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Monday 14 October 2013

Chinese Publishing British Comics? Why Not?

I was recently asked, quite seriously, if I had ever considered going to Chinese Manhua publishers to get UK comics up and running again?  I am assuming it was serious but who can tell?

The answer is, yes, I have considered it. I even tried a few years back after Indian comic publishers totally screwed me over (I've written about this elsewhere on this blog). I have also outlined my interest in Manhua (Chinese comics) on this blog:

http://hoopercomicart.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/chinese-manhuamanhwa-manga.html

and

http://hoopercomicart.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/benjamin-zhang-bin-benjamin.html



China has an ever growing economy and let's face it they own the London Taxi Company and have invested in many other UK businesses. The Chinese have allways had a knack for spotting good investments or even helping revive rather lame companies.



The Chinese are also excellent when it comes to the publishing business.  The paper and printing quality is even -on average publications- excellent.

This is why so many publishers have their books printed by Chinese companies -and the printing prices help!  Quirk Publications whose book The Geeks Guide To Dating I reviewed recently had it printed in China and it's excellent quality.  China currently seems to be leading the way in printing books and why not comics?

A Chinese publisher could receive a comic produced in the UK, forward it to their printers and ship copies back to the UK and from what I've seen it's cheaper than going to European or American printers.

But I can sense the panic of some reading this.

I am not suggesting that, say, a new UK range of comics or comic albums/graphic novels would be full of Chinese originated material. Yes, there could be series translated for the UK and some of the Manhua is absolutely gorgeous. There are creators in the UK such as John Erasmus, Tom Elmes et al who have produced great books and there is no reason why, once a publishing plan has been drawn up, that Chinese and UK originated material could not sit side-by-side on the book shelves.

But there has to be diversity of genres and even product formats and in that China does excell and is forward looking, rather than Japan which is very insular and has no interest in anything other than Japanese books.

Yes, I could do business with China!








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