DZ-manga

DZ-manga (, ALA-LC: dīzād māngah), sometimes written DZ manga, are comic books originally published in Algeria, either in French, Arabic or Tamazight, that draw inspiration from Japanese manga.

Etymology

Other name variations on DZ-manga, such as Algerian manga and manga-influenced comics can occasionally be heard as substitute names, but the term "DZ-manga" is the most commonly used.

The term "international manga", as used by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, encompasses all foreign comics which draw inspiration from the "form of presentation and expression" found in Japanese manga.

History

Although manga was only recently introduced to Algeria, its current popularity can be traced to the appearance on Algerian airwaves of its televised sister, the anime. In the 1980s, Algeria's lone state-controlled national television network (then RTA, later renamed ENTV and then EPTV) broadcast youth programs that featured Japanese animated TV series dubbed in French or Arabic. These programs were largely an oddity: at a time when mass media explicitly aimed to differentiate Algerian national identity from Western influences, the RTA was pressured by the Ministry of Information and Culture to favor local productions and shows from the Arab world. The RTA, however, was often unable to answer this growing demand. Following the example of nearby Arab countries, it chose Japanese animation as an economical and culturally accessible alternative to American animation. As a result, anime such as Grendizer or Captain Tsubasa made an indelible mark on youth growing up in the 1980s, leading Yacine Haddad (2008) – a rising star in the Algerian manga community – to dub this generation "the Otaku Generation" (otaku, a Japanese language word for a particular type of nerdy manga fan, has been reappropriated by communities outside of Japan to generically suggest a manga and anime enthusiast).

The prevalence of anime in Algeria increased rapidly starting in the late 1980s, facilitated by both technological and political factors: the rapid spread of cable and satellite access at that time coincided with a short-lived political liberalization (1989–1992) and the corresponding decrease in state control over programming. Algerian viewers responded readily, rapidly developing an enthusiastic following for French translations of anime from across the Mediterranean. By the turn of the millennium, satellite television further expanded the market, bringing anime dubbed in Arabic to Arabophone viewers, on networks such as Spacetoon and the Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC), as well as the Tunisian Radio and Television Establishment (ERTT). The emergence of broad Algerian interest in manga coincided with this growth in demand for anime. Furthermore, like anime, Algerian manga's growing fanbase included a heterogeneous selection of linguistic communities: unlike much print media and literature, the new works were equally able to attract Arabophone and Francophone readers. More recently, the rise of the Internet age further enhanced the spread of manga in Algeria: video-sharing technologies have made a wide selection of anime available at little or no cost, and Algerian otakus' blogs have brought together the community of manga enthusiasts, encouraging the development and exchange of fanmade productions and scanlations (amateur captionings of foreign comics).

By the end of the 2000s, publishers finally found it feasible to start commercially supporting manga production: Kaza and Lazhari Labter, both publishers of youth literature, began publishing manga in 2011, and Z-Link, the first publisher dedicated entirely to manga was founded in 2007. Among these, the most notable is Z-Link: with a specific focus on developing new artists and bringing them to the market, it predominantly publishes small-format, softcover, black and white manga books with a small DZ-manga icon in the bottom left corner of their jackets. These run either as independent volumes or, on rare occasions, as installments in a small series (like Victory Road). They are printed on low-quality paper, allowing locally published volumes to remain affordable. This combination of publication strategies has enabled Algerian manga to circumvent the financial barrier to access that young Algerian consumers face with imported manga and even local BD albums. Easy to serialize, Z-Link's low-cost medium has also helped artists to compete – at least on a local level – with foreign manga that admittedly are more intricate and include higher quality graphics.

Z-Link and Kaza both pride themselves on horizontal integration of their in-house management, where the artists are given full control over all steps of the publication of their product – from creation, to editing, publishing and distribution. Z-Link goes even further, working to foster new talent until it can gain a truly public following: traditional calls for submission are supplemented by scouting of unpublished works on blogs, Facebook pages and other collective platforms used by fan communities online. Aspiring artists are encouraged to reach out to an audience, so that budding amateurs, who previously created for friends, can develop a wider fanbase and become published artists. Typically, new artists first publish short installments in Z-Link's monthly manga and gaming magazine, Laabstore, before being commissioned to produce a small print run (500–1,000 copies) of an independent volume. This structure permits Z-Link to reconfigure the traditional publishing channels and capitalize on its position between conventional publication and self-production. It provides the infrastructure for autonomous artists to achieve local print runs at a reasonable cost. Since their creation, Z-Link and Kaza have developed an enthusiastic and loyal following. Their catalogs, however, remain limited in number and difficult to procure, as the works are still distributed through a capillary network including a few bookstores in Algiers, Oran and Constantine.

Characteristics

DZ-manga has come to encompass a variety of artworks that differ widely in how they relate to their Japanese predecessors. These disparate works are united by their use of references to and techniques from Japanese manga: they frequently use drawing styles derived from it, often incorporate the stylized aesthetics and facial portrayals that popularly characterize the medium, and occasionally even refer directly to characters or plotlines from famous works. Within this loose commonality, however, lies a broad spectrum of stylistic variations. Books produced by Algerian manga publisher Z-Link are carefully modeled after the Japanese format, in stark contrast to those produced by young-adult literature publisher Kaza, which are colorized and read left-to-right.

Formatting differences in Algerian manga productions derive in part from assumptions held by publishers about the expectations of their readership. The colorized, left-to-right formatting of Kaza emphasizes the historical connection between Algerian artists and Franco-Belgian graphic traditions, easing the reader from a familiar style into narrative plots and iconography inspired by Japanese shōnen manga which might otherwise seem alienating. In contrast, Z-Link's publications follow the emerging interest of Algerian readers in cultural models outside of Europe. Works in this spirit strictly follow the aesthetic formalisms of Japanese manga, including right-to-left pagination, stereotyped facial features such as oversized doe-eyes, caricatured facial emotions, and expressive dialogue bubbles.

Cultural status

In addition to the many conventional difficulties that DZ-manga has overcome in order to be successfully marketed in Algeria – such as the medium literacy rate and the limited purchasing power – Algerian manga authors have also been impeded by a lack of broadly recognized cultural status. Contrary to editorial cartoons and s, which have successfully established a tradition with their commentary on current events, manga has not yet established an identity internally within the Algerian cultural landscape. This lack of tradition is compounded by the nature of manga itself: its relative newness, its constitutive topical heterogeneity, and its complete independence from French-Algerian postcolonial rhetoric make manga a free agent, without a well-defined market or tradition. Recognizing this, producers of manga have attempted to graft their art onto other causes and traditions in order to expend DZ-manga's appeal and insinuate it into broader Algerian culture.

Kaza director and graphic artist Selim Zerdani, for example, integrated manga into his efforts to develop elementary literacy. He justifies his choice to publish a manga in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) with his personal imperative to guide readers toward better reading: "Many people do not know how to speak this language [classical Arabic] properly, thus it is only legitimate to direct readers toward a good reading". Zerdani's valuative judgment echoes biases against dialectal Arabic as an improper language which were cultivated by the last forty years of the Algerian government's linguistic policy. Implicitly, however, his judgment also promotes manga as a respectable form of literature, inviting educators and parents alike to consider it an informal educational tool. Zerdani's work effectively legitimized Algerian discourse about manga, helping to broaden its market and to provide a new voice for Zerdani's ideas about Arabic literacy.

Other manga works in Algeria employ a similar strategy: authors attempt to expand the resonance of their works by appealing to established tropes within Algerian culture. Fella Matougui's and Salim Brahimi's shōjo manga Nahla et les Touareg (2010), for example, uses the openness of the manga format to present Tuareg culture. Published for the Ahaggar Arts International Festival, celebrating the cultural heritage of this Saharan region, Nahla et les Touareg provides an extremely effective – didactic yet fashionable – mode of transmission of Targui culture to urbanized Algerian youth.

DZ-manga's utility as a voice for local concerns arises from its flexibility as a medium. Local concerns are fused with global aesthetics, irrespective of the boundaries that demarcate other literatures. Street politics mix casually with religious topics. Specific traits borrowed from Japanese manga pair with styles and themes characteristic of comics and Franco-Belgian style . The same circumstances that gave rise to this fluidity have permitted a renewed exploration of creative forms in Algerian manga: as this new medium grows, new creative politics are being explored as well. One notable example is Selim Zerdani's / (2009), a collaborative effort between Zerdani and 12 other graphic artists, published by his own publishing house, Kaza.

Collaborative works illustrate the way in which manga and its European and American counterparts are seen by Algerian graphic artists: not as mutually exclusive, but rather as complementary media that can bring together diverse readerships. The foreign analogues to the different strains of Algerian graphic art – , comics and manga – are often defined by their differences with each other; collectively produced manga such as /, instead, bring diverse sources together with new modes of affiliation based on non-hierarchical relations. In such works, artists draw their stylistic choices from an array of ideas which are neither localized nor confined, creating a composite structure which forces readers to move consciously in a world marked by a transnational fluidity of images and references.

List of works

This is a non-exhaustive list of DZ-manga, showing year published, original language(s), author and publication house:

See also

• Manga outside Japan
• Algerian literature
• Algeria–Japan relations