Vietnamese Comic: Long Road.... No Passengers

It was not until the third festival that the public could truly admire the comic works of Vietnamese artists displayed in the exhibition "From ideas to comic works".

The exhibition took place on International Children's Day, June 1, and ended on June 8. But after the crowded opening ceremony, the exhibition space was very deserted. Occasionally, you could see a few people attentively reading Vietnamese comics, while the Belgian comics - although beautifully drawn and lively - were in their original French, so not everyone could understand them.

The 5th and 6th grade girls were holding comic books while standing and admiring the paintings hanging in the exhibition. They were literally admiring because when asked, they were all honest: "I don't understand much, it's not as interesting as the comics I still read, even though the drawings are more beautiful." When manga fans complain that Vietnamese artists' comics are not as interesting, it's probably something to think about. It was even more surprising when parents brought their children to see them and also complained: even adults find it difficult to understand, so how can they show it to children? It's also impossible to say that these are just sketches for the exhibition because each work is presented in six pages, equivalent to a complete short comic. Not to mention that the 11 Vietnamese comic authors this time also went through a careful selection process.

It is undeniable that Vietnamese comic artists have worked hard to learn from the world's major comic "empires". However, a comic with three characters drawn in three different styles is really difficult to understand. Not to mention the ideas lack the coherence typical of Vietnamese comics. One can see Europe, America and Japan in the drawing styles of some authors. It seems that Vietnamese artists are still struggling to come up with an attractive enough comic idea about more contemporary topics, not just imitating folk tales as before.

The paradox is that authors who have the ambition to express the story through drawings forget the words. The drawings show consecutive states but the dialogue appears very little, making the viewer have to "rack their brains" to understand the author's intention. On the contrary, many authors have the inherent problem of being too "wordy", with philosophies preaching morality, while the drawings lack a message. That's not to mention the spelling mistakes that appear quite often, which many readers discovered from the first day of the exhibition.

Vietnamese comics are still taking their first steps on the path to professionalization. The surprise of comic book “empires” that have established a strong market share in the world inevitably makes those holding the pens and pencils waver. During the two festivals, Vietnamese artists studied and drew with Belgian-Vietnamese comic book artist Vinh Khoa and contacted Belgian and Canadian comic book producers. But this comic book sector itself is struggling to maintain its market share in the face of the manga storm that is sweeping the world. Wanting to escape the influence of manga, conveying the traditional philosophy of the Vietnamese people through new and modern comics... may still only exist in the form of ideas. And the path from idea to a comic book work seems to be quite far away.

According to tuoitre-vp