The September month has been a hectic month! Except for working with a very exciting side project to our manga series Kick Off (which we will reveal in future posts) we have been travelling around Sweden to take part in the annual book fair in Göteborg, hold seminars about our award winning manga Kick Off in libraries and participating in events. Here’s a summery of the things we have done. Enjoy!
In early September we were invited to Swedish town Solna to celebrate the Solna day. It was a big party filled with concerts, teater shows, face paintings etcetera and mangafying people with Yokaj Studio! We mangafied kids nonstop during 4 hours. We managed to do about 40 kids, which is a new record. Some parents with kids had to stand in line for over one hour! The line of people was still long even though we did half an hour extra. But we had to pack and leave because later that night we were booked to hold a seminar at…
The Punkt Medis library! Fortunately we only had to talk (Yosh who did the mangafying earlier was really tired in her arm) about our work with our manga series Kick Off. Punkt Medis is a special place for us. It was here where the studio hold it’s first manga lecture. That was before the studio became the foremost manga studio in Sweden. Now, seven published books later and couple of awards later,we are back. Returning here reminds us to keep fighting in order to reach our dream. Ã’wÓ
Photo: Valbo Library
In the middle of September we were invited to Valbo bibliotek in Gävle by Daniel Gustavsson, a librarian who’s known for his blog Mangabibliotekarien in which he reviews manga for librarians. Daniel is also writing articles about manga for the local newspaper, he speaks about comics in general at radio station P4, writes articles for the comic magazine Bild & Bubbla and bossing over a couple of libraries in Gävle. Phew, think that’s all! Anyways, Daniel invited us to share our work with Kick Off.
The group of people who came to the library was a great mix of children, teens and adults. We were really flattered having a 70 year old lady among the audience, especially because she travelled a long way to get here just to listen to us!Â
A couple of students from a comic school in Gävle came by to listen to us. We received a lot of Kick Off fanarts from them, it was like Christmas! The picture above is not a fanart, but a nice drawing we got fram J. Wiking (Thank you!) The fanarts will be posted in the next blog post!
In the end of September we went to the annual book fair in Göteborg. We were interviewd by Bokjuryn, a Swedish national book voting organisation for kids and teens. Earlier this year our manga series Kick Off was awarded “Best comic 2008″ by Bokjuryn. You can read more about the award ceremony in our previous blog entry.
A lot of book signing going on at the book fair. We love the Elvis comics by Swedish comic artist Tony Cronstam and his wife Maria. In the previous years, we have had a very tight schedule at the book fair, and thus we never had a chance to time the Cronstams signing sessions. This year we finally got them!
The Swedish manga publishers seem to have a hard time right now cutting down a major part of their manga releases. A cut which was made obvious as the book fair this year lacked a lot of the usual manga activities arranged in previous years. Though there is a light in all the darkness. Our collegue Åsa Ekström made her debut with her manga series Sayonara September! We get ourselves a signed copy of course.
Matthew Forsythe signing his book Ojingogo at Science Fictoin book stores. Ojingogo was released in Sweden not long ago. His drawings are irresistably charming!
We bought copies of the newest issue of the Swedish comic magazine Bild & Bubbla #179. The issue features a long interview with our studio about our work with Kick Off. One interesting point is that the interview itself was made one year ago during the same Book fair in Göteborg, and featured interview was released last month. It’s a great interview anyway! Bild & Bubbla is known for its irregular prints.Â
Photo: Bokjuryn
That’s all for the September month! There were some moments when we worried if we could make it with all the events going on and the deadlines of the Kick Off side project. And again, we survived! Phew. We are very excited about this side project and we will of course reveal it in future posts. Please come back and check our blog new and then!
Thanks to
… Annika Malmborg at Solna Stads Kultur och Utveckling who invited us to the Solna day.
… Anne Mobark and Punkt Medis who invited us to Punkt Medis library.
… Daniel Gustavsson and Valbo bibliotek who invited us and did a great effort with the marketing.
… Everyone who came to listen to our seminars! A special thank to the lady who came a long way just to listen to us.
…Â All of you who gave us wonderful Kick Off fanarts and arts! They will be shown in a later post.
Svenska
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Nihongo (Web translation)
Monday, 19 October 2009
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Kick Off on indefinite time-out
