Last updated at 09:43, Thursday, 06 November 2008

ULVERSTON artist Kate Holden tells CLAIRE HIGH how spending a year in Japan helped develop her passion for graphic novels which are an everyday part of Japanese culture

ULVERSTON’S Kate Holden, held a manga workshop last week for over 20 teenagers at Barrow library and she cannot quite believe that it sold out.

The 23-year-old explains: “Manga is becoming quite widespread now but when I first started getting into it as a teenager there were not many manga fans in Cumbria – it was still a very niche thing.”

For those of you who have not heard of manga, Kate explains: “It is the Japanese word for comics – a form of sequential storytelling or graphic novel.

“But manga has its own distinctive drawing style of exaggerated characteristics and very large eyes, it also uses techniques that really involve the reader and draws them in – almost as if they are part of the story. It is highly emotionally charged.”

While manga is most definitely Japanese in origin, in the past decade or so it has gained a sizeable fan base in the UK.

Kate explains how she became a fan: “I discovered it after I became interested in animé cartoons on TV, such as Digimon. When I looked into it I found that these cartoons were based on comics books from Japan called manga.

“I got on the Internet and other fans were able to direct me to different sites on original manga.”

Her interest in the comics developed further when she attended a manga convention while she was in her first year at university in Preston: “I discovered there were people in the UK drawing their own manga comics.”

In fact Kate was lucky enough to do a workshop and learn how to draw manga herself at one of these conventions with one of the best known of the UK manga artists – Emma Vieceli.

Emma is an illustrator whose work has appeared in the Guardian and who is most famous for her manga version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Now Kate could follow in Emma’s footsteps with the publication of her first manga story, Fell, in a self-published anthology called Origins.

The anthology is the brainchild of Kate and three fellow manga fans whom she met on the Internet – Sally Jane Thompson, Rebecca McCarthy and Anna Fitzpatrick – who formed a collective called IndieManga nine months ago.

“It is a collaborative collection of short comics and a short story which we published under our collective name – IndieManga,” says Kate.

She adds that the four friends decided to publish their own stories after three of them, Kate included, reached the finals of a national manga competition – the renowned Rising Stars of Manga – but failed to win.

Rather than see their manga stories remain unpublished the four friends decided to go ahead and self-publish.

“The book was self funded and printed in the UK. When split between the four of us the costs were actually very reasonable,” says Kate.

They published Origins in September and aim to do three similar anthologies each year.

She says that turning her creations into a printed book has been a “massive learning curve”.

But adds: “There’s nothing like the feeling of having completed a comic and holding it in your hands for the first time.”

And she says, with no small amount of pride, that Origins has been well received so far: “We sent a copy to Ron Smith, the 2000AD comic artist who drew Judge Dredd, and he said he enjoyed it very much.”

While Kate has always had an interest in art, she says that studying fine art at A-level put her off pursuing the subject academically at university.

Instead she opted to do a language degree: “I wanted to do something different and decided on Japanese at Preston – I thought it would be very useful to learn another language.”

As part of her four-year course Kate studied Japanese for one year in Nogoya, in central Japan.

She says: “My passion for Japan started with my love of manga and going there certainly gave me a deeper understanding of why manga is like it is.

“Now I have lived there I realise just how deeply manga is rooted in the Japanese culture. It made me realise how important it is to root my manga in English culture.”

In fact Kate’s story Fell is very much rooted in Cumbria and she is well-known in manga circles for giving her characters strong northern accents and making them use Cumbrian slang in her stories.

She explains: “I don’t set my stories in Japan, even though I have lived there.

“To do so is frowned upon in the UK manga community and is called being Wapanese – wannabe Japanese.”

After such a sterling response, Kate is keen to run another manga workshop in the future, so fans who missed out first time round should watch this space. She finishes: “I don’t think I would’ve started making comics if I hadn’t gone to the workshop run by Emma three years ago. Now I hope I can pass on what I’ve learned to others.”

First published at 11:43, Wednesday, 05 November 2008
Published by http://www.nwemail.co.uk