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Manga Answerman - Can Non-Japanese Comic Creators Call Themselves 'Mangaka'?

IMHO, your first language is Japanese and you're going to aim your products mainly at a Japanese audience, then yes it makes sense to refer to your self as a mangaka otherwise NO... you're just a comic's artist.
That's it.

Imagine you're in a restaurant and you order a soup. The waiter brings you a cup of hot cocoa. You protest. He tells you soup is simply a dish of ingredients served in a liquid. The waiter knows what you meant when you said soup, but he wants you to try his cocoa instead. He's purposely twisting the usage of a word and playing word games to suit his whole agenda. His agenda is getting you to try this really, really cool cocoa. He swears it's just as good as any soup. In fact, he goes so far as to say it's better than most soups out there.

That's what I always think of when I see these "Is X anime/manga?" debates.

Let's just call it what it is. People want to use Japanese labels because they think it's a badge of honor and elevates a work above it's peers. Just like those comic artists who swear up and down their work is a 'graphic novel', not a 'comic book'. It's insecurity being obfuscated behind an argument of semantics.

If foreigners that practices karate calls themselves a karateka, then a foreigner that draws comics/manga calling themselves a mangaka isn't really that strange, nor is it wrong. It's not exactly new either, people been doing it for decades. Remember that Tokyopop Rising Stars Of Manga scam?

IMHO, your first language is Japanese and you're going to aim your products mainly at a Japanese audience, then yes it makes sense to refer to your self as a mangaka otherwise NO... you're just a comic's artist.
That's it.

I don't understand why the necessity of using foreign titles that have an equivalent in your own language.

Animation and comics have a very low reputation in the west, where as anime and manga are held in high regard. Especially among people who consider them genres rather than mediums. It's why even Netflix is doing it like advertising Castlevania and their upcoming Magic the Gathering shows as "anime" despite neither of them having any Japanese creatives attached to them. Advertising them as anime is better marketing than advertising them as western cartoons.