DRAMACONgratulations!: With a new manga "Nightschool" and animated series My Life Me, Svetlania Chmakova's star is burning hot!

Russian-raised, Canadian artist, Svetlania Chmakova has been making quite a splash in the manga and comics world for the past several years. She's been nominated for an Eisner and a Harvey award. Publisher's Weekly named Dramacon one of the best comics of 2005. The following year she won a MangaCast Yomi for Best Global Manga of 2006. And in 2007b Dramacon was placed on YALSA's list of the Best Graphic Novels for teens.

According to this interview at HomemadeMech.com, Chmakova faced communication challenges after immigrating to Canada at 16 years old.

...I managed okay--the schools in Russia are paced a little differently so I was further ahead on some subjects than my Canadian classmates of the same age. I was literally falling asleep in math class, because the stuff that was being taught I'd already known for at least a year. But when it came to English, Creative writing, History, etc., things were much more, um... challenging. LOL

In the cultural sense, I adjusted very easily--Canada is a very accepting country with a strong multicultural community and people tend to be very friendly overall. I blended right in.

It seems only natural to me that Chmakova would gravitate toward graphic work to communicate ideas. Comics are truly an international language. the interview goes on to reveal that after graduating from Sheridan College's esteemed classical animation program, she found the animation had "dried up". After attempting to get an illustration career off the ground, Chmakova began to explore comics and fell hopelessly in love with the medium.

This Popimage interview conducted around the release of the second volume of Dramacon explains further:

I still love animation very much and would like to do some, time-permitting. But I've come to realize that I'm a storyteller just as much as I am an artist, so I am not content just drawing. I need to tell stories! The comics medium is perfect for me.

I bought the first Dramacon to try it out and immediately had to have the remaining two. At first, I was taken aback by the soapish quality of the story (I am not the target audience after all!). But soon, I was devouring the book. The storytelling was clear, compelling and drove me forward through the story, speeding me up and slowing me down as needed. The dang thing was so addictive I was itching to buy the next two right away. I contemplated purchasing the hardcover Dramacon collection this Christmas for my niece but one or two scenes forced me to wait until she's a wee bit older.



Chmakova is one busy creator with print and webcomics all over the place like "Chasing Rainbows" at www.girlamatic.com, "Svetlana Wheneverly" at www.wirepop.com, and "The Adventures of CG" at www.cosmogirl.com. A list of what's available can be found here at her website, www.svetlania.com.

Svetlania looks happy on her livejournal blog in the
"snazziest shirt" she "ever owned." Check out:
http://svetlania.livejournal.com

Chmakova is one the best known North American manga creators. Initially in 2005, she found herself caught up in a backlash against work by OEL (Original english Language), or non-Japanese, creators. Purists have softened their stance since, especially regarding Chmakova, as talent has shone through over preconceptions.

In this terrific Publisher's Weekly interview with Chmakova and JuYoun Lee, the editor of her new Yen Press series Nightschool, which premieres in Yen's monthly anthology Yen Plus this month, explains part of the initial problem.

One reason for the initial fan rejection of OEL manga was the weakness of some of the early properties, according Yen Press publishing director Kurt Hassler. “People who loved manga but had very little instruction were being given contracts early on, putting out full books without the kind of guidance you need on a professional level.” By contrast, he said, Japanese and Korean editors spend a lot of time working with their creators.

“The biggest reason for doing a monthly magazine in Asia is to let the artist grow,” said JuYoun Lee, the editor of Nightschool and of Yen Plus. “You get more feedback from readers, and you see how the characters get their own power—they go in a different way sometimes from the initial setup of the artist.”

With critical and that elusive commercial success for Dramacon and Nightschool secured, Chmakova has launched several side ventures, including speaking engagements and classes, how-to-draw manga manuals, toy designs and a return to her animation roots as designer and co-creator of the forthcoming Teletoon animated series, My Life Me.



Produced by Canada's Carpe Diem Film & TV and the international media company, TV-Loonland, My Life Me started out small as a glint in producer, director and co-creator J.C. Little's eye.

Little 's boutique animation company, naturally called Little Animation, has quietly built a strong reputation creating animation-filled, creative websites that get across important messages in fun, interactive ways. They've built sites for Dr. Jane Goodall, the English Literacy Foundation, Capoeira For Kids, culminating in the website, Little Animation For Kids (which features great games and teaches kids about the environment) and the Little Earth Charter, a website explaining the UN's Earth Charter.

If you ever felt animation and websites for young kid's were vapid, Little has done her all to prove you wrong. In this interview with Green Living Online, Little explains she was an ad producer who grew tired of selling sugar to kids. A natural next step for Little was developing her own series. After coming up with the original idea, Little brought on board my friend, Cindy Filipenko, freelance writer, story editor and all around classy dame.

