One ironic detail in that page... the dialogue is written in rows from left to right which, while still a perfectly acceptable way to write Japanese, may be awkward for readers as dialogue in manga is typically written in columns, right to left. This would seem to be at odds with attempts to make Western creators use more "manga-isms" as this is distinctly un-manga-like. (But that may not have been the direction his editors were taking.)

In fact, the only times left-to-write dialogue appears in manga is to emphasize foreign speech, in the same way that English-translated manga use a formal font such as Times to highlight dialogue that is actually spoken in English.
Simon Jones | Email | Homepage | 09.28.07 - 12:57 am | #

Interesting. Assuming those are the same female characters Pope featured in THB, they do live on Mars, so perhaps it was an intentional move to emphasize their alien speech.
John Jakala | Email | Homepage | 09.28.07 - 11:04 am | #

Hah! You know I got to talk to Kodansha myself this summer and while I can't draw stick-figures right I spent almost three hours discussing foreign mangaka.

The editors I spoke with were very much in favor of foreign artists. They see foreign artists as the future of manga. The evolution of manga is how they described it. And I brought up the increasing number of Korean artists and the Chinese writers that are working for Japanese publishers examples of that change. At the same time, the people that I spoke with openly admitted that they were currently in the minority at their company.

Change is a slow process though. As an example I was shown a series of work from the early 90's that they published in Afternoon (Oh My Goddess, Gunsmith Cats, Genshiken came out of that mag). They were manga from western artists or writers. The work was amazing and if you didn't see the artists' names in Roman letters you couldn't tell the difference. Editors at the time couldn't easily communicate with artists around the globe (mainly out of Europe). To this day the communication barrier (language mainly) is a major factor against.

As far as readers were concerned it was hard to judge what readers thought since these works were short one-shot and done projects. A manga-ism could mean a lot of things... manpu, maybe text orientation, maybe a change in the layout. But then again being able to tell a story in a Japanese way is kinda tricky. I feel manga are more character based than narrative driven. That's a personal observation (one that Koike Kazuo brings up quite a bit). That isn't relevant in a short story but in a series it could make a difference.

So I wouldn't say that readers are that picky because it wasn't until very recently that foreigners were really working in the market all that much. And editors are being editors... they need to be able to share their input with their artists. That last point brings up another question - foreign editors in Japan. I'll be blogging about that soon.
Ed Chavez | Email | Homepage | 09.28.07 - 2:14 pm | #

most readers won't give a flying rat's ass the origin of a manga-ka, as long as they like what's on the page. Manga is mostly character driven, if you haven't already noticed. If a manga-ka can create memorable characters readers care about, they can go on forever doing nothing and still sell a ton (i.e. ARIA). The key is all about character design and interaction. If a foreigner gets it, great! He or she will sell. If not, then it'll bomb. Simple. Quite a few manga uses pen-names and you can't even tell sometimes if they're a man or woman (i.e. Yoshimizu Kagami of Lucy Star fame). If there's a gaijin gal in CLAMP, would you know?

Sure there are cultural sensibilities, but after all they're trying to make it in JAPAN. If a manga-ka is trying to go big in their native country, then such rule may not apply. But if you're tying to make it in Japan, then you'd better stick what appeals to them.
Tivome | Email | Homepage | 10.01.07 - 6:29 pm | #

You rang? In a way, yes, Japanese readers are quite conservative. As I'm fond of saying, Japan is the Hollywood of comics, and just as Americans are used to the Hollywood way of making movies and have little patience for foreign films, Japanese readers are used to the Japanese way of making comics, and and are easily turned off by something done another way. Sure, there's a wide variety of subject matter in manga, and more variety of drawing styles than many people realize, but there are countless structural details that most readers (both Japanese and non-Japanese) are completely unconscious of, and yet which are necessary to make a manga "feel right." There's no manual out there listing those details, but experienced editors and artists know when something is "wrong" and how to "fix" it, and most readers, when shown the "wrong" version and "fixed" version would agree that the latter is "better," though they couldn't tell you why. Let me offer a real simple example. Have you ever noticed that the horizontal "gutters" between panels in manga are twice the width of the vertical gutters? (Forget for the moment that these days there are a lot of manga in which there are no gutters at all.) This is the way it's been done for more than 30 years, and it's done that way "just because it looks better." And the odd thing is, it actually does look better. There are literally hundreds of little things like that that are taken for granted in commercial manga, just are there are hundreds if not thousands of little rules involved in making a Hollywood movie that "looks right." So I have to disagree with Tivome; it's not just about character design and interaction, by any means. There are so many factors that go into the production of a commercial manga (and, by the way, Taiyo Matsumoto is critically acclaimed and well-known, but hardly a best-seller here in Japan), it would be a near miracle if a non-Japanese artist could hit the sweet spot after just a few months of direction from even a brilliant editor. Japanese artists have absorbed most of those details, subconsciously, over a lifetime of reading and copying commercial manga, and thus have an enormous advantage over the outsider artist. For example, almost all of my cartooning students here at Kyoto Seika University know how to lay out a page so that the reader has no trouble grasping the order of the panels. But few of them know that they know, or don't know what they know. So when I point out to them exactly how the "traffic rules" of manga layout work, most are taken completely by surprise. "Oh, so that's how it works! Now that you mention it, yeah..."
Matt Thorn | Email | Homepage | 10.02.07 - 10:33 am | #

Thanks for answering my plea, Matt! I really liked the way you put things, so I showcased your comment in a separate post. Any chance of you writing up an essay explaining more of these "manga-isms" instinctively employed by native manga-ka?
John Jakala | Email | Homepage | 10.02.07 - 11:49 am | #

I talk about some of those "manga-isms" in my Manuscript That Never Ends, but maybe I'll take a chunk of it and post it to my website the way I did with the "Are manga characters white?" essay.
Matt Thorn | Email | Homepage | 10.03.07 - 2:30 am | #