Connor Moran wrote:Scott McCloud wrote:There's such an explosion of talent right now which can be traced to a small army of kids reading manga about 5-8 years ago. Has anyone considered the sheer size of the talent pool that'll emerge just a few years from now when today's young manga readers?a group roughly TEN TIMES the size of their predecessors?begin to put their dreams on paper?
I've been thinking about how the next generation of creators will be heavily influenced by today's manga. This sort of worries me in some ways. Reading even really good manga, I often find the copy to be very stilted, bearing the marks of its translation. I fear that a lot of people whose main experience with comics is through these somewhat artless translations may never pick up the ability to write really good english dialog.
But perhaps it's nothing to worry about. Good creators have grown up reading much worse things than poorly translated manga.
Way back when I was on the cutting edge of trends around 89/ 90* I was on the whole Japan/ manga vibe. And like a lot of the kids today, I aped the style without the skills to back it up, and with little understanding of what it was I was aping to begin with.
As I grew more knowledgeable in comics, and I stopped being such an insufferable manga nerd, I grew to appreciate the finer aspects of Japanese comics and realized that not every single manga looked like Ranma 1/2, or Slayers. And strangely enough, I was able to shed that aping thing and develop my own style.
While I can see Amy's influences in her work, she's obviously been able to step away from them and I think she's been rapidly developing into her own style. I don't know her personally, but I can only imagine that she's been able to do this because she's learned what manga and comics are really about and has stopped trying to make it look like "manga", if that makes sense to you.
By taking a quick glance around the web, you can see a lot of "manga" style webcomics that would make it look like your worries are well founded. But those comics will vanish much like the spandex glut before the bubble burst. I'm fairly certain that those artists who have managed to figure it out before that happens will be the ones the kids will all be talking about in fifteen years as their influences.
And I hope like hell that I'm one of those people!
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*I used to be with
it, but then they changed what
it was. Now what I'm with isn't
it, and what's
it is weird and scary to me.
It'll happen to you!