Huge Crowds Swarm CICAF
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on May 8, 2007 Sign up now!
by Kai-Ming Cha, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 5/8/2007
This year’s China International Cartoon and Animation Festival, held April 29-May 4 in Hangzhou, China, featured comics, cartoons and merchandise aplenty as kids, teens, parents and even grandparents made their way through the exhibition halls.
This year's gathering of media companies, video and animation studios, and publishers drew 430,000 people during its six-day run. This year's attendance was almost double last year's, which drew more than 280,000 people. The weeklong show coincided with China's national holidays, when the entire country takes a seven-day vacation starting May 1. Not coincidentally, May 2 was CICAF's biggest day, with 89,000 people swarming the five exhibition halls.
Hong Kong Pavillion
Over 300 companies were present, out of which 24 were publishers selling books ranging from Japanese manga licenses like Hikaru No Go, Fruits Baskets and Slam Dunk! to interior design books, cookbooks and Korean light novels (short illustrated prose novels). Except for Comicfans Culture, China's primary publisher of local comics and the equivalent of Tokyopop in the U.S., most book publishers in China publish a range of material that includes but is not exclusively comics. As one of the biggest supporters of local comics talent, Comicsfans Culture brought a number of its artists to the festival. They included the widely popular Rain (whose ethereal illustrations were featured in CICAF's art gallery alongside works by Korean artist Seeyeon Won and Hong Kong artist Yu Liang Wang), JiDi (whose Tim Burtonesque comic, My Way, has been published in France and Singapore), ENO and KEXIN (whose series, MINOR, was Comicfans Culture’s most popular book at the festival).
 Novelist Guo Ni at her signing. |
U.S. artists Phil Ortiz (of The Simpsons fame) and legendary cartoonist Phil Yeh stopped by CICAF on their "Two Phils Tour." Yeh's family hails from Hangzhou, where he has been visiting and bringing his work since the late 1970s. Yeh signed a deal this past February with the Beijing publication Little Star Magazine, which now carries serials of Yeh's Winged Tiger comics. Little Star Magazine is published bimonthly for international schools in China.
Yeh hopes to publish a full book of his Winged Tiger stories for Beijing's 2008 Olympics. His book Dinosaurs Across America is forthcoming in the U.S. from NBM this fall. Yeh also hopes to publish Dinosaurs in China as well.
Phil Ortiz came with character designs and ideas for animation, comics and merchandising. He believes his animation work will appeal to a Chinese audience, and he also hopes to create children's books based on the same characters.
With the growing popularity in China of comics and entertainment for teens and young adults, the illustrated novel has also gained popular favor. Guo Ni, China's most popular young novelist, was on hand to sign posters and books. Her serialized novel, Ladies Revolution, is currently up to volume four. Volume one has sold close to 400,000 copies, according to her sales representative, Jing Jiang Liu. Liu is marketing manager of JouStar Cultural Diffusion, a creative studio and brand-name pioneer of the illustrated novel in China.
"We're interested in the growing market," Liu said of the growing demand for comics and illustration in China. "We want Chinese people to develop their own product so that we don't have to look to foreign material [for entertainment]."
