What if Comics Were Written Like Manga?

Okay, I've thought about this a lot and it just popped into my head again but went in a slightly different direction than usual and I kinda wanted to discuss it. Western companies have dabbled with "anime-style" works before, but they always do it completely the wrong way. They hire western artists who can draw in a shitty imitation of anime, and then write them the same way they write all their other books.

I'm referring to the writing style though, specifically first that each book would have one author who writes on one book continuously and when he stops the book ends (though it can be relaunched with a new writer.) That's the obvious change though, the other thing I'm thinking about is the way powers are handled. Now while this isn't true of every single manga series, generally if part of the plot centers on the characters having super powers the writer will put a huge amount of effort into coming up with creative ways to use that power to expand it's usefulness. A stock example would be Speed Grapher, it's a series where a girl re-writes hedonists DNA giving them powers relating to their obsession. In the protagonists case, he was a photographer who became obsessed with photographing war and death, his power thus was that whatever he takes a picture of explodes. As the series went on he got creative with this, covering himself with tiny instant cameras for small explosions, and carrying huge cameras with giant lenses for more massive explosions.

In western comics, not only does this rarely happen, but when it does the character pretty much never does it again.

Perfect example? Compare Mr. Fantastic or Plastic Man to Luffy. Their basic ability in each case is that they can stretch. Now, I know someone's ready to pull out the Mr. Fantastic from the Ultimate universe and point out that he stretched out his brain to increase his intelligence, and stretched his material to create duplicates. And I recall an episode of the 90's FF cartoon where to escape a cage he meditated until he became liquid and slipped through the holes that allowed him to breathe.

The problem? He never did it again. These new abilities didn't become regular parts of his repertoire. He went back so sciencing problems with the occasional "my fist is in the shape of a hammer" type crap. We see this a lot in western super hero comics, they come up with a new use for their powers to get them out of a specific corner they've been written into, and then it never comes up again. I remember after Ben Reilly went bye-bye people were complaining about Peter not being creative with his webbing anymore.

Back to the Luffy example, his power is very simple, he's made of rubber. Technically it should be less powerful than Mr. Fantastic because he's initially unable to stretch at will and has to apply force and throw his limbs to do it, but as the series goes on despite being written as a dumb character he comes up with increasingly creative uses for this. Blow air into his limbs to increase them to gigantic proportions, stretch and retract his heart and blood vessels to induce a doping effect increasing his speed and strength. By the point we're at in the series he's used his rubber body to grant himself super strength, super speed, fucking flight, he can fire blasts of concussive force, retract his arms into his forearms to make his punches go off like a gunshot when he shoots throws them.

Why don't most western writers write like this? His villain from a couple arcs ago is another perfect example (really, the whole of One Piece is.) Doflamingo has one super power: He can control strings. That sounds really useless, right? Okay, laundry list of techniques he's come up with using this ability: He can fire them like incredibly sharp bullets, cut with them like blades, generate cages with these strings at least the size of a city which he then closes in on those within slicing them apart. He can implant strings into people's backs that manipulate their spines to control their bodies like puppets, lasso his strings onto clouds to give the illusion of flying, change the color of his strings to create duplicates of himself made entirely out of strings, generate strings inside his body to perform on the spot surgery on damaged organs, generate giant lovecraftian tentacles of string by converting anything he touches into them, etc.

Can you think of any other characters who should be doing more creative shit with their powers but don't? Like, Spider-Man in one What If…? comic expanded his spidey sense to full out precognition enabling him to plan out events years in advance. Peter should be able to do that, but western writers are lazy so he never will.

ur a faget

...

Because mangas usually are written by one person.

The characters in western cape markets are written by countless different people over the years. I'm not saying that you're wrong but the thing is everyone who writes a hero from DC or Marvel always seems to have a different idea on how to take them (usually not trying to stray too far from the core factor though that depends to). In early comics Spiderman could make shields from his web or use them as a parachute but later ones nixed that. Why? I dunno maybe a new writer thought it was too goofy and maybe another writer will think it's cool then put it back in.

All of it on the Western side stems from the fact there isn't one central writer. But with how long these characters have been around can you really blame them?

