Forum - View topicNEWS: Tokyopop To Move Away from OEL and World Manga Labels
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Abarenbo Shogun
 Posts: 1573 |
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Pretty much all of TOKYOPOP's OEL stuff falls under these categories: * Hip-Hop Themed OEL (@Large) * Emo/Gothic Themed OEL (I Luv Halloween, Bizengaust, Princess Ai, War on Flesh, etc.) * Young Adult/Chic-Lit type OEL (Dramacon, Steady Beat) * Unclassified OEL (Sokoura Refugees, Van Von Hunter, Peach Fuzz, etc) To me, their OEL selection is pretty weak. Also, a good number of the art in these books look amateurish than professional. Plus the scripts are really terrible, almost on par with the trashy romance novels you can pick up for under $5. If this is the best TOKYOPOP can do, then I worry about their "Global Manga" monklier. |
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Kouji
 Posts: 978 |
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I don't see what the big deal is about Tokyopop using the term "World Manga" or "OEL manga" to describe their non-Japanese comic books. In Japan, all animation is refered to as anime and the Japanese use the phrase "Japanimation" to describe their domestic animation (though, this term has fallen into disuse in the U.S. since the '90s all because some idiots thought the term sounded racist, despite the fact that the Japanese still use it themselves) and the Japanese refer to all comic books as "manga." It is only in other countries where manga is refered to as Japanese comic books. If the Japanese have no problems calling Donald Duck comics "manga", then why do we have to pitch a big hissy fit about calling some comic books with big eyes and small mouths "manga"? People who say "ZOMG, OEL manga isn't real manga!" are the same elisist fans who try to claim "ZOMG, it's not a cartoon, it's annamay!" or "ZOMG, it's not a comic, it's MAN-gah!" as if calling it something else changes what it is.
If the terms were reversed and the Japanese called manga comics and we called our comics manga, would the situation be any different? Quoted from dictionary.com, a comic book is, "A book of comics strips or cartoons, often relating a sustained narrative." Isn't that exactly what manga is? Manga is a book of comic strips collected that often relates a sustained narrative. Manga and comics are the exact same freaking thing. If I call a tomatoe a fruit and you call a tomatoe a vegetable, does that change the fact that it's STILL a tomatoe? No. Just because you call a comic book by a fancy exotic-sounding term like "manga" doesn't change the fact that it's still a comic book. Likewise, just because you call manga by an ordinary term like "comic book" doesn't change what it is, either. If you're getting into this big hissy fit just because Tokyopop is using the CORRECT definition of manga by using it to refer to all of their comic books JUST LIKE the JAPANESE DO, you either need to get over yourself or just call it whatever the hell you want to because it's just a freaking label. Just because you give it a name doesn't change what the contents inside are nor does it affect the quality of the work. Manga and comics are the same freaking thing, so stop trying to pretend like they aren't already. |
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Cosmic Kath
 Posts: 17 Location: Australia |
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Come on guys, this is like saying a pizza isn't a true pizza unless it's made by an Italian.
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midori kou
Posts: 469 |
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I think the main issue is people have different interpretations of the word, "manga". I know for some Japanese people who imigrated here, in English they would rather refer to works from their land as "comics" than use "manga"... Because to them, that's ALL comics.
However, here we have people labelling all comics with a distinct animation-like style as "manga". I personally don't like it but I'm not gonna go on a crusade to convert everyone to this idea. Sometimes I do use the word interchangably. Words have different meanings from person to person. It's like being picky about calling your egg noodles "mein" (Chinese), "mi" (Vietnamese) or "ramen". It really doesn't matter because it's all the same and yet have some small differences. |
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mufurc
 Posts: 612 |
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No, they don't. They refer to all comic books as "comics" (yes, "komikkusu"). At least I've never seen/heard a Japanese person call foreign comics "manga", but I've seen countless examples of Japanese people referring to Japanese manga as "comics" (even on the official sites of publishers, retailers, etc.). As for "world manga" vs. "OEL"... While "manga" certainly sells better, I think it's not a very good idea to encourage people to draw "manga." I mean, dammit, however you call it, it's comics. I don't see the point in encouraging people to imitate a certain style (especially since it's not like all manga looks the same). Don't try to make "manga", make comics. |
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Patachu
Past ANN Contributor
 Posts: 1325 Location: San Diego |
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After all, "99% of anything is crap," right? |
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Necros Antiquor
 Posts: 571 Location: Funny in a car crash sort of way |
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If that's true, then where do the two popular series of "How to Draw Manga" books (both with the same name and logo, for some reason) that are written by Japanese manga-ka and translated into English? There's a lot of terrible manga instruction books, but there are books from Japan itself available that focus simply on the art style itself and not the other aspects of manga stories and such.
