Totes an aside, but innit there full color manwha out there? Pretty sure I've seen a few. Could argue the korean stuff =/= manga, but s'far as most folks I've encountered are concerned they're effectively the same thing. There's definitely full color one-shot manga running around, though I'm less sure about anything particularly lengthy.
Yes, and lots of Japanese-origin comics have short sections of color pages.
I realize it's kind of funny to get this mad. Please hear me out.
Where I am, I grew up at the time right when manga and anime were first being packaged for mass appeal here--the first runs of Pokemon and Dragonball, as well as Cardcaptors, Tenchi Muyo, and Sailor Moon. These shows were dubbed over, heavily censored, and often had the narratives restructured to change the roles of various characters (such as writing larger roles for male characters and making female characters less significant). Then, when it because clear that these shows were really popular, manga started being translated, flopped, and published--often with continued censorship that disrupted storylines and made things make little sense.
This was before internet usage was widespread, so the audience mostly didn't know it was happening. A certain point of view of Japanese cartooning evolved, mostly disparaging. These criticisms of Japanese cartoons, which had been processed and altered for American audiences, were assumed to apply to the originals--which are certainly not above critique, but the intermediary agents got off scott-free.
Then, in this atmosphere, American comic artists published how-to-draw manga books and positioned themselves as experts. Nowadays, there are lots of options. You can see tutorials on DeviantArt, you can order books from Japan in Japanese, you can often get them translated accurately into English, you can visit pixiv or niconicodouga or whatever. But in the early days, our local library had exactly one book, which wrote from a point of view of almost no understanding.
And, in the local bookstores, more and more of this kind of book started appearing. It was
all stuff like
this, or like
this. I'm sure that you can agree with me that these are fairly unrecognizable as manga, right? But that was what was there. That was the ENTIRETY of it. That was what we thought manga was like. That it was fairly representative of what Japan produces. And some of it, of course, called itself the "first and only" book on how to draw manga, or said it was published by an expert on cartooning, or that it came from a Japan-based studio.
So they would also sell things like the
Harlequin Pink brand--put out by, yes,
that Harlequin, the one with the romance novels, and called that manga, and put up "manga posters" that looked like
this,
because that's what the kids liked. It was stuff like
this. People were making a lot of profit on calling this manga and acting like authorities. And no, I'm not exaggerating. This is actually how it used to be.
Winx Club, for example, was explicitly marketed as anime (it's actually an Italian anime-inspired cartoon).
(Please note that this is different from, say, Powerpuff Girls, which no one called anime; and Powerpuff Girls Z, which no one would call an American cartoon at this point)
Then, one memorable evening, I went to a sleepover and we found out together that Tenchi Muyo actually had some fairly explicit sex scenes in it when you're watching an uncensored tape. Which is, you know, kind of funny, since we were all in fourth grade or something like that. However, someone said: "Oh, the
real Tenchi Muyo isn't like this, I'm sorry."
And in middle school, someone said they'd watched the Samurai X OAV, and it was filled with blood--not like the
real version of Rurouni Kenshin.
And that kind of stuck with me. It had gotten to a point where the censored version became the "real" version. And they could sell us all kinds of things, and that became the real version, because that was what we were familiar with. It didn't matter that all of this was derivative of something else. Before long, I started noticing it everywhere. I could watch a dubbed version of a movie and see that they had changed the roles of the characters, or overwritten meaningful silence, or did things that made the film plotless--and they still do this with the localizations of Studio Ghibli movies; in fact, it's gotten more pronounced in recent years. I could watch subtitled shows and see that what the characters said and what was written were often contradictory. I could read criticisms of these productions in the newspaper that judged the parent culture without the writer realizing that they were actually, in part, criticizing the work of a sloppy localizer. And this version, this opinion, was what became real. It wasn't that both could exist anymore, as real things. What came before either quietly disappeared or was called derivative and denounced.
Kind of like how Twilight has created a "real" version of the vampire that leads tweenagers to leave disparaging reviews on Bram Stoker's anime page, or the complaints that The Hunchback of Notre Dame is nothing like the Disney version. Or people even assuming that it was a disgustingly grimdark story inspired by Disney and riding on its coattails. It's an adaptation masquerading as the original and enjoying an atmosphere of preference.
Why does the original have responsibility to resemble the derivative? That doesn't make sense. And there's nothing wrong with people enjoying one version more than another--that's a matter of taste. But to me, deciding to act like the inspiring source doesn't exist--which is what happens when you refuse to recognize any differences between what you've produced and the source, and then authoritatively call your product "professional-looking manga" and the like--is sickening.
So, that's the point of view from which I'm operating. Call it a cartoon-maker or a 3D-posing program or perhaps even manga-inspired, but please stop calling these things manga if you won't put in a basic effort to find out what manga is and how it works. It's not false advertising the way that selling horse meat as beef is, but it's still not the right thing to do. It's a destructive practice. And yes, the characters may be drawn in a more manga-ish style now, and they may be dressed in clothing that looks vaguely like what you find in manga, but they've made it abundantly clear from their presentation that they still don't have much knowledge of what they're actually selling.
PPE NOTE: My rant is more apropos than I thought, though not from the perspective I anticipated. It seems that in this instance, it's just a fault on the part of the folks who did the Steam marketing, because the
video on the creator website, while deliciously Engrishy, is clearly made by a person who understands manga.
So there you have it. I've put my foot in my mouth a little, but I'll call it a day.
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Topic: Things that made you RRRRRRAAAAGGGGEEEE today: Trust-o-nomics Edition (Read 3783889 times)