On Sunday, 22 April 2018, Webtoon portal Comico held an event called Comico Access: Let’s Go Global in Malang, East Java. The event took place in HD’R Comic Cafe Malang, and attended by many indie comic artists and circles from East Java, including Malang based comic circle Perakit Komik.
The event started at 14.00 West Indonesia Time (WIT). In the first session, one of the comic editors from Comico, Evelyne, began the event by introducing Comico Indonesia. Comico Indonesia, which has been established only recently, aims to bring more Indonesian comic artists to the industry. With Comico Challenge, Evelyne hopes that more talented comic artists from Indonesia can be recognized by more readers, just like the event’s tagline “Let’s Go Global!”.
In the next session, two guest contributors made their appearances. The first guest contributor is Esa Pavlichenko, a comic artist who is famous as the creator of Pavlichenko: the Cute Hearted Roshan Sniper. As the representative from the comics magazine re:ON Comics, Esa told the audiences how to submit their work to re:ON Comics. He also agreed with Evelyn that Indonesia needs more comic artists. “Indonesia needs new comic artists,” he said. “Nowadays, many comic publishers compete against each other to publish new work. However, many new comics that has been published usually came from comic artists who have already had their works published in other publishers before. It is time for regeneration.”
There are some interesting questions brought in the Q&A session. One of the participants asked about how re:ON Comics handles intellectual property rights. Esa explained that while re:ON Comics has the right to publish the comic artists’ works, the IPs still belong to the comic artists as the creator. So when re:ON Comics plans to create transmedia products like merchandise or movie, they still need permission from the comic artist, and the comic artist can still get income from royalties.
The second guest contributor was Tessa Y.P, the founder of Kisai Entertainment, Indonesian comic writer, and one of Indonesian representative in Silent Manga Audition Competition. As writer, Tessa’s session had more focus on narrative. She described what makes a protagonist interesting, and how to make the readers sympathise. He also discussed about antagonist characters and their archetypes.
The last part of the event is sharing session. In this session, Esa, Tessa, and the editors of Comico casually discussed about comics or publishing with participants. Together, the guest contributors and visitors talked about various things while eating some snacks from HD’R Comic Cafe.
See also:
Interview: Silent Manga Audition 2016 Grand Prix Runner Up Tessa Y.P
The Indonesia Anime Times | Photo, text and translation by Dany Muhammad
