My name is Lily Cernak. Welcome to my website. 

My webcomic can be read here:　http://farewellfeeling.smackjeeves.com/

my deviantArt site with my other illustration work is here:　http://rain-and-sunshine.deviantart.com/

I spend much of my time at the Goggleworks Center for the Arts in Reading, PA, where I have a studio that I share with my father Alan Cernak (alancernak.com)

I teach individual and group
manga and other art classes (as well as basic, intermediate and advanced Japanese) both at the GoggleWorks and elsewhere.
Please contact me if you are interested in a class. for a full listing of our classes please click the “Classes” link above. 

I have also worked as a community liaison with the Reading Cherry Blossom Festival, doing
manga/origami demonstrations and speaking about Japan/Japanese culture. I am affiliated with the Kyoto International Manga Museum and help to bring the work of Japanese manga artists to the Goggleworks for exhibitions. 

If you have any questions or comments, please contact me at 

Lilyhanamail@gmail.com

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SOME THOUGHTS
I think I was born wanting to be a paleontologist/artist. (Incomprehensibly, my mother kept my earliest drawings of stick-figure dinosaurs on the wall for years). However I am half-Japanese, and when I was little we began making day trips to a Japanese mall, where I discovered something that quickly replaced dinosaurs: manga (Japanese comics). Although I couldn’t read the language then, the graceful lines and vivid characters in the Japanese childrens’ magazines fascinated me. As I got older, I discovered that manga was being translated into English and that its demographics extend far beyond childhood — and began reading the comics for the stories and not just for the artwork.

There are many qualities that attracted me to manga and made me want to create my own. When you read really well-done manga, you get swept away and dazzled by the beauty and flow of the art and the writing. It feels almost like you are watching a movie, as if the pictures are moving smoothly from frame to frame.

I love the way artists are able to create characters that through their striking visual images and odd or endearing quirks take on a life of their own. You enjoy reading about them because they are them. Many characters (especially in boys’ comics but in girls’ comics as well) have an indomitable spirit and a heart of gold, which I think is part of what gives them universal appeal.
In Japan, guns are very illegal and violent crime is quite low. A great deal of emphasis is still put on politeness, honor and respect. So in manga, though the character may fight with weapons, they often have a naive or innocent feel to them — a sweetness of personality, even if their words and actions are rough or coarse. You end up wanting to root for them whether you mean to or not. And so I want to create stories with characters that stay with people…characters people can fall in love with…and stories people can fall in love with and feel involved in.

Then there is the aspect that first drew me into the genre — the beauty of the artwork. A great deal of manga is drawn very aesthetically — with beauty or grace in mind. It is not that the characters all move with grace in the way that a dancer does — it is more a matter of finding the beauty in everyday life (the slouching teenager, the small child, the carefree childhood friend). In the manga, as in movies, the slightest widening of the eyes or purse of the lips speaks volumes. There is also the aspect of manga everyone recognizes — the deep, expressive eyes.

And as one panel joins or flows to the next, one scene into another, memories of characters’ pasts are mixed with present events and future foreshadowings. Even battle scenes can have a very aesthetic flow to them while still remaining complex, engaging and intense.
I think comics are a wonderful way to tell a story — there are things in comics that you don’t get in novels.

Manga is for everyone — while many people only know the stories aimed at children, there are many stories written exclusively for teenagers and adults (in fact, most of the manga you would see at bookstores like Borders are for teen and adult readers). In Japan, businessmen and women and housewives can be seen reading ther latest volume on the bus or Shinkansen. Some small bookstores there seem to sell almost nothing BUT comics — and there are comics for just about any taste you can imagine (think comics where the protagonist is an office worker, a pachinko player, a housewife or a baker with psuedo-superpower bread making abilities).

I hope that as an art form, manga continues to spread and thrive in the coming years as it has in the past. I continue to try to do my part to help this happen by spreading the word and sharing the love wherever I can.