Seattle sisters teach others the Japanese style of cartooning

By Lisa Heyamoto
Seattle Times staff reporter

THOMAS JAMES HURST / THE SEATTLE TIMES Sisters Danielle Pelham, 19, left, and Nicole Pelham, 24, own their own manga publishing company and are part of a surge in female involvement in the comic-book industry.

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Showing someone the first comic book you ever drew falls into the same category as naked baby pictures and seventh-grade poems.

"It's so embarrassing," protests Danielle Pelham, 19, as her sister pulls "Guiding Light" out of its manila envelope and spreads it on the table of their Northgate anime store.

Tossing off a practiced older-sister smile, Nicole Pelham, 24, ignores and explains: "Guiding Light" is based on a novel she'd written about an intergalactic fighting fivesome ... "

"Oh God," Danielle moans. "It's getting worse."

Danielle, now a published comic-book artist, would really rather not revisit the sketches that betrayed her then-raw artistic skills. There aren't any gutters or frames, she says, and the characters' words are just kind of hanging out there in mid-air. It looked so ... unprofessional.

Nicole, who wrote the script for Danielle's drawings, would herself like to take back a few things from that first effort, but hey, everyone's got to start somewhere, right?

"Guiding Light" was the first comic the Pelhams published through NDP Comics, the company Nicole formed four years ago. And it's not, strictly speaking, a comic. It's called a manga — "comics" in Japanese. Compared with American comics, manga is drawn in a particular cartoonish style, the characters are often very complex and the storylines go far beyond good-guy-defeats-bad-guy-while-learning-a-valuable-lesson.

And they're not just for boys.

On the Internet, in small outfits like the Pelhams' and in large publishing houses bringing more manga from its native Japan, American kids — and girls especially — are gaining exposure to the movie-like plots and the wide-eyed, wild-haired characters of manga. Like the Pelhams' comic company, the manga scene is maturing and is gathering a devoted following of fans-turned-artists growing all the more swiftly for its widespread appeal.

For a fledgling and far-flung industry, accurate growth numbers are hard to come by. But ICv2, a pop-culture trade Web site, estimates manga took in about $100 million in retail sales in 2003, about a quarter of the $400 million sales for all comics that year.

TOKYOPOP, one of the largest manga publishers in the U.S., said it has doubled its revenue every year since it started in 1996.

	THOMAS JAMES HURST / THE SEATTLE TIMES Comic books such as those published by NDP Comics are drawing more female fans to manga and its diverse storylines, which include themes of fantasy, romance and friendship.

"This is the direction that the visual medium of sequential art is going," said Mark Paniccia, an editor at the Los Angeles-based company. "This is the evolution of the comic book."

Before Nicole Pelham learned to call it manga, the idea of realistic-acting-if-not-looking characters had been knocking around in her brain for years. She'd been writing mini-novels with elaborate plots, but could never fully articulate exactly what she wanted the characters to look like. It wasn't until she saw her first anime that the idea took shape.

Manga is both anime's predecessor and its evolution. Before, say, Pokémon was cereal-side entertainment, the stories were playing out in the pages of a manga. After Pokémon made it big, interest in its original manga began to grow.

When the Pelhams were kids growing up in Bothell, they had to wake up at 4:30 a.m. and flip to the Sci Fi channel to catch a glimpse of anime. The first time they saw the show "Ronin Warriors," it was a cartoon revelation.

Fast forward to Nija Chappel, who is 10. Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh have always been part of her cartoon repertoire. Sailor Moon is her Scooby-Doo. Anime is fun, but manga has always been the Seattle girl's thing.

She loves the action and the cool art. To her, they're as good as any book.

"It's kind of like Harry Potter," she said. "But way better."

Chappel's generation grew up on anime, Paniccia said. Since manga is pretty much anime without the animation, it's natural that kids like Chappel would gravitate toward the comic-book form.

"Almost every cartoon that a kid watches on Saturday morning or when they come home from school is done in an anime style," he said. "When they get to the bookstore and see graphic novels done in the same style, they identify with it quicker."

Nicole and Danielle Pelham completed "Guiding Light" a few years after watching that first anime. It didn't make quite the comic-scene splash they'd hoped for, but still, they sold 35 copies at a Seattle comic-book convention.

"It was enough for us to go, 'Let's try it again,' " Nicole said.

By their third try, they started creating a product that wouldn't mortify Danielle today. They started hiring artists with ideas and a style of their own. Danielle began writing and drawing "Dojo Destroyers," a manga about wandering warriors seeking to regain their honor. In addition to running the company, Nicole works on projects like "As Told By," a manga series, which recounts classic fairy tales from different characters' points of view — and with a twist.

Nicole thinks they might be one of just three small press comic-book publishers in the state. Within the entire small comic market, she says, few produce manga.

