RANT ALERT: Because someone has to say something!

[eonen]

Okay, here's the deal: if I had the power to enforce this, I would decree that for, say, the next two-to-five years, unless you were raised in Japan or are of recent Japanese descent, you are NOT allowed to draw in that anime/manga style

Comments

Agreed

[water451]

I love the anime/manga style when it's used appropriately or not so heavily stylized. I especially like it when it's done messily by a talented artist for story-telling effect (see Masamune Shirow, Yukito Kishiro, Katushiro Otomo). Western adoption of the style usually just looks sickening to me, with extra-clean lines and heavy stylizing. It doesn't help that the characters tend to be vapid, too, which plays right into the cultural expectation that comics/cartoons are for kids or younger teenagers. That latter bit might be the root of the whole annoying pattern.

Re: Agreed

[eonen]

Vapid, yes. Agreed, absolutely.

Now, I don't know how much of that is horribly bad translating--goodness knows that most of the anime I've watched feels dumbed down, even the stuff aimed squarely at adults--or if it's genuinely a cultural thing, but there rarely seems to be much depth even to legitimate, Japanese anime characters. I'd like to believe it's just something lost in translation; I wonder how American cinema seems to the Japanese.

But, yes...I've noticed the same thing, and it doesn't please me at all.

Re: Agreed

[luchog]

Check out Range Murata. His is some of the most distinctive and atypically creative work I've seen. He puts out a colour anthology of unusual manga artists, titled Robot; that really breaks away from the typical manga/anime style.

Re: Agreed

[eonen]

I think you're missing the point. It's the rabid Anglo fanboys/fangirls that I want to develop their own style, not the people who actually make REAL anime/manga.

[luchog]

I don't think there's anything inherently different or new in the popularity of Japanese manga style drawing techniques. Prior to the beginning of the flood of anime and manga imports in the early-mid '90s; all the unoriginal hacks emulated the DC/Marvel comics style. When I was in school, every dork who thought he could draw was doing half-assed American-style comics. Before How to Draw Manga series, the most popular "shortcut to drawing" book was How to Draw Comics the Marvel Wayy. Every second-rate high-school hack had a copy of that book, or one of the many similar manuals. I take that back, not all of them did. The really "creative" or "underground" ones would rip off Heavy Metal instead of Marvel.

Manga style hasn't replaced originality; it has merely replaced a different form of unoriginality. Very few people have ever bothered to develop a truly original style of their own.

[eonen]

But, see...I look at American comics and I see a wide range of variety; in no way is it require to ape Marvel or DC, or even Heavy Metal.

Hell, I had How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way...in fact, I still have it, and I think I know exactly where it is at this very moment, which shelf. But what I got from it more than anything else was a kind of short-hand for drawing anatomy; the characters I designed, the style of shading, the facial designs, all of that happy stuff...that's all either my own, or a mish-mash of so many different ripped-off styles that it might as well be my own. Hell, there's more than a little anime in there somewhere, though you have to look to find it

[luchog]

The proliferation of styles in American comics is a very recent thing, and primarly indie and small press. The mainstream stuff still pretty much all looks the same, all uses the same conventions

[eonen]

What you're saying doesn't match my own experience.

I mean, I've seen plenty of American artists from before when anime was popular, and many of them did not follow American comic book artists' styles, even though they were clearly comic book style bits of art. Hell, you have only to open up your average newspaper comics page to see radically different styles of cartoon art.

And it's those imported anime styles that the fans are drawing. And maybe you're judging on different criteria than I, but I can identify three distinct styles that only have marginal variations from artist to artist.

I'm not sure we're looking at this from the same perspective, but from where I sit, anime art doesn't have a lot of variation in it already, and it seems like everybody is drawing it these days in place of coming up with something original.