Manga
For the past ten years, MAKMA has become a major reference when it comes to manga creation in France. Euromanga? Global manga? Franga? Manfra? We’ve read and heard everything about French mangas. One thing’s for sure: MAKMA plays an important role in the creation of French mangas, whether it is shonen or shojo.
A pioneer studio for French mangas
After Zeitnot which told the story of a high school girl in a chess club (the manga was pre-published in the Humanoïdes Associés’s Shogun magazine, just like our other series Last Seduxion and Code Neon), we continued with the best-seller Amour Sucré (a shojo manga).
We’ve also adapted the online game Urban Rivals into a manga before realizing an old dream of ours: sports mangas with Z United (a manga about soccer whose story takes place in Bordeaux) and Paris Saint-Germain Infinity, PSG’s official manga. More recently, we worked as script doctors and also provided the art for the manga Epic Lanes (Hachette).
An efficient team of mangakas
Among our team of mangakas, let’s start by introducing our artists first. Our star, Albert Carreres, whose most notable works include illustrating Hugo and Majid adventures in Z United (Kotoji), and Brazilian player Neymar, Jr mid-game arrival in PSG Infinity (Soleil). He also provided the entire graphic part of the manga Epic Lanes. Cyril Bouquet, also known as SiB, was Albert’s inker on the PSG manga. He also worked on the tones which is particularly important when it comes to defining the manga’s atmosphere.
When it comes to the writers, we have Stephan Boschat, also known as Migoto Sen Chu (Amour Sucré, Urban Rivals), and Edmond Tourriol (Zeitnot, Z United, PSG Infinity) who often works with Daniel Fernandes (Z United, PSG Infinity). Among MAKMA’s other manga writers, we also have Philippe Dos Santos who worked on Urban Rivals.
Zeitnot: the first manga about chess in the world
Published on September 2007, Zeitnot was one of the first French mangas to be published. This manga series, which tells the story of Tristana Thibert who is part of her high school chess club, was first published in the Shogun Shonen magazine and then in Shogun Life. Five chapters were created by Edmond Tourriol and artist EckyO. Only four of those chapters are available in the first volume, which collects the pages of Zeitnot into tankōbon format. Until today, this manga about chess remains unfinished but its writer expressed many times that he was determined to tell the end of this story. We should thus expect to see the return of the Zeitnot manga one day. Maybe it will be with a new creative team. To be continued !
Two other mangas for the Shogun label
After Zeitnot, two other French mangas were published in Shogun: Last Seduxion (the first shojo written by Stephan Boschat who would later become the writer of Amour Sucré), and Code Neon, a spin-off of the Mind series, which was co-written by Edmond and Stephan based on a pitch that was given to them by the publisher. Rocio Zucchi, who provided the art for this chapter, would later work with MAKMA again by illustrating the comic (which was drawn with a style similar to that of a manga, but published as a regular French BD album) which adapted the Urban Rivals game. For each of those projects, only one chapter was published due to the Humanos’s bankruptcy which led to the premature ending of the Shogun collection.
Amour Sucré: tens of thousands of copies sold
After stopping its manga production for a few years, MAKMA was contacted by Beemoov which wanted to adapt into a manga its successful game Amour Sucré. With its experience of adapting the Urban Rivals universe into webisodes, MAKMA appeared as the perfect candidate to accept that challenge. It’s the writer Stephan Boschat, using the alias Migoto Sen Chu, who fully dedicated himself to the project. To do so, he worked alongside the Spanish duo Xian Nu who had previously illustrated the Morsures comic book. Amour Sucré mangas were a huge success with tens of thousands of copies sold and five volumes released !
Urban Rivals gets its manga adaptation
Because of this huge amount of mangas that were being released, Delcourt decided to publish their own manga based on an online video game. After handling webcomics and hardcover comics, we were thus given the task to work on the manga Urban Rivals which ran for two volumes. When it comes to the story, we had a group of experienced writers working on the project: Migoto Sen Chu, Daniel Fernandes and Philippe Dos Santos. For the art, we had Spanish mangaka Albert Carreres who did wonders.
Two French mangas about soccer
Then, being the huge soccer fan that he is, Edmond Tourriol launched with Dan Fernandes and Albert, who had worked with him on the series Banc de Touche, the production of his most famous manga: Z United. It’s a sports shonen whose originality (for French readers) comes from its story which is set in present-day Bordeaux and its characters who are representative of our multicultural society.
Not long after that, Soleil asked the writers of this soccer manga to handle the black and white carreer of the Paris Saint-Germain players. This is how the PSG Infinity manga came to be, with Neymar’s transfer happening beside the main story of the second volume. An out-of-this-world scene !
A manga about e-sport
With mangaka Albert Carreres providing the art once again, and Stephan Boschat working as a script doctor, we took part in the production of the Epic Lanes book which was published by Hachette Comics for the Robinson collection.
Even though we are determined to tell stories that we love, our mangakas are also available to create manga on demand: communication comics, manga-style user guides, graphic charters with manga-style characters, everything is possible! Contact us to get a sales quote!