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This Week in Anime - Is OEL Manga Really Manga?

All this debate could be solved if we just called it all comics as manga is just the Japanese word for comic books and sometimes they just straight up use the English word comic to describe it.

You are always going to have purists, gatekeepers, and labelers, but that doesn't mean everything has to be vanilla either.

I grew up on comic books (Marvel, DC, and many of the independents). But manga is significantly different in style than American comics. I remember being excited for the next issue of Outlanders, Caravan Kidd, Drakkun, Grey Digital Target, and a few others.

Just like we don't want every restaurant to be Taco Bell (like that one movie). Manga is just a different flavor of comic. And that makes Manga a good descriptor of what you are going to get and receive. And of course Manhwa is also a good descriptor.

You are always going to have purists, gatekeepers, and labelers, but that doesn't mean everything has to be vanilla either.

So where are we putting the works of Stan Sakai at who is a Japanese author that lives in America and he makes comics for an American audience? And I doubt your average manga fan would recognize Usagi Yojimbo as a manga. But if we go by the American definition of manga he should also be considered alongside mangaka that create comics in Japan.

He's an American publishing work for Americans, therefore a GN. Manga is made in Japan. That is my definition, point blank.

So if you’re white and live in Japan you can be a mangaka then?

So if you’re white and live in Japan you can be a mangaka then?

There’s definitely some elitism involved. If you haunt fan boards, you’ll see these people come out, crying that OEL manga isn’t really manga. That by definition, manga is Japanese comics, period. Which…isn’t false. Some manga fans resent that OEL is given the label “manga.” And many tack on an instant stigma because of this.

What’s really disturbing, to me, is that sometimes this bias extends itself to Japanese series that appear to be OEL (I have heard several times that Est Em was an “OEL artist,” said in a negative way–like, “I would like that manga but she’s an OEL artist”). A lot of fans refuse to touch anything OEL, or anything that appears to be OEL.

I think that several series were greenlit and published that really shouldn’t have been. I don’t want to name any names, because that wouldn’t be nice >__> but when you have so many bad series touting the OEL flag, it leaves a bad impression of what OEL is and what OEL has the potential to be. Essentially, the ratio of crap series to non-crap series is too high to leave a good impression, in a market (“manga”) that is already distilled into series that have proven that they can hold their own.

This argument has been around the anime/manga community for years. So if you’ve read one of my rants on other message boards or blogs, you know what I’m about to write.

For better or worse, the US manga market was built around the fetishization of Japanese culture. It wasn’t marketed as high end graphic novels or bizarre adult seinen/gekiga. It was the Japanese or foreigness of the product that sold books. Jason Thompson calls it, “the thrill of Japaneseness”. Moreover, the market has been so carefully crafted and molded to sell Japan that any clever dissemblance of OEL as manga will be vehemently attacked as disingenuous. The ones who shout the loudest about OEL are strongly tied to this characterization of manga.

In Japan, all comics are called manga. This includes everything from one-page four panel manga to full 1000-page omnibus tankoubon covering a broad range of genres. In reality, only a fraction of Japanese manga and dojinshi are ever printed in English. If you only read manga in English, for all intensive purposes, you are probably reading only the best of the best (marketing wise). The US market has been handpicked by manga companies and editors. In a very subtle way, your entire manga diet has been already carefully curated and chosen for you. So, it’s unfair to compare the infant OEL industry to the best of the Japanese manga industry.

Before I go any further, I should probably make it clear that I’m writing this as someone who was once ridiculously biased against manga. I started at Tokyopop with an inherent love for superheroes and a complete lack of interest in Japanese graphic novels. Had I not landed my job there, it’s unlikely I’d even know what a tankoubon was, let alone actually sat down and read them.