I met Cindy years ago when she was the Director of Creative Development at Vancouver's Bardel animation. She was one of the most approachable execs out there. She was about to start story editing Silverwing, the animated series based on Kenneth Oppel's series of fantasy novels. She's also the co-writer (along with Geoff Berner) of the animated holiday special, The Christmas Orange.

Cindy Filipenko and Geoff Berner's
The Christmas Orange.

I caught up with Cindy last week and begged for some of the details of the show's production. With Chmakova rounding out the creative team, the team began development in earnest throughout last year. Cindy was impressed with Chmakova from the start.

"My Life Me was J.C.'s idea. And she brought me in. J.C. also brought Svetlania on board. Svet's design is incredible. She's a real artist. She's so committed. When she's working on the show in Montreal, she works at the director's (Little's) triplex. And if J.C. weren't making casseroles and pulling her away from her desk she'd be there from morning to midnight."

The manga style influenced more than the character designs. The heightened portrayal of character's emotions and actual, black and white comic book panels reveal their hidden thoughts. It looks like the production team's dedication is paying off. According to Cindy...

"My Life Me got lots of attention at Cannes. It was sort of the belle of the ball because it looked so different and hip."

You can check out My Life Me's manga-meets-Archie-Comics look for yourself. TVLoonland.com has a five-minute trailer. It's bouncy and fun has a lot of info packed into it. This clip was designed to help sell the show to network's so it's also interesting to see how they spend time sharing details of the series' web component.



Want more links?

There's also plenty of info and artistic goodies at Svetlana's website, here.

Svetlana herself has expressed a liking for www.mangablog.net.

And finally, clicking here will take you to an early reaction to the greenlighting of My Life Me.

Beavers Up!

Comics: March To Legitimacy

One of the many reasons I have found Facebook so distracting lately (I joined two months ago) are members like Karen Green, whose Facebook notes on comics and Comic Adventures In Academia column over at Comixology.com are always worth a read. Her perspective as a scholar, librarian and comic fan always shed new light on her topics.



Her latest CAIA post provides an overview of the Graphic Novels and Academic Acceptance panel she moderated at the New York Comic-Con. The discussion entered into two streams, teaching comics as form worth serious study and teaching the creation of comics.

The debate is a challenging one with each person's background, personal strengths and preferences guiding what aspect they teach. The same debate continues to rage in the Film School world with the academics teaching criticism, history and how to read film while practitioners teach how to make it. I have always believed a combination of these approaches is necessary for a complete education in any art form.

For a complete write-up on that fascinating panel discussion check out Paul DeBenedetto's blog Wednesday's Child (cleverly named, I'm guessing, for the fact that new comics in North America are always delivered on a Wednesday).

The panel also discussed the continuing challenge of getting comics accepted as viable subject worthy of study. Some panelists have encountered strong resistance to adding courses on comics whereas others have avoided ghettoizing them, preferring instead to add comics here and there to their "regular" course reading lists. I'm not surprised this approach considerably lowers academic resistance.

It's a slow crawl to acceptance as an art form.

Karen recently pointed her Facebook community to the New York Times installation of a Graphic Books Bestseller List.

Apparently there is some debate as to whether the Times introduced this to keep their bestseller list "pure" of such a childish things as comics. The same cries rose up in 2007 when the Times introduced their Children's Bestseller List, arguably as a way of keeping those damned Harry Potter books off the bestseller lists to make room for real literature. An example of this point of view is this outraged column by the Huffington Post's Michael Glintz, who made some valid points in between some indignant posturing.

Imagine if the people behind the Nielsen Top 10 TV show listings decided that reality shows were "taking away" valuable attention from dramas and sitcoms. Let reality shows get their own list and the official Top 10 only include "genuine" TV shows, like CSI and House and Grey's Anatomy.

Imagine if Variety decided animated movies were just for kids and didn't belong on the box office Top Ten list, when more adult films like Knocked Up and Ocean's 13

Imagine if Billboard decided to banish country music to Nashville and reserve its list of Top Ten album for "real" music like pop, rock and hip hop.

Of course, that would be absurd. Any list of top TV shows that didn't include American Idol would be a joke. Any ranking of hit movies that ignored Shrek The Third or Ratatouille would be foolish. And any ranking of top CDs that pretended Garth Brooks and Carrie Underwood didn't exist would be bizarre. needed the space.

And yet that's exactly the status of The New York Times Bestseller list.

