Who's Who In The CBU Update 2009

Who are... Park and Barb?

Barbara Lien-Cooper and Park Cooper, are the owners of Wicker Man Studios and of Gun Street Girl, its flagship project created by Barbara and artist Ryan Howe. Barbara has written for many websites, and served a one-year stint as Managing Editor of the multiple-Eisner-award-winning print magazine Comic Book Artist. Park is the Editor-in-Chief of indie comics company Septagon Studios, and of Comics Bulletin's sister-website MangaLife. Together, they also co-wrote the graphic novel Half Dead, published by Dabel Brothers Productions and Marvel Comics, and later picked up again by Desperado Publishing, and the New Media project The Hidden for manga publisher Tokyopop. They both also adapt manga and edit manga and comics for various companies.

Children of the Electron

By Park Cooper

I'm sure I'll run this particular column this summer, but as I first write these words, I'm subbing for a charter school who've had a teacher leave. Yet another chance to field-research America's youth and their relationship with pop culture. A charter school apparently brings a rather wacky mix of students…

I spoke with two young 11th grade men on the merits of various video gaming platforms… they looked forward to playing God of War, enjoyed Final Fantasy… one 11th grader felt that Kingdom Hearts, with its Disney content, was too "kiddie" …the other wasn't bothered by it. They recommended Final Fantasy: Tactics to me… One enjoyed the Onimusha series, the other kept confusing it with some other game such as Kessen or Romance of the Three Kingdoms or something.

One young 9th grader was very gung-ho about comics… loving Frank Miller… loving Gaiman's 1602, but not really knowing what else Gaiman has written… loving Wolvie's ORIGIN saga… He was impressed with what I do, but I wondered-- would it upset parents that their child's substitute teacher recommended Half Dead, a horror comic for let's face it, adults? So, for that reason only, I didn't.

On the other hand, it was easy to talk to the girls and a few boys about manga and related anime. While a couple of students finished up their semester final, one manga artist and I took turns drawing little sketches of characters from Azumanga Daioh (I can draw the cats). She and her friend were quite amused.

Fruits Basket is truly the reigning monarch of manga right now, followed by Azumanga Daioh and then Yotsuba. One young woman had many Fruits Basket accessories... rice-ball-person purse, FB bag and keychain... I tell you, there's no point in worrying if kids are going to still be reading comics in the future. All you have to do is make yours so good that they try it and tell each other about it, because believe me, they'll still be buying and reading sequential comics stories of some type. If you don't make comics for 8-year-olds now, so what? The medium's not going to be alien to them. And even if your favored genre is, it won't matter. True Crime is a genre that kids don't want to read, that we don't want kids to read, but have the readers of True Crime stories grown old and passed on, without any new readers to help the genre grow? Of course not. Normal people can learn that they like new things even after they grow up.

And people can get into a genre in many ways: I found a young man in the special ed room playing on his laptop (the kids here drip with technology… cell phones, camera phones, digital cameras, PSPs, camcorders, iPods, laptops with wireless internet… text-message phones [the kind with full keyboards, I mean]), playing the superhero game City of Heroes. He was blown away when I told him I had played it, even if it was only for the free trial period.

Another young man who always has his laptop likes to play some MMORPG online… a game that's Korean in origin, but is now mostly populated by German players for some reason… he has a page of basic German phrases with their English translations that he's made (hand-written) so he can better communicate with other players.

Something else I've noticed is when you ask students these days where they'll be in 10 years, most of them say they'll be rich. You know what? Most of them won't be. I can't bring myself to tell them.

Anyway, of those who say they'll be rich, most of them see that happening from... being a doctor? Lawyer? No. They see themselves getting rich from the entertainment industry in some way. Rapping, singing, writing, art... And, again, it's not going to happen. I feel like American Idol and Rap and, well, comics and manga, I guess, have fed these kids a really false dream. Well... almost infinitely unreliable, let's say that.

On the other hand... I'm fooling myself. That's not really a problem in comics or manga. Wanting to make your own manga is just the natural thing that manga readers do. I truly think the I'm Gonna Win On American Idol Someday crowd really is a big problem, but I'm kidding myself to think that the comics/manga problem is any kind of widespread problem for most kids. Just because one in every 2000 hardcore comics readers wants to figure out how they can write Spider-Man or Superman, that really doesn't make it a widespread problem. Barb and I recently discovered the anime GENSHIKEN which is in the genre (we never before knew it was a genre) of the School Anime Club genre (I guess other examples might be Cosplay Complex and Comic Party? Or maybe not, haven't read or watched those. Barb tried 5 minutes of Comic Party the anime once and it happened to be a scene where they're sitting at a convention table wishing people would stop and buy their comic and she was like "Turn it off, turn it off, it's too real...").

Genshiken shows that reading manga/watching anime and then starting to try to draw your own doushinji (homemade comics, whether original concepts or fanfic comics) is just a natural thing -- it doesn't mean you want to be the next Bendis. In fact in Japan, the best doushinji are often treated as the equal of the mainstream manga. The manga companies encourage this behavior, instead of having lawyers lean on them -- whatever gets people to come around to trying the originals. Plus, it's also too big to control. But my point is that it doesn't mean you're trying to make your own studio so you can pitch that JLA miniseries you've been dreaming about -- it's as common as lemonade stands.

So it's the end of the school year and as I write most of this column, lots of kids are on field trips and things... someone breaks out a Gamecube. They play a fighting game, Smash Bros., populated by the main characters from about 20 different video games, and the girls (and then the boys, unfazed, chime in) discuss who among the characters is cartoon-hot and cartoon-sexy (Batman represents the latter, it is said, which is interesting since he wasn't a character in the game-- a girl just volunteered this information, which means she's thought about this topic before).

One student's whole family are huge Naruto fans. The student herself, of course, is yet another manga artist.

So this is a world of games, of manga, of lots of high technology. I also did the old writing exercise of "if you were stuck on a desert island for 2 months, what 5 things would you bring?" More than axes or fishing equipment or guns or tents, they went for game systems, dvd players, laptops and cellphones. We had to make a rule that one item slot could be used for Energy: electric generators, batteries, battery rechargers, etc.

If the X-Men are the children of the atom, these are certainly the children of the electron, of the Spark.

But then it's not just them. It's everybody. Today Barb and I went swimming in the local swimming pool, and we heard these 5th-grade-or-so kids for whom English is their second language choosing who would get to be Naruto and who would be Kakashi. When I was a kid, it was Spider-Man and Iceman. These kids, too, are watching Cartoon Network. The adventures jump from Japanese to English to Spanish.

This is not just a fad.

And ninjas are not just the new superheroes. This is going to mean something different, and you really might as well understand that now.

My advice? Embrace it. Then later when your kids ask you if you'd rather be Naruto or Kakashi, you can tell them.

"You're young. You be Naruto. I'm more the Kakashi type. I've been around, and I've got a lot to teach you... but I can appreciate what your stuff is all about."