleading. In the end, I suppose it hardly matters.

Cannibalism, fetuses, and art

Kittiwat Unarom, 28, a Thai art student, sits behind his works "human being parts" made of bread at his studio in Potharam district of Ratchaburi province, south of Bangkok, Thailand, Friday, Sept. 2, 2005. Kittiwat who is a son of bakery owners said he spent about six months to create his eatable works with a concept of "do not believe of what you see" intended to put them on exhibition at the Institute of Thai Arts in Bangkok later this year. (AP Photo/Apichart Weerawong)

Read the full story:
"Thai artist bakes edible 'body parts'" by Watcharaporn Taithongchai, The Associated Press (2005-09-04).

Kinda reminded me of Xiao Yu's recent work, Ruan:

A Chinese artist who grafted the head of a human fetus onto the body of a bird has defended his work as art after a Swiss museum withdrew the piece from an exhibit.
``It's precisely because I respect all life that I did this,'' artist Xiao Yu said Tuesday. He said the bird and fetus ``died because there was something wrong with them. ... I thought putting them together like this was a way for them to have another life.''

Swiss museum visitor Adrien de Riedmatten, 29, filed a complaint on Monday with the district attorney of Bern, Switzerland, calling for an investigation into the piece, which was on display at the Bern Art Museum.

``I want to know where this baby comes from and if it was killed for this work,'' de Riedmatten said. ``We know about the problems of late-term abortions in China and we have the right to ask ourselves questions.''

The work was removed, curator Bernhard Fibicher said Tuesday, because museum directors didn't want the controversy surrounding it to overshadow the rest of the ``Mahjong'' exhibit, which features avant-garde Chinese works from the last 25 years. The museum is planning an Aug. 22 symposium with artists, philosophers and ethics experts before deciding whether to re-exhibit the piece.

Read the full story:
"Chinese Artist Defends Fetus Artwork" LatelineNews via Muzi News (2005-08-09).

And Zhu Yu's eating fetus series:

The artist himself, whose past accomplishments include an opus entitled "Canned Human Brains," has claimed in interviews that he used real aborted fetuses stolen from a medical school to create "Eating People" and that he actually cooked and ate them "for art's sake."