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American Manga: Does it count?

Allow me to provide some different opinions: there are more and more Taiwanese shōjo manga artists whose story and art on par with or even better than their Japanese counterparts serialized in Ciao or Ribon. Their stories are very original, usually with some jokes that only local readers would understand. And the sales numbers have shown their successes.
Not to mention that CJK languages share the same characters for "comics."

I personally find Chinese and Taiwanese comics to be a little stiffer in terms of people's movement, though that could simply be my take on it and certainly doesn't stop I-Huan from being one of my favorite authors - but ultimately the measure of merit is how much you enjoy it.

I think that as long as they are well written and well drawn, then where they were made shouldn't matter.

I mean if a anime/manga is drawn, written etc, the exact same way, but done in Canada or Japan or Brazil, then what's the difference?

Do you call American or Russian or French tanks "panzers"? No, of course you don't. Why? Because we already have the word "tank". Hence, if we use the word "panzer" it's because we want to draw attention to the fact that it is a specifically German tank.

The fact that the word "panzer" could be applied to tanks from any nation and not technically be wrong is immaterial.

Same goes for "manga". Yes, it just means "comic" in Japanese - but why on Earth would you use a Japanese word in place of the perfectly good English one we already have if not to draw attention to its nation of origin?

Moreover, since the vast majority of English-speaking people would associate "panzer" with German tanks and "manga" with Japanese comics (regardless of how universal the terms are when used by Germans or Japanese people respectively), why would you want to confuse things by applying the words differently?

Depends onw hich series you're refering too. There are a lot of them.

1. The cliches. (You know some of these at least right?)

And then there's stuff like Witchblade or Star Wars or Star Trek. All of which have been made into manga.

[...]

Another good example would be Kingdom Hearts. Sora and his friends are clearly anime. While Donald, Goofy, and Mickey (and all the other Disney character) aren't.

Allow me to provide some different opinions: there are more and more Taiwanese shōjo manga artists whose story and art on par with or even better than their Japanese counterparts serialized in Ciao or Ribon. Their stories are very original, usually with some jokes that only local readers would understand. And the sales numbers have shown their successes.

Personally, I feel SPP is much better in editing and developing local shōjo manga than Tong Li (which I-Huan belongs). Selena Lin, Cory, and Lin Min Xuan (unlike the other two, she seems not having an official romanized name yet) all have excellent AND popular works.

The thing is though, a Western is a genre classified based on it's fictional setting, not what country it comes from in reality. Though the genre may have originated in the west, that's not what the genre name implies. Logically an Italian can certainly still make a Western because that only means they are making a movie that is set in the North American West. If 'manga' denoted a specific style or genre then it would be comparable. As it is though, calling an American comic manga is like if those Spaghetti Western directors called their movies Hollywood films. It's just silly. They could say that their movie is a lot like a Hollywood movie or heavily Hollywood influenced. They can make a Hollywood-like movie that's even better than actual Hollywood movies. Regardless though, saying it actually is one is incorrect.

True.. I guess I just call the stuff Tokyopop and Seven Seas publish as 'manga' because out of laziness.. I suppose the real term would be 'manga inspired-comic' or just 'comic'...

The words anime and manga came about because in Japanese all words end in either a vowel or an N