For a scene on the verge of quite possibly being The Next Big Thing, the homemade manga market is still very much in its infancy. Instead, more budding artists are drawing at home, and many are still in their early and midteens.

TOKYOPOP is in its third year of holding a contest to find the "Rising Stars of Manga." Each year, it receives more than 1,000 entries, some from kids as young as 13. Most manga fans want to become professionals, Paniccia said, and the chance to be published draws them every time.

	The manga "Dojo Destroyers" by Seattle company NDP Comics is about wandering warriors seeking to regain their honor.

Submissions for this year's contest will be accepted through Aug. 16, and winnings include $2,500 for the grand prize. The top 10 artists will be published in the annual book. For more information, visit www.tokyopop.com.

"The fan base has just continued to grow, and that little tiny slice of pie way back when has become huge," he said. "There's just something about this stuff that really stirs up the emotions of people, and they've got a story inside them and they want to tell it."

An artist for a Seattle gaming company, Fan Yang in her spare time creates manga that recount what happens post-happily-ever-after in fairy tales — a popular manga topic. After being published in the "Rising Stars" contest this year, Yang, 25, started to get a few gigs drawing manga — the first step, she hopes, in becoming a professional artist.

Though Yang has been published in her native China, she says the U.S. market is the ideal setting to embark on a career.

"The American market is now opening," she said. "It's easier to be outstanding here."

The Pelham's NDP Comics is also at the crossroads of hitting it big. Diamond Comic Distributors, which says its the biggest English-language comic-book distributor in the world, picked up their comics in February after three years of fruitless submissions.

With Diamond's nod, their manga will reach around 4,000 comic-book stores nationwide, a sweeping increase from the store-to-store knocking they'd been doing before.

"It means we actually have arrived at the point where we're a legitimate comic-book company," Nicole said.

For the Pelham's, NDP is still a nights-and-weekends side project. Nicole helps their mother run a Bothell day-care business, while Danielle is an international taekwondo champ. Yet it's traveled a few lucrative sidestreets that have helped it grow. Last year, the sisters opened Anime-Ka, their storefront in Northgate, where kids can buy their comics, learn to draw manga and play video games or watch anime for $10 a day.

They've also taught "Manga 101" classes at area libraries for three years. It's been accidentally and incredibly successful, sometimes resulting in up to 80 classes a year at libraries in Seattle, King and Snohomish counties.

Library patrons had been dying for a manga class when King County Library public program coordinator Deborah Schneider came across NDP. They were organized, they were great with kids and made wonderful role models, she said. They made kids think about books in new ways. And the added bonus? They made the library instantly cool.

"The kids gravitate to them because of their age," Schneider said. "They demonstrate that you can live your dream."

If the Pelhams are finally making it in the current manga scene, these young fans are its future. The round, sensible library tables are filled with kids clamoring for a lesson, calling out questions and scribbling with brow-furrowed seriousness. They don't necessarily want to draw Spiderman. They want to draw Dragonball-Z.

And here's the other remarkable thing about manga fans: Half are girls.

In Japan, especially, manga is marked by a breadth of appeal seldom enjoyed by American comics, which have stereotypically been relegated to the treehouses of adolescent boys. Yet in Japan, the recurring anecdote goes like this: Take a look around a Japanese subway, and even the schoolgirl and the businessman are reading manga.

About half of manga readers in Japan and the U.S. are girls, according to TOKYOPOP. Part of the appeal is in the diverse storylines, which include fantasy, romance and friendship comics as well as the shoot-'em-ups and superheros, Paniccia said.

Emily Harrold, who works at Seattle's Zanadu Comics, has seen manga's influence play out in her downtown store. Most female customers head straight to the manga section, she said, which had to be expanded from the two shelves two years ago to the entire wall of today.

Paniccia says he's seen a similar shift while scouting for talent at art schools across the country.

So what's with the female interest? Nicole Pelham is willing to take a guess.

"(Manga fans) are girls who had liked the idea of comic books but didn't necessarily like the stories they were reading," she said. "Manga storylines are just so much more appealing, and I think that was a big draw for girls."

All but three of the 25 artists that have worked for NDP were girls. It's not that the Pelhams sought them out, Nicole said, it's just that girls are the people who are serious about it.

"Guys rarely choose manga," she said. "It really is weird."

As the Pelhams preside over a "Manga 101" class of about 40 kids at the downtown Seattle library, Chappel, the 10-year-old, puts up her hand to ask a thoughtful question, then bends down low over her work. At home, she sells her original manga to friends and relatives for $2 a pop.

Glancing over at the Pelhams, she reveals that she wants to be a manga artist when she grows up. Or an actress. No, she changes her mind. Manga artist it is.

Lisa Heyamoto: 206-464-2149 or lheyamoto@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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