Local illustrator Lai Tat-wing, alias Lai Tat Tat Wing, hit the international market with his comic Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. Written and published in Chinese in 2005, it was recently launched in French at the biggest comic festival in Europe, the Angouleme International Comics Festival in France last month.
The comic was originally created to pay tribute to local comic master Wong Yuk-long's Oriental Heroes series, also known as Lung Fu Mun.
Lai (left) says the work is the result of a collaboration, which started about two years ago at a Hong Kong Arts Centre exhibition when Lai's works caught the eye of representatives from Belgium-based Franco-Belgian comics publisher Casterman. The publishing house is known for producing the reworked version of the The Adventures of Tintin series.
Lai thinks his works stood out from the crowd because they are softer in tone than many mainstream comics, usually full of violence and action.
The artist was surprised that people treated comics so seriously in France. 'A reporter came up to me with my comic in his hand. He made it very clear that he had read the book through from front to back as it was all highlighted with stickers on different pages showing where he had the queries. The nice thing about it was that he knew my book so well, I didn't have to go through ideas from scratch.'
The French version of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star was launched after a year of re-editing and translating, and has had positive international response.
Lai says the translation process was not easy. 'The translator was a French person who had lived in Beijing for many years, so we didn't have any problems communicating in Putonghua. But the original was written for local readers and contains a lot of Cantonese slang, and he found it extremely hard to understand some of the Cantonese expressions.'