But I still read Bizenghast. I still read Nightschool. I read Re:Play through to its conclusion (and not just because I was the editor of that series for a while). If I have any interest in the subject matter of a comic, I’ll read it, regardless of the style. So why is it that comics drawn by manga-influenced artists (other than Adam Warren) seem to always struggle to find an audience in the United States?

Unfortunately, I still think there’s a lot of misunderstanding among both readers and publishers. They hear manga and they instantly think of big eyes and flowery backgrounds. The problem is that far too many people still cling to the idea that manga is a style. Manga is not a style. It’s a format, and even within that format there’s a lot of diversity. To say someone is a manga artist is no different than to say they’re a comic book artist. And just like with comic book artists, manga artists can draw in vastly different styles.

TarsTarkas wrote:

I grew up on comic books (Marvel, DC, and many of the independents). But manga is significantly different in style than American comics. I remember being excited for the next issue of Outlanders, Caravan Kidd, Drakkun, Grey Digital Target, and a few others. Just like we don't want every restaurant to be Taco Bell (like that one movie). Manga is just a different flavor of comic. And that makes Manga a good descriptor of what you are going to get and receive. And of course Manhwa is also a good descriptor. You are always going to have purists, gatekeepers, and labelers, but that doesn't mean everything has to be vanilla either.

So where are we putting the works of Stan Sakai at who is a Japanese author that lives in America and he makes comics for an American audience? And I doubt your average manga fan would recognize Usagi Yojimbo as a manga. But if we go by the American definition of manga he should also be considered alongside mangaka that create comics in Japan.

If you're talking about Heroman, created by the late great Stan "The man" Lee. Then yes, it's a manga. Are you saying Stan Lee is not a mangaka because he's not a Japanese person. Are you saying in your logic that Tekkonkinkreet directed by Michael Arias is not an anime because it was directed by a non-Japanese person? Is this what you're saying?

Don't explain how some fans got this logic or this thought process of calling manga a comic/graphic novel is considered an insult to them and viewing American comic/graphic novel as inferior.

mdo7 wrote:

Don't explain how some fans got this logic or this thought process of calling manga a comic/graphic novel is considered an insult to them and viewing American comic/graphic novel as inferior.

I think that now that anime and comics are becoming more mainstream among adults in the west, westerners are becoming less insecure about using the same words for the Japanese and Western stuff.

This image probably perfectly illustrates why I never cared for OEL/American Anime or whatever people call this stuff. Am I supposed to be impressed the writers of this show know what Dragonball (one of the most popular series of all time) is? What importance does making a character dress like Android 18 have other than I clapped because I know Dragonball.

My Adventures With Superman has nothing to do with Superman other than character names and some imagery like the Superman costume because every character is completely unrecognizable. It's a show written by and for millennials who grew up watching anime. And the ironic thing is an actual anime adaption would probably try to stick closer to the source material like the Superman vs. Meshi manga which was originally just supposed to be about Superman eating various Japanese foods but has since done far more. Personally I feel a true anime-inspired Superman show would try stick as close to the comics it's based on like how most anime adaptions respect and try to adapt their own source manga. But that would be more about anime-inspired in terms of how the industry works rather than superficial traits like art style or references. So I'm not sure what it ultimately says when Japan's take on Superman is more faithful and accurate than an American's perspective on what they thought an Anime Superman series would be like.

Hell, it's hard enough getting people to agree on what exactly counts as "anime" even when we're limiting the scope to shows that were made in Japan. There was a big stink on MyAnimeList a few months ago when an "enlightened" moderator rejected Scott Pilgrim Takes Off from being added to the database. Y'know, because apparently the entire production staff being Japanese, and the show being explicitly marketed to domestic Japanese audiences, including being dubbed in Japanese, didn't count as being "anime enough."

I can see why a website or people would not call Scott Pilgrim Takes Off an anime anymore than Thundercats, Batman, or Tiny Toons. But I also see why fans of it would want to call it an anime because they like it and they think the anime label is a badge of honor and maybe the animation adds some kind of charm to it.