AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
It is an extremely popular book form that originated in Japan, where it became a cultural phenomenon. Now manga comics are flourishing in Algeria as well. “The Algerian manga is our trademark,” said Salim Brahimi proudly. “It’s what we call the DZ manga.”
Brahimi is the founder of Z-Link, Algeria’s first publisher of manga comics. Z-Link’s manga are 100 percent Algerian, from the drawings to the text. Published in French, colloquial Arabic and soon in north Africa’s Berber language, DZ manga has put a distinctly local stamp on a major Japanese product. The comics are flying off the shelves.
“We are printing 3,000 copies per title,” said Kamal Bahloul, Z-Link’s representative at a book festival in the eastern city of Tizi Ouzou. “In 2008, 40 percent of our print run was sold against 70 percent today.”
Since its launch in 2007, Z-Link has been increasing its catalog — and its staff.
“When we started this adventure, there were just two of us,” Bahloul said. “Now we have nearly 30 employees. We are growing 5 percent on average every year.”
In 2008, a year after Brahimi co-founded Z-Link, he launched a key weapon in its marketing armory: Laabstore magazine, a monthly review of Algeria’s burgeoning manga, cinema and video game scene. Laabstore runs extracts from the work of up-and-coming manga writers and also serves as a successful shop window for Z-Link’s own titles, with its print run having risen from 2,000 to 10,000 copies in five years.
“The stories we deal with are typically Algerian scenes,” said 28-year-old Sid Ali Oudjiane, a manga writer whose Victory Road series, featuring a schoolboy’s quest for sporting glory, has already won him three national awards. One of the first major successes of the local manga scene was Samy Kun by Yacine Haddad, about a teenager who gets mixed up in the problems of the Algerian Sahara.
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