Graphic Novels and the Rise of Manga Publishing in the UK

Posted on May 20, 2009 in Uncategorized

It was sweltering inside, and a gorgeous breezy evening taunted us from the other side of the window. Few people attended the Manga publishing talk, but maybe it was only going to be the geekiest of us anyway.

A shame, if so – both speakers represented an atypical, down to earth subgroup. Emma Hayley was the founder of Self Made Hero, best known for its Manga Shakespeare series. Lizzy Spratt commissions graphic novels for Walker Books.

Manga is growing. According to Emma Hayley, the market for it doubled in size between 2005–7. In 2007, Japanese Manga accounted for 70% of graphic novel sales, although its UK share was a more modest 15%. No longer a pursuit for Japan-obsessed geeks, it’s now a pursuit for multicultural geeks of all flavours. Fun fact – the fastest growing manga genre is Yaoi, male-on-male homoerotica that’s most popular with adolescent girls.

But today’s speakers were more family-friendly. Both their booklists are largely pitched at children and young adults – Walker’s specifically so, SMH’s out of a pragmatism born of GCSE literature syllabi. Emma compared Manga Shakespeare to Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Each story is modernised, at the least. The star-crossed lovers court and die under Tokyo’s skyline. Hamlet is cyberpunk. The original texts have been pruned to suit the format, but otherwise left untouched.

For those who thought pruning Shakespeare sacrilegious, Emma showed some earlier graphic novel/Shakespeare experiments from the 1950s – bloated monologues delivered by pompous caricatures who were almost squeezed off the page by the enormous speech bubbles they competed with. Manga Shakespeare unquestionably showed more respect for the artist and medium, letting the pictures create as much of a narrative as the text.

In fact, Emma ‘didn’t want the series to be associated with Shakespeare’ – rather, she wanted it to ‘shock’. The enterprise has been one of English publishing’s recent success stories. Self Made Hero sold out of their original (undisclosed) print run within six months. Emma also won the UK Young Publishing Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2008.

Next steps on her path to world domination, she says, are developing their Eye Classics series (other literary works set to more Western illustrations) and moving into graphic biographies – starting with Johnny Cash.

It turns out that Japanese follow the educational logic of manga even further – Emma said that you can find manga maths in Japan, if you search hard enough!

If you’re thinking about writing or publishing manga yourself, Emma recommended seeking artists at Sweatdrop Studios, a UK-based collective of mangaka (artists).

Someone asked about the creative process itself. It sounded comparable to a play, albeit with more feedback – the author/editor puts together a script of sorts, which could be stuffed with directions or left solely to the artist. The artist fills in the blanks, and then they negotiate over any disagreements, before producing the final product.

Up next was Lizzy Spratt. Her talk contained less factoids than the first, and focussed more on her own company, with less emphasis on the industry as a whole. Walker publishes children’s books, and is no stranger to dense illustration, having published the legendary Where’s Wally? series.

Lizzy was starting a graphic novel list, and most of the talk focussed around its forthcoming and newly published titles. These included Skim, a graphic novel for young adults dealing with depression and suicide; Outlaw, a Robin Hood interpretation; Vermonia, a manga series/computer game crossover and Salem Brownstone. The latter is one of Lizzie’s first books for Walker, and obviously her pet project. In a real coup for a unknown author/editor team, it’s been endorsed by Alan Moore, author of V for Vendetta and Watchmen, and god of Western graphic novels.

The warped, gothic look of the book led to a discussion of age ratings on books – a pointless exercise, Lizzy claimed. Even without sex or violence a text might not appeal to younger readers, but why tell them not to read it?