| The U.S. comics industry can seem like a closed society when you're
dreaming of a career as an artist. The doors can seem to stay wedged shut
even tighter when you draw in the Japanese manga style instead of the currently
fashionable big-muscles-and-breasts mode that litters American super hero
comics. Three American manga artists (left to right) - Kensuke Okabayashi,
creator of Pineapple; Robert DeJesus, busy artist for comics and
video games; and John Staton, who draws Daniel Dukke and Ferdinand Fox
- spoke about the comics business at an Otakon panel. |
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| Okabayashi has bridged the trans-Pacific comics universes. He studied
with Leiji Matsumoto in the East and Carmine Infantino in the West. Okabayashi
sees manga as being cute, minus the hyper-realistic bodies and violence
of U.S. comics; with a specially individualistic style; with an attitude
that always tries to get an opinion over to the reader; and with a measure
of class and dignity. American comics are too bureaucratically produced
for Okabayashi, who doesn't like the assembly-line pattern of separate
penciller, inker, color artist and letterer. Still, he would like to break
in with a major American comics company. The alternative is self-publishing,
which sounds brave but gets expensive real fast, especially when artists
have to advertise to convince dealers to carry their books. |
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| "European art's never grabbed me," Staton said. "Some people get on
artists for drawing in the Japanese style because of the iconography of
the characters - they say `Why do you draw all of that big-eye stuff?'
I find the characters to be expressive and pretty darn cute." Staton enjoys
the cinematic style of manga, which uses panels and pages to set a mood
rather than rush a plot along. He prefers the Japanese pattern where a
single artist creates a manga story from plot and dialog to layout and
drawing. In U.S. comics, sometimes the actual dialog isn't created until
after the pages are drawn. "That can lead to a nice looking page that is
really incomprehensible. Manga are choreographed in a way that, even if
you don't speak Japanese, you can tell what's going on." |
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| DeJesus enjoys the trend of manga-styled comics from the major U.S.
companies. However, he worries that the Japanese style they're mimicking
comes from only a handful of artists such as Shirow Masamune. "If you have
something that looks like Sailor Moon, it won't sell," he said. So how
do you break into the comics business? As much as DeJesus likes anime conventions,
he admits they're not good places to advance a career. Rather, he said
artists should head to industry comics conventions to look for company
representatives. If an editor looks at your work and doesn't like it, don't
get offended, listen. "People are offended by critiques, but only the best
will take those critiques and make them work for you," he said. Finally,
studying film techniques such as cinematography and lighting can help comics
artists, who are drawing what are little more than glamorized film story
boards. DeJesus points to the success of manga artist Kenichi Sonoda, who
started as a story board artist before he started drawing comics in Japan. |
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