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Coco Wang's 5.12 Earthquake Strips

grant

18:07 / 28.05.08

You may need to go outside for a bit after reading these comics.

Coco Wang has collected - almost in a Joe Sacco style - a few human stories from the incredible devastation of the Sichuan earthquake.

I'm pretty much blown away by the emotional content, but I'm also intrigued by the way the cartoons are put together - black, white, gray and red, with occasional loose framing or unframed images.

Reading around Coco Wang's interview elsewhere on that site, I get the idea these are in a Japanese style called "TuWen" in China - "Image-Text." These are somehow parallel to manga (or "manhua"), but I suppose tend to be smaller, shorter, more personal stories.

Tell me more about Coco Wang. Tell me more about TuWen.

And read the comics.

LDones

21:38 / 28.05.08

Powerfully affecting stuff. I'd never heard of Coco Wang before this.

There hasn't been much in the way of news coverage of quake here in the US - what coverage there is is very easy to miss, or ignore.

The cynic in me always wonders at the truth of stories like these, of extraordinary humanity during a crisis stoking fires of nationalism - but I don't know that the truth of it matters much. Protracted crisis can bring out the worst in people; but in my experience, sharp, quick, un-ignorable catastrophe will often reveal the very best instincts of human beings - and it's a massive comfort in a time of trauma to be able believe that people are basically decent when the world falls away.

Good interview, too. Thanks for the links, grant.

grant

01:40 / 29.05.08

I've been getting a little too much earthquake coverage in the form of newsletters from Half the Sky; I've excerpted a few of them on my LiveJournal (which is where a commenter alerted me to these great cartoons).

I have a hunch I've seen some original Japanese TuWen - newspaper strips chronicling a Japanese immigrant's experiences in San Francisco around the turn of the last century. They were collected by Fantagraphics... come to think of it, the Great San Francisco Earthquake is in that book, too. Hmm. Wish I could remember the name of that thing.

Oh, it's the Four Immigrants Manga, so maybe not a TuWen at all.

I dunno enough about these genres to say for sure.

The earthquake connection is weird, though. There's a panel of that down the page here....

Closed for Business Time

08:49 / 29.05.08

Thanks for this grant. Blown away, indeed. Great art, great story-telling - my critical faculties simpy refuse to register fault with this.

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