We can. Very easily. A character should not be going on for as long as something like Marvel's have. Having hundreds of writers working on the same character over the decades just messes it all up. It's not a character anymore. Just an IP. It's one of the many reasons I can't buy from the big two anymore. They don't make stories or characters. Just the same products over and over and over again with a different creative team each time. For something like that, you don't want a shared continuity or universe. That only works if it's independent from one another.

Because mangas are written to end. Capeshit is written to be eternal.

Capeshit already dabbled before in continuous accumulation of ridiculous powers, we called that the Silver Age. Likewise, it has a main Editor, who has the job to keep the status quo stable so the character / franchise can have new writers and illustrators being swapped in and out constantly.

One of the main elements of manga is that characters grow as time passes, and as they overcome new challenges. In Shonen manga, that shows as accumulation of new powers, which become new tools for fighting. In a way, you can argue this growth is also a sign of deeper self-knowledge, to know more about oneself to do more, a rather eastern concept.

Capeshit for a long time hasnt been about new challenges to the same characters, but about selling toys – or nowdays, about keeping the brand strong to farm movies from it. You'll notice that in manga, villains live, fight and die, before the next rung of more powerful villains is rolled in. In Capeshit, villains tend to get ressurrected instead.

So basically big-name comics are built to be stagnant from the get-go.

Pretty much.

I found more enjoyment from indie superhero stories at times because it actually would have an ending or something it's building up to.

Some of the shorter lived western stuff, like Power Pack, actually did that fine

Yeah. End when the money stops flowing.

Shonenshit and Capeshit are the same crap. What was once about big dudes suddenly creeping their powers evermore into infinity for no good reason against the absolute forces of evil became little boys going on about their bullshit powers against whomever just pissed them off in a rotten dystopia where nothing ever goes right.

Whether its shattering the universe, or pulling some godly weapon out of negative earth, it's goddamn fiction pushed to kids, only one's a tad bit more risqué, and the other's in colour. Don't pretend longrunners are unique to the west only, you goddamn weeab.

Yep. Pretty much.


Most shonen is crap. And by most I mean the super popular ones with normies. But there's still way more good shonen stories that have ended or will end than there is for american cape comics.

Yup, surgeon's law.

Dragon ball is a zombie franchise, Detective Conan never used it's backstory. But having a story arc with an end is something they try to do more often in japan.

I have high hopes for One Piece, because Oda supposedly had the ending in mind a long time, but is adding to it in the middle. Kind of helps that the end goal is a place

I really don't know how someone could stay with One Piece this long with it still having no clear end in sight.

It would obviously be better. It is much easier to find a good comic outside of big two than within, despite all the resources that both Marvel and DC have at their disposal.

Because Marvel and DC dominate the market. Luckily things seem to be changing slowly, with more creator owned books gaining popularity and increasing amount of foreign stuff being translated to English. Outside of the U.S., comic books are almost always done by one person or a team of two (artist+writer).

I like OP mainly because it doesn't lean so hard on straight-up fight scenes, mixing them with other stuff like chasing someone down, trying to find things, and wacky antics. Plus I'm a sucker for not compartmentalizing serious and silly to ensure they never touch.

Well I suppose that's fair.

That's half the appeal of One Piece for me. It never takes itself seriously, but it presents it's ridiculous situations dramatically so you can see something that looks straight out of Looney Tunes video and still get socked right in the cockles.

Perfect example is this fucker right here, Senor Pink. When we're introduced to him we see a fat slob dressed up like a baby surrounded by whores swooning over him who he wants nothing to do with, and he has the power to… swim through any surface.

Later, moments before his defeat we finally learn his backstory. He used to be in shape, and a badass mobster. Then he met a blue-eyed girl in the rain named Russian. He fell for her and they got married, but he kept his life as a mobster secret from her. They had a kid, but the kid got sick and died and she blamed him for it because she wasted time trying to reach him at the bank he worked at when they'd never heard of him, time that could have saved the kid's life. In a rage she runs out during a storm, slips and falls and ends up in a hospital alive but braindead. He visits her every day. One day he brings in the baby's bonnet. He puts it on in front of her noting how much the baby looked like him, and she smiles. Despite supposedly being braindead he smiles. So he dedicates himself to it. Every day he comes back dressed a bit more like a baby. His slim physique is replaced with a rotund more baby-like appearance until he's barely recognizable except for his sunglasses. His wife dies, he keeps it up in her honor. Women flock to him hearing of his dedication, but he'll have nothing to do with them.

