Following yesterday’s post, here are three more award-winning books from Taiwan, or I should say “wordless works”. All three have performed well at the recent Kadokawa World Manga Contest in Japan (@kd.worldmanga.official). According to the official website, the contest attracted a total of 1959 works from 118 countries and regions around the world.
3. “Cells Within the Body” by Eli Lin (@eli.pluma.lin) won the Gold Prize in the “Wordless Manga” category, and can be viewed here. It was described “a perfect embodiment of the kind of talent that a wordless manga contest can bring to light”, showcasing the author/illustrator’s “remarkable storytelling ability”, and reaffirming that “manga’s true strength lies not in dialogue, but in its ability to communicate through images”, by the Comic Regulus Editorial Team, an editorial branch under the global publisher Kadokawa.
4. “Hitokuji” by Murji (@murji1996) won the Bronze Prize in the “Wordless Manga” category and can be viewed here. “Hitokuji” literally means “one bite” or “one mouthful”. The work was described as having portrayed “the whale transformed into a human…in an extremely charming way”, while “the protagonist was also depicted effectively through subtle details that naturally conveyed his personality, lifestyle, and emotional change, making the characters themselves the greatest strength of the work”.
5. “Johnny B. Good is Gonna be Good” by JASONZ (@jasonzart) won an honourable mention (“Effort Award” and features a rock’n’roll cyborg named Johnny and his companion “Ah-Mie”. Unfortunately I cannot find where to view the work online, but here is JASONZ’s work “Vandals: The Prequei”, which is set in the same universe as that of Johnny B. Good.
Voices under the Sun 陽光下的聲音 