Forum - View topicNEWS: Mangaka America
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KyuuA4
 Posts: 1361 Location: America, where anime and manga can be made |
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Let the non-Japanese manga spread! Bwahahahah
Only one direction this can go -- that is towards growth. More and more non-Japanese manga will be developed; and there's nothing anyone can stop that. As long as the material is good, people will buy - regardless of source or even label.
We'll either have stuff avaible at lower cost -- OR -- they'd profit so much such that work quality improves. Either way, this is much to look forward to. |
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Aaaamory
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Carl Gustav Horn who has been writing about anime since 1993 and was manga editor for the first translated series to be published in right-to-left format, (Yoshiyuki Sadamoto's Neon Genesis Evangelion), says that Japanese manga is defined by the audience that it is targeted towards. 'Pure' Japanese Manga is Japanese comics targeted for Japanese readers. It's not a style because defining it is extremely difficult.
The appeal of manga is that the culture of Japan is so vastly different from our own, and Mr. Horn expressed some worry over the future of Manga. While the market for it continues to grow in America, it's slowly decreasing in Japan because Japan is actually experiencing a population decline. What he's worried about is that the comics industry in Japan might start focusing less on targeting Japanese readers and more on westerners as a result of this. There is a definition of manga that can actually be swallowed. There are comics that come out of North Korea that get mistakenly called manga when they are actually called manhwa (the Korean word for comics.) Although people are arguing that all comics are manga because if you said it to someone in Japan they would only understand it to mean "comics." I'm pretty sure they would understand the English word, "comics" to mean western comics and not Japanese comics. |
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KyuuA4
Posts: 1361 Location: America, where anime and manga can be made |
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And yet, we can fear Muslims, another vastly different culture. Heck, we're giving Koreans just a little chance; they make good music by the way. 
Of course, it is difficult but not impossible. Heck: animenewsnetwork.com/bbs/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=23606 I just learned of that piece of information today. After a quick skim, some are actually glad at the idea. Very encouraging.
Pure economics. Any one of us would direct our attention towards a source of livelihood. Best part about catering to the Western market - that's where the money is.
Therefore, what it all boils down to is -- "language differentiation". We do create words to "categorize" things; however, they do create "walls". Sometimes, categorization is convenient; other times, it is harmful. One thing I do notice - we are encapsulating Japanese as a sub-category while placing others under "everything else". Is that sensible? I don't think so. |
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Aaaamory
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The really, weird thing is... would they know what we like? Nobody thought Americans would like Harry Potter because it wasn't EXTREME. And everyone knows Americans like everything extreme 
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KyuuA4
Posts: 1361 Location: America, where anime and manga can be made |
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I'm an American (former) immigrant male; and I enjoy Shoujo. 
I have a feeling the dollars have done the talking -- which show which type of series succeeded here (and which didn't). I mean, already some studios have tried to create anime specifically for the Western audience. |
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The Xenos
 Posts: 1519 Location: Boston |
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Yeah, that's the word IN JAPAN. This isn't Japan. By that same standard America calls the stuff comic books or graphic novels. Yet out of respect for its country of origin, we call it manga. Why can't we extend that to countries other than Japan? Why not call Korean comics by the similar yet still different Korean name for comics? Korea calls their stuff 'manhua' and China has a name too. Dark Horse has the hoensty to call their new couple of Korean books by the Korean name. Tokyopop just calls it manga. They've had Korean book Priest since they first started publishing collected manga. Also, Tokyopop used to publish manga as American comic book sized issues, but they didn't take off until they collected them in the 'takubon' colleceted format which has been incorrectly renamed 'manga format'.
I keep debating that is no single manga style. Lone Wolf and Cub is manga and Frank Miller's art was influenced by it, but it looks nothing like what you call 'manga style'. GO check out Crying Freeman. That's manga, but it doesn't look like those How to Draw Manga books. The stuff in Range Murata's Robot antologies are manga and they're in color in oversized books. I have prepared graphics for my presentation. (Yes, I was so bored one day making this argument, I made a collage.) 
All that's manga, and between all those wonderful artists, I don't see a single style jumping out at me.
Actually, the interesting thing about Ramos is that he's also influenced by South American artists like the guy who drew Cybersix, Argentinian artist Carlos Meglia. I wish I could get that comic in English! Sadly, South American and European comics sell like crap. It's actually this gen that was popular when I got into US comics in middle school and highschool. I remeber seeing and article in Wizard about this stuff called 'anime'. I saw Joe Mad draw characters from Akira and thought it was awesome. Of course, if I had already seen the original Akira manga or even anime, I would have thought it was crap. Though I still like Mad's style. Ya know, when he actually drew it. I acutlly thought Ramos's Crimson was the best and underrated of the three Cliffhanger titles back then. I didn't discover Chynna Clugston and Blue Monday till a bit later. Of course that opened me up to the fantastic world of Oni Press. Hey, there's a company with many manga influencedn books and even a Japanese name, but they still sell comic books and graphic novels. As for generation one as you list them, Miller stands out as an absolute favorite. Ronin being his book most obviously influenced by manga. Namely from Lone Wolf and Cub, which he helped first get published in America long ago, even before the Dark Horse editions. This was back when manga just wasn't published here. Of coruse, it wasn't right that comics publishers shunned manga. So now it's almost karmic the manga market is shunning comics.
Y halo thar. Ha. 
I'm curious too. The trouble is you'd have to compare them to sales of trades becase you can't quite compare them to single comic book issues can you? It's be apples and oranges. My guess would be they'd be about even. Some higher than regular US comics, some lower. I think it helps these books by Tokyopop that they take up less shelfspace and major chains like Barnes and Noble seem to prefer putting them on the shelves than a larger pricier comic.
Haven't looked into the manga-ized Achie titles, but I'm not surprised. You are quite right in that it's more than character design that manga influenced Americans find. Panel layout and other storytelling techniques are a big influence too. And, yes!, Erik Larson of Savage Dragon fame is also quite a manga fan from a long time back. I keep forgetting that. Then again, you see Yashirow Nightow in the pages of Trigun comment about Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and draw in little references to Jim Lee's Wildcats. (One chapter has Wolfwood or someone drinking Grfiter brand booze.) Of course manga's influence isn't always a good thing, at least to the consumer. I also notice many, perhaps too many, American comics taking the decompression from many manga stories and dragging stories out. A story that may have taken one issue to tell 20 years ago, now takes a five issue story arc to tell. That's one thing many artists have learned from what many mangaka and Japanese publishers do. Drag out the story, so people have to buy more chapters/issues and collected volumes. Now some decompression isn't bad, but it seems to get ridiculous in some manga and US comics today. A chapter of manga or issue of a comic is no longer jam packed with story for your dollar. Instead you have to buy many chapters or issue to get a decent full story. |
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I snagged an issue of Archie not that long ago that had a pretty standard Archie story, a Katy Keene story with absolutely AWESOME old school American good-girl art (go, Andrew Pepoy!), and a manga-style Sabrina story that was just downright awful. It was so horribly derivative, and had nothing to do with "manga" other than the characters having big eyes.
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