Digital Young

This weekend, 17-18 may, there has been the second edition of Otaku Festival in Bucharest.

Now, this is an important event for all manga fans and creators in Romania. As manga remains a little bit underground as social phenomenon, it starts bit by bit to develop in Romania. Why did I say underground? The sources for manga fans and makers are not available so easily; either they download what they can find from DCC++, or they spend a lot of money buying them from SUA or other countries.

Last year, Otaku Festival took place at Carturesti library. This year, they needed more space because they organized expositions and projections of animes. The place of this year’s festival was the ancient center of Bucharest, on Selari street.

At the exhibit, here are few of the artworks exposed.

Even if it was quite a small place, there was a continuous dynamic. What I really liked was that there came parents with little children, teens, youngsters. Most of the people were, obviously, teens. It was like their space and I liked this fact very much. Here are some of the people who came and also who organized the festival.

At the festival, there was also a little table with a manga fan accessories:

In the other place, a bar where there were the projections, I bought myself a repertoire of a manga creator (I think her nickname was Anima, but I think I might be mistaken), the Otaku Festival poster and the last number of Otaku Magazine, the Romanian community of practices’ magazine.

I would like for the future to make a comparison between the different ways of figuring and the new forms of literacies. This my next project, to make a description and interpretation of this new digital culture, manga creators. Why digital? Because, mainly, they use technological tools. The creators who came to the festival were still drawing by hand. But here is a picture showing us the opposite.

So, if you are interested of how Romanian manga creators work, with what tools, what they come up with, stay tune because I am trying to put in place a mini-research and I hope that in a relatively short period of time.