Very, very funny, and so true. I know Abarenbo Shogun didn't mention this, but you can't discount the overabundance of repetitive harem manga like Dears and Girls Bravo either. |
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The Xenos
 Posts: 1519 Location: Boston |
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As for US books... hey! There's a term for them. BOOKS! Holy crap. Why didn't think of that sooner!? Graphic books. Illutrated novels. I like Graphic Novels myself and there already is a history with the term. Why label something with a nationality, at least with just one word. Is America getting that dumb that we need a short one word answer to this? How bad is our attention span? TTFN OMG WTF BBQ, eh?
Anyway, as for US Books Tokyopop has, I've gotten I Luv Halloween and the pirate one by Becky Cloonan. Halloween was a bit gory and weird. The pirate one was quite good, but I already liked Cloonan's work.
Yeah, well why don't you open your eyes as well. There have been tons of indie books and publishers who hae been trying to get away from Spider-man and Archie. Calling these new American books manga is a slap in the face to them. All the years you've had artists working on comics, many inflcuened by Japanese manga artists as well is washed away due to a marketing buzz word. Why does Becky Cloonan's Demo not deserve the term manga while her new work at Tokyopop does? To me they're both wonderful American comics. One is a graphic novel, the other is a comic book if you consider using that term for serial magagazine. Also, if you're only paying attention to Japanese comics and want to make 'manga', then you're not a good artist. A good artist doesn't have such a bias, they'd reconize good artwork -and- stortelling in art no matter where the author came from. Take off your blinders, people. Comics is not a dirty word people. I'm damned sicked of marketing and the public treating it as something immature and illterate. Using the term manga as a buzzword is a shortcut to sales I'm rather not willing to take. God help us if America is unwilled to be educated on the meaning of words and the nature of books and instead is going to cowtow to whatever marketing dictates will be the new catchphrase. Disgusting. Will Eisner must be turning over in his grave. If you don't know who he is, then you seriously should not be talking about the comics market in America. It's like talking about animation in America and not knowing who Walt Disney is. Let's not even get into how Wertham used igrnoance and scare tactics to almost eliminate the artform in this country in the 50s. Also, I'm curious as to that German comic. I belive they're called comics over there too. Plus they've sold terrible here in the past because of their oversized formats. Mind you a big part of manga's boom is that bookstore like small books so they can fit more product onto the shelf. It's sad bur I'm pretty sure true. It's product people, and Tokyopop just happened to package it in a small enough package to fit the already small shelves of giant retial chains. There's nothing magical in their ink. They just lucked out in discovering bookstories prefered that size format and manga fans liked the way it was non-flipped. That's it. I read their bullcrap marketing blitz as part of their Free Comic Book Day book today. Gee, they don't mind being considered both manga and comics today, did they? From their website:
They're manga AND comics! Or at least they're comics when it prvides some good marketing. Anyway, they had this whole bullcrap spiel about the magic of manga and how Tokyopop somehow was the Christ figure that brought it to these shores. I need to check it out again, but Tokyopop seemed to be patting itself on the back a bit too hard. I didn't take the copy home with me. |
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Abarenbo Shogun
Posts: 1573 |
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* Art wise, only Van Von Hunter looked "professional" enough. The rest...Some of them looked like it was drawn by a 2 yr old hyped up on fumes from Sharpies (War on Flesh) or their trying too hard to be "manga", but fail miserably (Sokoura Refugees suffers from excessive "black line tracing" syndrome. Plus the art looks to flashy than nice). * Story wise, some of them suffers from poor writing skills. DJ Milky's stuff in particular suffers from a lack of depth (Princess Ai and Juror 13), and it shows also with his uninspiring "Hip-Hop Electronica" music that replaced the staple Eurobeat in the Initial D Anime. |
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tebalith
Posts: 134 |
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We call comics comics, we call manga manga, and we appear to have given up on finding an awesomely catchy special term for "manga-inspired comics from Germany", so we just usually refer to them as "German manga" or "manga made by Germans" - and we survive, no big deal. 