And then a cyborg in a speedo and a tuxedo top pummels him unconscious with his giant popeye robot arms.

One more consistent difference is that even when anime/manga tries to run forever, like OP started the thread about, the characters get new powers/flashier designs/stronger/swap characters out and generally have at least a tweaked status quo so that there's the illusion it's going somewhere.

Capestuff typically goes completely back to normal after an arc is over, with very little changed. A plot arc will happen, and when the arc is done everyone goes back how they were before it started.

I watched the show myself and still lost it when I read that.

I also loved how Usopp managed to achieve the goal of knocking out Sugar despite losing. In your typical Shonen series he'd have discovered/unveiled a new power/technique strong enough to beat Trebol, gotten the upper hand by being underestimated, or accomplished nothing so the main character can be more important and badass.

The difference between a stable, stagnant status quo, and a stable, (fakely-)progressing status quo.

It's even worse when you begin to see the plot holes happening. For example, since people are using it, in OP, the devil fruit were suppose to be an extremely rare commodity. Once they got to the "Alabasta" arc, everyone powerful had devil fruit powers, wasn't a human, had some bullshit "plan", and/or (Since "Summit War" arc) achieved some superhuman level of enlightenment. In fact, prior to, I think the only powerful, regular, human was the sword guy Zoro wants to kill.

I don't think it's that the fruits themselves are rare, I think it's that it's difficult to get the one you want. A lot of them give really useless powers, and it seems when one is identified it tends to go out of circulation quickly or someone eats it. I remember during the arc with Cipher Pol, two members nervously eat the ones the government gives them having no idea what powers they'll grant them. In other cases we see people who have identified which fruit they've found readily willing to kill to get it, like Blackbeard killing the guy who got the fruit he wanted, or the entire conflict with Doflamingo's crew over the surgeon fruit since it's one of the ones that possibly grants immortality. I'll bet you their search for another that did that is how they got the fruit Sugar ended up with.

I think the more important development was Haki which shook up their value dramatically and established characters without them as still being extremely viable threats.

Power creep just appears to be inherent problem with long running shounen. Only cases where it is/was minimized are Jojo, Fullmetal Alchemist, HunterxHunter, and Soul Eater.

It's not like capes are free of it either. Superman and Flash became close to omnipotent, Batman went from a skilled fighter and detective with gadgets to a man who's ability to prepare borders on clairvoyance; Richards' kids are almost godlike; and I won't even mention X-Men. And it's not only characters themselves, but technology too. Death in either of the big two books is just a temporary setback to most characters.

As someone said before, anime heroes work hard and train for their powers and their victories, even if they acquire their powers by accident, or are given them, or are born with them, they still train with them.
Western superheroes just stay the same, or build a gadget, or if they're a millennial female hero they get their friends to do it for them.
The only western heroes who train like Baki or Son Goku are Flash and the original X-Men.
Even Daredevil and Batman only have training as part of their backstory, they have plateaued and don't train to get better.

What about the Robins?

What about Knightfall when Bane broke Bruce's back and he had to heal for a while so Azrael took over as Batman?

That's because capes have no real continuity. Only the illusion of one. They make you think change has happened when in reality nothing has changed.

For example, Batman has gone through the same goddamn arc at least THREE TIMES and keeps forgetting what he learned from it.

The problem isn't the power creep, it's that writers don't make challenges that rise to that level.

Like, if you're going to have Bat-GOD, you better make the crime he faces warrant such skills. Joker randomly murdering people for LOLS just won't cut it.

Are you referring to the "Batman becomes a dick" arc, where he acts like a dick to the Batfamily and tells them to fuck off, then realizes he needs them and comes back?

Depends on the Manga. If its like shonen then its comics at its worst. Lots of fighting, even less context, even less focus on environment and just bashing power levels. Very little context is going to exist and fights are just gonna be fights.

