As I said in my original post above, I am not arguing that people should only write about their own cultures. But from my perspective, these are not minor errors simply because they are so easy to fix. A conversation with any Korean or Korean-American who has been raised with a knowledge of their own culture or basic web searching (there is after all a well-cited Wikipedia article based in the 2000 Korean census on Korean names) would have been all that was necessary to avoid these errors. I am not claiming that creators need to do doctoral level research when they have projects outside their own culture. What I am criticizing is the obvious lack of basic research.

When people outside my culture are appropriating it for profit without being respectful enough to do basic research, it does begin to feel an awful lot like exploitation.

Conversations on the internet are indeed difficult because of misreading of tone and intention. I do appreciate that you have been civil and that you stopped by here to comment on this issue in the first place. That said, I don’t think I’m the only person who feels that explanations aren’t excuses, and apologies tend to be better received when they aren’t followed by a list of reasons why the offense wasn’t so bad after all.

For me exploitation or being disrespectful is more a question of characterization. I lobbied for example for the final kiss being on the cheek rather than the lips cos it seemed more in keeping with character; and (though there was no place for one finally), for a stronger korean male character of Dixie’s age in the story.

Anyway internet exchanges are probably not the best place to try and change opinions; its inherent impersonal nature often leading to misreadings of tone and intention… so hopefully we can agree to disagree and best wishes for your future endeavours :)

sonny

Frankly, when I hear that cutting corners in this manner is fairly common in the industry, it doesn’t make me think, “Oh, Re-Gifters isn’t so bad. Everyone else is doing it.” It just makes me feel alienated from the industry as a whole.

As for DC’s budgeting – its really a problem with all comics in general. Gail Simone set some of her Bird of Prey stories here in Singapore, and got involved in a debate about its accuracies with some readers here. Ultimately everyone agreed that there’s only so much research which is possible given time and money constraints – even most american cities depicted in comics look nothing like the real thing.

is it exploitation? i hope not – i think we tried to do justice to the setting other areas. but i do accept that the hangeul SFX thing should have been better done – perhaps if anything similar comes up again i’d be able to consult you for fact checking :)

sonny

That said, I don’t see the explanation as an excuse. (I could not tell if you meant to present it as such.) I still don’t understand why you still chose to attempt Korean sound effects even though you were aware that you did not have the personal knowledge or outside resources to proofread them. While the hangeul sound effects are a neat idea, they only add to the story if they are executed correctly. Having correct English sound effects on those pages would have been a thousand times better than having nonsensical supposed-to-be-Korean ones.

Along the same lines, I do not understand why DC went forward with this project if they were not willing to budget for cultural fact-checking during editing and adequate research by the creators.

Respect and accuracy go hand and hand during cultural appropriation. Without them, cultural appropriation ends up feeling a lot like exploitation–and who needs more of that?

I guess the only real excuse is that i didn’t have access to someone who could help check it at the drawing stage; there wasn’t exactly a disneyesque budget to get all the research right :p

even the way koreatown looked – i tried without success to get friends in l.a. to help take pics for me (being based in Singapore), and the only advice i got was that it looked like the rest of the city except with korean signs.

I ended up sketching off Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, having been told that game was extensively researched and based on the real los angeles.

Anyway, would just like to extend my apologies to anyone who found the inaccuracies insulting… it was mostly a question of a lack of research budget and time constraints…

cheers

sonny