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Ztarr
 Posts: 44 Location: Canada |
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You make it sound like an evil conspiracy. I agree there are some publishers who may print work that is obviously a ploy to try and cash-in on the popularity of manga. Readers know the difference betweena well produced manga and a low-quality knockoff...but that difference isn't the country of origin. Cry all you want about it, but readers are NEVER going to call manga COMICBOOKS. If you tell someone you read comicbooks they think of Marvel, spiderman, superman, Archie & Jughead, etc.. Yes, it is all sequential art, but there is a difference between the target audience for "comic books" and the target audience for manga. As non-japanese manga starts to get better and better, the 'terms' people try to add to manga will wash away, and it will all be called Manga, regardless of where in the world it was produced. When I walk into my local book store, I head to the manga section... There's never going to be a "World/Global Manga" section, and comics/sequential art is not discriptive enough. I think what needs to be focused on is the quality of manga, and not the label. |
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darkhunter
 Posts: 2992 Location: Los Angelas |
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You totally miss the whole point of of reply. I just find it idiotic that some manga/anime fanatic will say all OEL suck and they probably only read 2 or 3 books. If you're gonna make a bold state, you should be able to back it up. I also wonder why can't people look at it with an open mind? If someone is inspired by manga's style, he/she want to create their own manga/anime by going through the hard work, then why get so mad about it? Don't judge a book by its label, but by its quality. Last edited by darkhunter on Mon May 08, 2006 4:16 am; edited 1 time in total |
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doc-watson42
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 1708 |
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Edit: I believe each post contributed something to the thread, and I am only just catching up on the thread in any case. Should I have posted once, and replied to each person in turn? Would you care to discuss this in private? Last edited by doc-watson42 on Sun May 07, 2006 10:42 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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The Xenos
Posts: 1519 Location: Boston |
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Awesome example there.
Funny, I can't help but thinking Tokyopop is thinking people will judge a book by its labels and marketing than quality sometimes. Why are they scared to use the previously established terms like comics or graphic novels? Pretty much because they aren't as popular a marketing buzz word. Even last week my local comic shop owner commented how he bought some US made 'manga' and thought it was Japanese. It's a big marketing con game using buzz words. They're not really repsecting the term and history of manga, they're just using it's hype to sell more books. Now I'm glad Tokyopop is reaching out to US creators, but I feel bad that they have to be labeled as 'manga' artists just to sell more books. Is a book labeled manga instantly better than an indie comic? In Tokyopop's marketing scheme, it sadly is. Anyway, here's their marketing speech from their Free Comic Book Day giveaway.
One of those series is by Alex Di Campi.I believe she's up for an Eisner Award for her book Smoke (with Irgor Kordy) from Image Comics. She talks about an upcoming horror book here. I belive she uses both the term manga and comic to describe it. She refers to comic writes like Alan Moore as well as horror manga creators like Hino and Ito. Plus she's British and the artist is Canadian web comic artist Dan Kim. I met him at a US con and bought his book. I also hang out on his messageboards. He's a huge fan of Tsutomu Nihei's manga Blame! and I got a signed fan poster of that he drew of it. Now, if this is released, is it manga or a comic book or a graphic novel or what? They haven't said which compnay has this new book, but whoever gets it, whatever they call it, I'm buying it. I like TokyoPop's books. A friend of mine says I shouldn't buy them because I don't like their marketing and I'm still supporting them, but that would be wrong, especially to the creators I like. I just hate their marketing and how it's basically shunning the hard work of decades of American comics artists by making sound like that Japan and their manga is the only place that has been carrying on this artform. It's simply not true. Now it's been most sucessful commercially in Japan and I'm glad their market has let genres and artists flourish, but I still find it insulting to whole generations of artists from across the globe to insist on the term 'manga'. Of course, knowing national pride and political history, I really doubt Korean artists will be thrilled at being called 'manga' artists. Why should they have to bow down to the Japanese terminology? Hell, Nihei himself, I belive, was influenced by French artist Moebius. Hell, they're both working on a Marvel Comics graphic novel