About Manwha/Manga style

8th Oct 2006 (Sun)

I read a book titled “MANGA”, which is published by Taschen and it included DVD that contains interviews with famous Manga artists. I’ve watched the DVD and it was really helpful.
In those interviews, Naoki Urasawa said that he wants ‘something short but unforgettable’ and these expression of ‘something short but unforgettable’ is just what I want to do with my work!! I do not want to make a long film with animation because I know the fact that audience never be concentrated on long video art, which is longer than 5 min or even shorter than that, very well. That’s why I prefer to make short animation that is shorter than 3 min and strong images. My ideal type of film is resembled with commercial advertisement. Only 15 seconds that is unforgettable and give people huge impact!!

In addition, in this book there is an expressions such as ‘Manga Artist’ and ‘Write Manga’ and I like these expressions. In South Korea, most people say “I see manwha(漫畵;manga-same Chinese character and same meaning but a little bit different pronunciations)”. The differences between ‘see’ and ‘read’, ‘draw’ and ‘write’ are based on reputation of manwha Koreans have. Most people in South Korea think manwha is too light to say ‘read’ as a meaning of low quality and subculture so they say ‘see manwha’ in Korean.

In MANWHA, the story is as important as its picture/drawing. It’s similar with novel. With this reason, western people call manwha ‘graphic novel’, however Korean doesn’t admit manwha as a literature work and they express about its creation just ‘drawing’ like a doodle because they don’t focus on its story of manwha and they look down on the quality of story in manwha. Of course, drawing is not small notion but they say like this in Korean with bad meaning. They say “ He draws manwha.” not “He writes manwha.” And they never consider manhwa artist as an artist.

My reason to draw manwha/cartoon style is because of it. Every school and teacher say ‘don’t see manwha, never!!’ thus I am against their this opinion by keep drawing with manga/manwha style saying about their fault and truth to say about school in critical way.