Meanwhile, take a look at the latest addition to my comic book collection. It's the first one of the five Maliki books. Maliki is the name of the pink-haired girl with pointy ears on the cover above. It's basically a printed collection of webcomics that have been published at maliki.com since 2004.
While the books are currently only available in French, some of the webcomics have been translated to English by fans. You can read them here.
The comics revolve around a young girl who lives in Paris with her two cats Fëanor and Fleya and works as a comic artist. In later strips some side characters are introduced like Fang, the little Chinese girl Maliki rescued from drowning, and Jonn the Norman viking.
The strips focus mostly on everyday stories like Maliki doing her grocery shopping or taking her cats out for a walk.
There is also a four-minute video of Maliki and her friends playing video games while the cats...do their cat things (sleep, jump around, sleep):
The way the website is set up you might be led to think that those are more or less autobiographical comics drawn by a young female artist. That's not the case. Maliki is the creation of Souillon (which is French for "litterbug"), a male comic artist from France, who said in an interview that while the stories are roughly based on RL events, Maliki's character is completely made up. (The cats are real though.)
However, to keep up an air of mystery when at conventions, Souillon acts as Maliki's spokesperson rather than her creator. He even drew himself into his comics (the guy with the Zorro eye mask and skull shirt) having Maliki announce that he'd be at Japan Expo 2008 in her stead. (That in turn led some hardcore Maliki fans to actually cosplay as Maliki & Souillon. How cool is that?)
Maliki is Souillon's first and only comic series so far. His main job is at Ankama Games. He first worked on the flash-based MMORPG Dofus as a video game character artist and is now helping with the WAKFU television series.
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