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by This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it on Friday, 11 September 2009
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Meet the Emirati entrepreneur giving Japan’s most popular art form an Arabic twist.
If Superman and Sultan got into a fight, who would win? One is a US superhero from the DC stable, the other a teenage Emirati manga character whose sidekick is a falcon named Majd. Granted, it’s not yet a conundrum set to divide the comic-book masses, but if 33-year-old Qais Sedki has his way, superhero junkies will at least be asking the question in a few years time.
Sedki, a slight, softly-spoken man with a background in IT, is the author of what is being billed as the first original, Arabic-language manga comic. Gold Ring, which tells of Sultan’s adventures and challenges as he competes in an epic falconry contest, is his stab at putting an Emirati slant on a uniquely Japanese genre.
With it, Sedki hopes to encourage more children to read in classical Arabic, and to create a window into Emirati culture. More broadly, the book’s launch is a sign that manga mania is at last starting to bite in the Middle East.
Manga, an edgy art form born in the wake of World War II, is hard to miss. The comics resemble cinematic storyboards, where action-packed narratives are carried along by exquisitely drawn saucer-eyed characters with spiky hair and — bizarrely — pointed ears.
Far from being a niche market, however, these novels have sales figures that most conventional publishers would kill for. Despite sliding a little in popularity in recent years, the manga market is still deliriously large and comprises nearly a third of all printed materials in Japan. (Ride the Tokyo subway and you’ll see the full gamut of greying corporates, schoolchildren and twenty-somethings pawing through their daily fix.)
Little surprise then, that the former Japanese prime minister Taro Aso — a self-confessed comic addict — earlier this year suggested ramping up the export of Japan’s manga heroes as part of a 15 trillion yen ($162.48bn) economic stimulus package.
Still, manga hasn’t waited for an invitation to spread its wings. By setting up Pageflip, the Dubai publishing house producing Gold Ring, Sedki is now serving for a slice of a competitive $5bn global market. In Britain alone, graphic novels last year generated the best part of $16m in bookstores. In the US, sales have tripled in the past four years; astonishing in a country where home-grown comics rarely seen a print run of more than 150,000.
From its start as a cult, manga is now a fully-fledged publishing phenomenon and top literary houses including HarperCollins, Random House and Simon &Schuster all have fingers in the pie.
For Sedki, his interest traces back to the first wave of crossover anime cartoons in the 1980s, which were dubbed into Arabic and aired on local television networks. Nearly all began life as weekly manga comics.
“Some Emiratis grew out of it, but a good chunk, like me, held on to that interest,” he says. “It fuelled an interest in all things Japanese — I am fascinated by their ways, their work ethic, their culture and history.”
Most Middle Eastern kids today are familiar with Pokémon-style graphics and anime (Japanese animation) but Sedki’s is the first made-in-the-UAE manga. His aim is to create a tempting comic format to bridge the gap between kids’ books and heavy novels for 10 to 12-year-olds, in a bid to show young Emiratis that Arabic isn’t just a language for academia.
“Kids don’t think of classical Arabic as an entertaining form,” he says, shrugging. “I want to show that it can be just as fun as any other language, and not all associated with work or study.”
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