This isn't just about bragging rights for J.K. Rowling. This is about accuracy and fairness...and about the next Harry Potter. One major reason the books became a phenomenon in the first place was because they broke onto the New York Times
bestseller list. At many bookstores, any title that does so automatically gets placed in a prominent position and receives a hefty discount. Adults who read about the success of the books didn't have to skulk into the children's section to buy a copy. They found it right there in the front of the store next to new releases by Stephen King and John Grisham.

Vitriol aside, Glintz's argument on the Kid Lit front has validity. If literature aimed at a younger audience outsells an adult lit book, it should be above it on a best-seller list. And yes, the Harry Potter books are read by hundreds of thousands of adults as well, otherwise there's no way it would have sold so robustly. Much of the debate came form a concern over "ghettoizing" children's literature. But according to the Times article that announced the list, booksellers praised the additional list that allowed more room for more books to gain the attention a NY Times bestseller notice offers. That is hard to argue with.

Adults who read youth fare with crossover appeal (often fantasy works like Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials books or the Twilight series currently taking the world by storm) will continue to seek out those books no matter what list they are or are not on. In the continually splintering world that is today's media, having a separate list for various genres is a valuable resource and marketing tool.

I think the concern over whether a graphic books list "ghettoizes" comics is overstated. Comics is different medium than literature, sharing only the presentation in "book form". It requires a different set of linguistic and visual code-breaking to read and offers many techniques that writing alone does not. It deserves and requires its own list (or set of lists, as the Times has broken up theirs into three categories: softcover, hardcover and manga).

My main concern is how is the list calculated, since graphic novels sell the majority of their stock outside the mainstream bookseller market. To a layman like myself it appears the Times may have this covered, combing figures from a number of sources to get what may be a considered a fairly accurate reflection of sales:

Rankings reflect sales of graphic novels, for the week ending February 28, at many thousands of venues where a wide range of books are sold nationwide. These include hundreds of independent book retailers (statistically weighted to represent all such outlets); national, regional and local chains; online and multimedia entertainment retailers; university, gift, supermarket, discount department stores and newsstands. In addition, these rankings also include unit sales reported by retailers nationwide that specialize in graphic novels and comic books.

The subject of categorizing the lists properly is touched upon by another librarian, Robin Brenner, in this round table chat found on her Good Comics For Kids blog at Schoollibraryjournal.com. Yes, the lists will likely be dominated by Marvel and DC for the foreseeable future, possibly creating a public perception that comics are still super-hero books aimed at children. But that's merely a factor of the publishing and marketing reach of the big two. I believe we will see the subject matter and type of graphic novels bringing in the big numbers slowly grow to include more challenging work. What can I say? I'm in a Pollyanna mood today. :)

On Facebook, Green summed up the process of gaining acceptance thusly:

Based on a comment made by Bill Savage during our NYCC panel, I recently looked into the process by which the novel became a subject for academic study. According to one article, massive popular sales led to reviews in literary journals; the reviews led to acquisitions by academic libraries and the novel's introduction to an academic community; critical scholarship followed. This was in the 18th century.

Sound familiar?

Very familiar, Karen. So we move forward, step by step.



In my view, the first huge step, and by step I mean breakthrough, that propelled comics onto the literati radar came from the tremendous commercial and critical success of Art Spiegelman's Maus. Spiegelman had street cred among cartoonists for his underground comicx work, the art world due his publication Raw, and the literary through work with prestigious magazines like the New Yorker. His unique position straddling so many worlds enabled him to gain a toehold for his unique, cartoon memoir.

The Pulitzer Prize Committe was impressed but ended up giving Spiegelman a special award, finding his work hard to classify. I can almost see their confused faces. "Gee, it looked like comics, but the effect on me was like having read powerful literature What do we do now?" Maus raised the level of whether comcis were true to a true debate in the critical world. In the Maus write up for the "Witness& Legacy - Contemporary Art about the Holocaust" website, Stephen Feinstein describes art critic Adam Gopnik's attempts to wrestle with this question in the pages of the New Republic ("Comics and Catastrophe," New Republic, 22 June l987):

Is Maus art? The art critic Adam Gopnik has tried to answer this interesting question:

If you ask educated people to tell you everything they know about the history and psychology of cartooning, they will robably offer something like this: cartoons (taking caricature, political cartooning, and comic strips all together as a single form) are a relic of the infancy of art, one of the earliest forms of visual communication (and therefore, by implication, especially well-suited to children); they are naturally funny and popular; and their gift is above all for the diminutive.

Gopnik goes on to suggest the truth is actually the opposite and that cartoons represent "a relatively novel offspring of an extremely sophisticated visual culture."

I personally suspect the success of Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavelier and Clay, and the author's subsequent defences of everything comic and pulpy in magazines and online articles was the next huge catalyst that shook up many people's perception of the comic art form as being an actual ART form.