based on the American video game Halo. Would you call that manga? You wanna call Moebius's decades of work in France 'manga' too? That's ridiculous. These kids who use the term are Johnny come latelys who have no idea of history. Then again we live in a country where college students can't even find Iraq on a map. Why am I not surprised they fail to acknowlage the history of an artform and just follow whatever the newest commercial marketing buzzwords say it is. Plus, Tokyopop was not the first to import manga and support small American indie comics as that press release makes it sound. They were just the first as the market caught on fire thanks to them sumbling upon the format bookstores wanted for their shelves. I think we should be disgusted that the size format of a book and not its contents is what caused manga to take off in this country. There has been manga in the states before, just not in that size format bookstores wanted. Let's not forget Darkhorse who was one of the first companies to bring over manga. Let's also not for get Oni Press with their wonderful mix of genres and creators. All 'manga' is to Tokyopop is a marketing buzzword. That's it. You go over to Marvel or Oni and they publish comics. Over at Dark Horse they have American and (a few) European comics and Japanese manga. Viz is pretty much all manga. Hell, they even publish Shonen Jump anthologies. You don't see Tokyopop doing that. Even the US Shonen Jump is on better paper and costs more than its Japanese counterpart. If Tokyopop really belived in the term manga, let's see them bring over that aspect of manga from Japan. They won't because it's just too unsure to market. Please note, I belive that say 90% of marketing in this country is really just professional lying and exageration, mincing the english langauge in ways to con people into buying a product more than they wanted before. I pride myself on being honest and this gets under my skin. |
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smoochy
 Posts: 367 Location: Texas |
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[quote="Anime World Order"]Not quite.
I strongly disapprove of Tokyopop's (highly effective) marketing technique of convincing non-Japanese creators that if they draw their comicbook in a certain fashion, then they can proclaim themselves a creator of "manga." Certainly, I understand why they did it. Not only does it sell a dream to their fanbase that they too can be a "manga" artist if they just learn to mimic the visual conventions of your average shonen and shojo title--certainly none of these "global manga" titles have art styles bearing similarities to say, Golgo 13--without necessarily adapting any of the underlying elements, it allows them to apply the marketable "manga" buzzword to a variety of other titles that may look similar to manga to the uninitiated (read: retailers) but actually are not. Why would they do that? Well, it's far cheaper to release those other titles than it is to actually license and localize real manga. Plus, they own the "manga style" comics lock, stock, and barrel. Tokyopop and the other like-minded publishers (such as the various parties behind the barrage of different "How to Draw Manga" books), may have successfully convinced people that "manga" actually means "big eyes, sweatdrops, and speed lines," and folks can vehemently argue for the "evolution of the word" to their heart's desire, but [b]I[/b] still say that the only way for "manga" to be a useful word among the English-speaking anime fan vernacular is for it to denote "Japanese comicbooks," end of story. Of course, the would-be "global manga" artist might want to say "but what MAKES a comicbook Japanese?" I personally consider a comicbook to be "Japanese" if it is first and foremost targeted towards a Japanese audience. The original language would therefore be Japanese and the creative forces behind it would almost assuredly also be Japanese. That's my criteria for being a "Japanese comicbook," or "manga." Nothing complex, no "but what about THIS?" cases. [b]There is already a perfectly established and acceptable term for what Tokyopop is now calling "global manga." "Comicbooks."[/b] Practically a dirty word, particularly to retailers looking to stock shelves with something that sells (which "comicbooks" do not), but honestly folks, that's what "non-English language manga" is. This "Ameri-/Original English Language/World/Global" shell game needs to be recognized by fans for what it is: marketing hype targeted towards people who don't know any better. We're smarter than that. Aren't we? [quote="burzmali"]Graphic Novel may be more correct in some cases, as [u]comic[/u]book suggests something fluffier than many manga artists aspire to.[/quote] Perhaps. I always find it amusing when comicbook fans fire off the "it's not a comicbook, it's a GRAPHIC NOVEL!" defense, particularly since I have certainly never encountered any US fans to date that get belligerent and say "it's not manga, it's GEKIGA!"[/quote] Thank you, Daryl, Clarissa, or Gerald? Or all of you at once, but once again you're shining the light on,"the truth." |
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(Though Stan Sakai is "only" an  |
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