Jem Yoshioka

INFO

Name	Jem Yoshioka (she/her)
Born	1986
Country of Birth	Aotearoa
Place of Residence	Pōneke Wellington
Artform	Visual arts
Decades Active	2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Jem Yoshioka is an award-winning cartoonist and illustrator from Pōneke. Described as a “webtoons pioneer”, Yoshioka is best known for her webcomic, Circuits and Veins (2017–2020) — a queer science-fiction romance that currently has over 5.7 million views on Webtoon. Her style weaves together a distinctive blend of manga and fanart, often focusing on themes of belonging, culture and identity. Yoshioka’s heritage as mixed Japanese and Pākehā provides a backdrop for much of her storytelling, as seen in her autobiographical comic, Folding Kimono, which won the 2015 Chromacon New Zealand Indie Arts Festival Comic Award.

Yoshioka was born in Auckland to a Pākehā mother and a Pākehā and New Zealand-Japanese father. Her Japanese heritage is linked to the Hiroshima prefecture, including the army port town Kure, where her grandfather was stationed as part of Kayforce in the early 1950s, and her grandmother witnessed the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. As a descendant of an atomic bomb survivor, Yoshioka refers to the bomb as a “looming shadow” in her family and describes a feeling of alienation when discussing the impact of living with such heavy cultural and personal histories. This experience is reflected deeply in Yoshioka’s work, with many of her early comics exploring familial stories and lineages.

Yoshioka didn't have access to mainstream graphic novels beyond vintage comics growing up, and instead found inspiration from online fanart and webcomics. She states that online comics were a “game changer for her own art and storytelling” and provided “a sort of freedom to be able to create stories on [her] own”. Her comics are often described as focusing on complex relationships and character-driven storylines, such as in Sunshine — Yoshioka’s 2013 award-winning comic that reveals an intense but fleeting relationship between two characters in Wellington. Using a vibrant, manga-style aesthetic and expressive narration, Yoshioka tells “evocative and moving stories about identity, place and the powerful ways we connect to one another”.

In 2014, Yoshioka came up with the preliminary character designs for Aki and Ai-Chan from Circuits and Veins. She cites her negative reactions to contemporary AI and AI-romance films such as Her and Ex Machina, hoping for Circuits and Veins to provide a different perspective on femininity and queerness in android circuits:

These stories got me thinking about the ways we represent femininity as this unknowable ‘other’, how often queerness is also tied up in these concepts, how hypersexualised, degraded, and designed for consumption androids are. So I wanted to tell a story that stepped away from that.

The series was released on Webtoon in 2017 and amassed a significant following over the 3-year period of production — fanart of the protagonists was common across platforms such as Tumblr. Diving into themes of chronic illness, queerness and belonging, Yoshioka states that she was “quite scared” to publish the series initially as it was the first time she was overtly writing about her bisexual identity. Fan comments on Webtoon have called Circuits and Veins a “welcome relief from…toxic representations” and praised its realistic portrayal of queer romance in a science-fiction space. The setting for Circuits and Veins, though not an explicit part of the story, is described by Yoshioka as a “blend of Japanese and New Zealand spaces and iconography”, referencing her own cultural identity. The series concluded in 2020.

After the completion of Circuits and Veins, Yoshioka launched Folk Remedy (originally titled Starstruck) on Webtoon in 2021 that centred around the adventures between an apothecary and a yokai (Japanese supernatural spirit) set in a fantasy version of Taisho-era Japan. Yoshioka described the comic as nothing like Circuits and Veins, focusing instead on comedy, fantasy-style shenanigans and larger-than-life characters. Inspired by Japanese folklore and fantasy manga such as Demon Slayer, Folk Remedy “engage[s] with themes of colonization, community, and unavoidable change…reimagining mythology from a diasporic perspective”. The comic received close to 200,000 views on Webtoon before it was pulled in 2022 due to Yoshioka signing on with literary agent Jas Perry. Folk Remedy was acquired by Andrews McMeel Publishing as a middle-grade graphic novel series and has an expected publication date in the United States of fall 2025.

Beyond her long-form narratives, Yoshioka has been published widely in various anthologies and journals. Her comic Something Alive, published in the 2018 Level 4 School Journal, provided a space for mixed-race identities and Asian diasporic histories to be discussed in the New Zealand education curriculum. Her work was exhibited in New Lynn train station in 2017 as part of Satellites' Revolver: Te Ao Turoa, and she has spoken about her work at ComicFest and Same Same But Different. Yoshioka’s creative practice also encompasses digital illustration, watercolour, ink work and soft textiles. She works full-time in communications while creating comics.