Even the Times early review of the book by Ken Kalfus, can't help but apologize for the comic book roots of the tale with grudging acknowledgments suggesting Chabon elevates the form.

Despite the creative straitjackets within which the cartoonists worked, Chabon plausibly identifies in the successful comic book many of the qualities of genuine artistry: craftsmanship, provocative themes and the artist's personal investment... ...In ''The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,'' Chabon may romanticize the comic book, but it's unillustrated prose that he makes love to... ...Novels conventionally draw a good deal of their power from surprising plot turns. ''The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay'' fulfills its quota of surprises, but most of its unexpectedness resides, comic-book-style, in its challenging situations, lushly written, in which you know beforehand that the heroes will prevail. It would make a nice comic book series -- the cousins square-jawed and ham-fisted -- but the depth of Chabon's thought, his sharp language, his inventiveness and his ambition make this a novel of towering achievement.

Amt Befner accomplished a more insightful summary of the pros and cons of Kavelier and Clay's comic book and pulp inspirations in her Salon.com review, despite at one point succumbing to the tendency to add "Bat! Bif! Bam!" sound effects to her article, as almost every journalist with little experience of comic books has done for the last forty years, thanks to the Batman television series of the sixties.

Their harebrained schemes lead to fame and fortune, often in a matter of days. Their loves are requited. They hobnob with the likes of Orson Welles, Salvador Dali and Joseph Cornell (whom Joe is said to resemble, in that both are "striking out for the sublime in a vessel constructed of the commonplace, the neglected, the despised"). Stan Lee knows their name. Greedy bosses prove to be good men with the boys' best interests in their hidden hearts of gold, and their enemies are foiled in the nick of time. This leads to some rather implausible last-minute saves, including one especially improbable sequence in which a well-timed phone call to Eleanor fucking Roosevelt (someone happens to have her number) saves the day...

...Luckily, the reader loves Sammy and Joe, too. They are lovable. (In fact, reading this book makes one wonder why so many authors are so ready to saddle their creations with ennui, thwarted ambitions and disillusionment.) Their last-minute saves and superhuman luck and pluck, moreover, are central to the theme of the book, which is the beauty and necessity of escape in all its forms...

I believe that Kavelier and Clay's popularity, critical success and Chabon's highly public love for comics as a medium put an acceptable, articulate literary face to a much-maligned form. In the aforementioned NYCC Graphic Novels and Academic Acceptance panel, blogger Paul Debenedetto describes Northwestern University professor Bill Savage's approach to teaching comics this way:

Bill's approach to teaching comics is twofold. First, what has done while teaching comics is to never put a class together that was "just comics", because it turned into a niche course students took to have fun, which wouldn't have any real academic merit and, as Savage said, "would get me fired"; thus, he picks his battles carefully...

...Second, he tries to integrate comics into courses he teaches based on subject matter (100 Bullets in a course on crime fiction, The Golem's Mighty Swing in a course on baseball) in order to make some change toward teaching comics. And he says it has worked. A lot of his peers have begun to teach books like Maus, which besides being a useful text for a class on WWII and the Holocaust, helped bring comics toward respectability by taking on such incredibly serious subject matter in an art form that was considered unrespectable. Now he has students that write Masters Theses on comics. Academic respectability is on a certain level a matter of "just doing it".

I believe Chabon's work helped legitimize comics in much the same way, sneaking a celebration of the form and history into a poetic, well-written literary work. The point may be arguable but since the release of the Chabon book, the Times itself has come a long way.

Take for example, this 2002 Nick Hornby article, "Draw What You Know", in which the popular author reviewed comics for the Times. In it ,Hornby struggled with the perception of comics as an acceptable, legitimate art form and spends a good portion of his review explaining himself.

Jump ahead two years and we find the Times publishing a lengthy 2004 article from Charles McGrath. "Not Funnies" is essentially, a defense of the form; a line in the snobby sand. It takes a great deal of time explaining why the comics form is one to respected by the literati and takes great pains to cover artists whose work reflects a more personal, artistic or journalistic perspective. McGrath came loaded for bear, basing the article on his group interview with respected creators Seth, Chester Brown, Adrian Tomine, Joe Sacco and Art Speigelman, who hosted the coffee clatch at his Soho apartment (pictured below in photo by Jeff Riedel of the Times).

Since then, the New York Times has provided respectful comic coverage for several years most notably from writer George Gene Gustines.

All in all, I have to throw my hat in with Karen on this new Times Bestseller list. Like me, she is excited at the prospects:

...whatever the cause the effect will be significant. They've now given an official imprimatur to graphic narrative. Which is AWESOME.

Debenedetto followed up his New York Comic-Con coverage with a terrific interview with Karen Green. you can find here, at his Wednesday's Child blog.

Beavers Up!