The Taiwanese novelette Cheng Huang (城隍~賽米絲物語) — a well-received story with a light-hearted take on the traditional Chinese netherworld — is scheduled to take its first tentative steps in the immense local comic book market, which has been dominated by Japanese manga, with a theme song and a live music video on the way.
The novelette’s publisher announced plans to launch the graphic adaptation of the book on Thursday next week, to coincide with the opening of the 13th Comic Exhibition, an annual six-day Taipei-based expo that has attracted an average of 500,000 visitors year after year.
The book’s illustrator, who also brought the comic books Ye Feng (夜風) and Level X Yung Che (Level X 勇者) to life, is to attend the event and is set to join 45 comic book creators and voice actors, both from Taiwan and overseas, at signing sessions with their fans.
Photo: Chen Yi-ching, Taipei Times
The light novel, released in February, centers around the mythical stories of netherworld deities including Cheng Huang — the city deity who acts as a prosecutor in the underworld’s district court — and the “eight generals” who operate as netherworld police.
Counter to the long-standing “world of the dead” horror stereotype in which ghosts and gruesome gods rule supreme, the world depicted by the novelist — who uses the pen-name Tsang Keui (蒼葵) — is not that different from the world of the living.
Cheng Huang, the book’s leading character, is represented by a petite, child-like female character called Ai Tsao (艾草), who has long dark hair and twinkling black eyes, rather than the customary solemn male figure.
The novel’s unique presentation of the netherworld has resulted in the story selling more than 20,000 copies in a five-month period and becoming the first novel in the country’s history to be adapted into comic form within such a short timespan.
A sequel to the novel, published in May, also swiftly made its way onto the best-seller list with publishers from Thailand and Japan expressing interest in publishing the novel in their own countries under licence.
Several renowned Taiwanese cosplay enthusiasts, including Akatsuki Tsukasa, Neneko, Mao-mao (毛毛) and Manami are also set to take part in a live music video dedicated to the novel in which they are to dress up as various characters from the story.
Meanwhile, Chia, a popular online singer, has been invited to sing the theme song.
With a number of animation theme songs under her belt, including one accompanied by the Taipei Civic Symphonic Band in April, Chia said she was quite nervous about singing for a Chinese-language comic book for the first time.
“By producing a theme song and a music video, more readers could get enchanted by the good music or the intriguing video and then want to know more about the work itself,” Chia said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching