The editors of Japanese manga magazine Morning recently announced the winners of their 4th annual Morning International Comics Competition, and posted the three top entries translated into English and Japanese so readers around the world can experience these multicultural comics for themselves.
The grand prize winner is The Unreberating Echo by Kim DaeJin, a 50-page full-color story about a student who discovers to his horror that alphabet letters representing the letters "N" and "G" are disappearing before his eyes. Before long, he loses the ability to form consonant sounds with his voice too -- but he's perplexed to discover that he's the only one suffering from this affliction.
The Unreberating Echo earned praise from the M.I.C.C. selection committee for its "individualistic and powerful style." According to M.I.C.C. committee lead Koji Tabuchi, Kim's work has a theme that "possesses a level of originality that seems very well thought out."
Second place was split between two entries: one from England and one from Hong Kong.
Starfields by Michael Aubtin Madadi was singled out by the judges as being similar in tone and style as heta-uma (bad-good) manga. They even nicknamed Madadi "London's Yusaku Hanakuma" (the creator of Tokyo Zombie, who is also featured in AX: Alternative Manga Volume 1 from Top Shelf).
Starfields is a 27-page black and white short story about a young man's encounter with a "robo-telly" at a park bench. Both have reasons to be miserable: the man is barefoot, possibly because someone stole his shoes. The robot television is facing obsolescence as well as a broken heart. Can they somehow find comfort in each other's company?
The other second place winner is Apple Baby Cat by little thunder, a professional comics creator from Hong Kong.
This two-part, full-color story is a surreal yet simple story about a young girl who encounters a strange fruit growing from the tree outside her window: an apple that looks like a cat, that also talks to her. Soon enough, the girl discovers that her visitor is nothing but trouble wrapped in a cute package.
The M.I.C.C. judges called out Apple Baby Cat for its "fashionable and exotic" art style, but also mentioned that "the underlying tenderness of the work can be understood by all."
Take a read of all three stories, and you'll get a sense of the diversity of art and storytelling styles that really caught the judges' eyes.
In summing up the results of this year's competition, Tabuchi also made mention of the goals of M.I.C.C.
"...our objective is not to "import" manga authors from around the world. While we naturally hope to encourage and attract talented individuals who could never have been raised within Japan, we do not believe that there would be anything that could make us happier than to "export" the joy of reading manga. We truly hope that increasingly diverse manga, such as the prize-winning works in this competition, will be able to act as a foothold to do just that."
Check out the rest of the entries and some of the somewhat blunt yet insightful comments from the selection committee. It'll give you a pretty good idea of how rigorous and thoughtful the selection process was for this batch of winners.
They're accepting submissions now for the 5th annual Morning International Comics Competition. If you're considering entering, you've got until July 31, 2011 to submit an entry, so that'll give you plenty of time to pull together your very best work. Check out the rules and guidelines in English, or visit their contest page for links to read the rules in Japanese, Korean, Italian, French, and Mandarin.
The grand prize winner will take home $3,000 and have the honor of being published in Morning or Morning Two, which are both very popular and influential manga magazines. The winner and runners up will also be assigned an editor from Kodansha who will assist in preparing subsequent works for future publication. Give it your best shot, and good luck!
Image credits: © Kim DaeJin, © Morning / KODANSHA, © Michael Aubtin Madadi, © little thunder
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