Manga Library

AJS Twilight Briefing - Visiting Manga Artist,
Madeleine Rosca

Event Report by Katherine Pickhaver

In March of 2008, the Manga Library along with The Australia-Japan Society of Victoria were honoured to welcome Australian manga artist Madeleine Rosca to talk about her work. Last year Seven Seas Entertainment published the first of three volumes of Madeleine’s manga “Hollow Fields” which was runner-up in the International Manga Award run by Japan’s Foreign Ministry for non-Japanese manga artists.

Hailing from Tasmania, Madeleine is only the second Australian manga artist to be published professionally, the first being Queenie Chan, whose 3 volume “The Dreaming” has been published by Tokyopop.

In her talk, Madeleine related how Queenie’s success at breaking into an industry, with such a low profile in Australia, had inspired her. After looking at what Queenie had done, and trying it out herself, Madeleine encouraged all aspiring manga artists to create and post a webmanga on sites such as Wirepop.

Madeleine also talked about the steps she follows when creating a volume of “Hollow Fields”. In order, they are: script, rough thumbnail sketch of each page, final script broken down per panel, pencil drawing of the page, inking, then scanning into a computer to add the mechanical guide, tones, lettering and sound effects. However at Madeleine’s level, she now has someone else add the tones, lettering and sound effects giving her more time to be creative. It was also interesting to learn that the choice of a right-to-left Japanese 'style' reading direction for Hollow Fields was a marketing decision made by Seven Seas publishing. Previous incarnations of Hollow Fields before it was picked up by Seven Seas can still be seen on Madeleine's Deviant Art page and are in the standard western style left-to-right direction.

For further information on Hollow Fields check out the GoManga page, where you can also read a free online preview.

GoManga also has an in-depth interview with Madeleine here.

And Madeline has weblog you can follow on live journal called Clockwork Hands

Direct links to Madeline's early versions of Hollow Feilds on her Deviant Art page are here:
First version: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3.
Prototype: Page 1, Page 2.
WirePop version: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5, Page 6, Page 7, Page 8.

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