Seediq Bale – Warriors of the Rainbow - Row-long Chiu

PUBLISHED BY 遠流 2011-2-1
PAGE : 302
ISBN: 9789573267515

Copyright Row-long Chiu & 遠流 Publishing house

Seediq Bale – Warriors of the Rainbow, a history documentary comic which take Row-long Chiu more than 10 year to finished its research and drawing, published in 2004 as its original name" Wushe Incident" and republished in 2011 with the adopted movie made by Wei Te-Sheng. WusheIncident was an action from Seediq ethnic (indigenous in Taiwan) to against the Japanese in 1930.

Author show the beautiful landscape with a realistic style, the costume with a very fine research, and the action with a excellent tempo. Reader could understand all the cause and consequence of this incident, the change of the position and the emotion, and the detail of the strategy of both in these 250 pages, a documentary comic with this scale is very rare in Taiwan. The time and the passion which Chiu spent, were not only for making a comic but also to express what he had been touched to the other.

Chiu went to Wu She by a coincidence, and he met someone who lived this incident and someone who work for the document of local history. Chiu is somebody who always want to clarify everything. He began to stay longtime in the tribe and became a real friend with these local people, that was why he could finally got a lot of discussion non official and personal. This is one of the most important part about a reported comic of a history documentary comic. If the other is not someone very intimate with author, it is very difficult to get a profound content or a personal position with only one interview, it's a question of confidence.

As a history documentary, this comic is very clear and affluent, we can understand how things happened, which is the first propose of the author. But all the composition of image and the structure follow the "action" and the development of the incident, but rarely put the focus on the character and the humanity, so it's not easy for the reader to notice the inner side and the spirit of the Seediq.

In the interview of Chiu, we saw him talked about how the Seediq treat something tough, the difficulty for them to speak out this incident, the important of Gaya, what Seediq Bale real means, and the special way the Seediq treat their enemy…etc. After these complete research if all these thing could be underline in this comic, i think it would be a more profound and influential work.

This comic is draw with a fine-illustration style, which we saw often on the history book. The research of costume and tool is very well-studied and the landscape and the architecture are full of complicated effect-lines. But after a huge work like these, the drawing lacks some personal character or style.

In the taiwan version, we can see the color design setting which Chiu made for the movie. This drawing has a very personal style, and we saw a clear segmentation between the Seediq who wearing in red and white and the Japanese army who wearing in green. I think it could be nice to use it in the comic (but anyway, the comic version made longtime before!). 

Although i mention a fews points could be perfect, but i still highly respect all the work for this book. and i also recommend you to read this book and understand the situation of an indigenous group under the colony, and how brave and battle-wise they are. 

In September, this book is going to publish in France, hope to see an english version very soon.

At the end , i would like to present you a Taiwanese music group who make a music album which is inspire from the Seediq culture and their history.

*Please apology of my english, i don't use english in my everyday life, so there must be a lot of error, but i still want to show people all kind of documentary work, specially about Asia. If there is any error, and you want to correct them, please feel free to leave a message. 

I also have a publishing house which produce Asia documentary graphic work, if you are interested in it, you can check out the website of SLOWORK PUBLISHING