About a month ago, I had a talk with VG about these alleged “western mangaka”, which are people from America or Europe who want to become manga artists even if they’re not Japanese. Now, this could seem like a choice of life like any other, and I’d like to make clear that I’m not saying they shouldn’t be allowed to become mangaka if they want to; what I’m questioning is the whole line of thought behind this choice.
As one might expect, most of these people have been reading manga since their childhood or youth, liked a few select series and then wanted to emulate their favorite authors by drawing with their style. This clearly explains why these “artists” seldom to never come to develop their own style.
One could say it’s just their way to give credit to that particular artist, much like fan art, but fan artists are not going to get a living from their creations as long as they keep working on derivative art. These other ones have as their greatest aspiration to get paid for their work, and when they do they’re stealing someone else’s talent.
On this same line, I think that the whole western mangaka business is about stealing Japanese culture. In Japan, manga is not a recent fad; the first examples of manga can be traced back to the 19th century with Hokusai. As of now, manga is an essential part of their culture; think that the first examples of pizza are almost contemporary to Hokusai’s manga to get an idea of how important can 150 years be. But while pizza began spreading worldwide in the late 19th century, modern manga began to be translated and sold outside of Japan only about thirty years ago. Not only that, but manga is also strictly tied to Japanese culture and traditions, thus making impossible for westerners to make “real” manga as they lack the necessary references to appeal to the public in the first place. Then, if they only want to use a manga-like drawing style to make comics to be sold in America and Europe, they should reflect more about their choice.
For example, some weeks ago I saw the first number of this new comic drew by an Italian girl. It had this manga-like style with dull lineart and ugly drawings, and this cover which was made of a badly digital-colored picture with the title in Monotype Corsiva. As you can imagine, the fact someone actually thought of publishing her work felt like an insultment to me. Not only it had as much quality as a thirteen-years-old’s first attempt with comics, it was almost as if she was using a random manga style to be as hip and trendy as possible.
What I’m saying could work with anything, of course. If some Russian wrote a great comic and everybody started to emulate him it would really be the same, but since here we’re talking about manga, here’s it.
The worst thing is that these western mangaka could actually be decent comic artists if they bothered to think about their work and developed their own style, but no, they want to live in someone else’s shadow and in another culture’s shadow, unable to understand that what they’re actually doing is nothing short of insulting their pet authors.
Will post new artworks later.