If its one of the better manga then we get stories with conclusive beginnings middles and endings.

What if OP stopped trying to bring /a/ shit into Holla Forums?

Spoiler for getting off-topic.
The abundance of devil fruit users past the east blue arc is kind of justified a few ways. First of all, if people who don't have DF power, haki or something special would just me more helpless bystanders. They become relevant because they have powers. There's plenty more normal people around, they just can't be very relevant. Also the grand line, especially the new world is an especially ruthless place. Regular people in the four seas get freaked out when they see DF powers in action, but people in the grand line don't. Pirate emperors are essentially the government there because they've kept the WG out for the most part. So in short, as an audience we're only seeing interesting things happen in interesting places. DFs seem common because of our perspective. Though there do seem to be a lot of them total.

It's been happening since the 70's buddy. And, it doesn't help that all cartoons within the past two decades are all animated in Korea. Your precious "/a/ free" Holla Forums has been dead for years.

There's only supposed to be 100 or so Devil Fruit, but that may be a translation issue of only "100 known" Devil Fruit, or something to that effect.

Even still, they are still fairly rare, when you consider that the Strawhats have fought pirate crews that have mooks numbering in the thousands. They fought something like 50,000 guys at Fishman Island.

It's just the way the narrative spotlight works.. Because no regular, weak schmuck from a podunk island in the East Blue will want Devil Fruit powers unless they intend to use them. Chances are they'll get killed or the fruit will get stolen before they sell it, either way. So all the Devil Fruit users that keep popping up are big shots who fought and struggled and earned their place as bigshots who hang out with Yonkou and run with the strongest Pirates in the world.

Plus, there's that one thing one of the CP9 guys said about Devil Fruit users being made to fight each other by the raging Devil's that possess their bodies.. So there's always a chance that Devil Fruits naturally crop up or find their way into the hands of particularly strong or willful individuals.

The thing I'd want to carry over from Manga the most is smarter fight scenes. I thought of this while reading the bad Crysis tie-in comics. Here you've got these people with suits that have Strength, Speed, Armor, and Cloak modes that all pull from the same power source, but in all the action scenes they only show them shooting in the general direction of ayy lmaos with some explosions in the background. Hell, there are even Koreans with Nanosuits they could face off against, but instead they focused the whole thing on time travel and killing off the protagonist from the first game. Imagine if they had brought power management and strategy into the mix instead of treating the action like an afterthought to support the shitty writer's fan fiction.
Doesn't help that the art's atrocious.

That is an excellent point. They're in the strongest territories in the world. You can't be weak and thrive there. And we are being introduced to all sorts of new non-devil fruit powers. Everyone's learning Haki, the Minks have their Electro, the samurai and ninja have their own various techniques, the Fishmen have their own water karate and all their natual inborn abilities, giants, demons, all these "tribes" popping up like the three eye tribe, long leg, long arm, long neck, etc. characters like Sai, Cavendish and Elizabello are ridiculously powerful without even that, we're still routinely getting characters like Kyros who have absolutely no powers but are still able to pose a genuine threat, and there's the entire style of martial arts Cipher Pol uses that we've barely scratched the surface of. Sanji learned their foot moves, but that's it. All their other techniques are insanely strong. And you know Franky isn't going to be the last cyborg we run into.

I got three theories on the DF personally. 1. the most obvious, they're souls. That's why the mass-produced ones are all Zoan, it's easy to get an animal's soul, just kill it. 2. Blackbeard's "unusual body structure" that's allowing him to have two devil fruits is that he has three stomachs. 3. The final challenge is going to be overcoming the DF weakness. I think either that can be achieved through Haki (and we've already seen evidence of it with his underwater battles in and before Fishman Island) or they're going to run into a DF user whose ability is that they can change what your weakness is. I hope for Luffy's sake it doesn't get changed to meat.

Funny thing is, based on him brushing his teeth with a toilet brush in his first appearance in the manga, I swore he was a reference to Mr. Plinket.

You're giving manga far too much credit here. Fights in manga are drawn-out bullshit where they stand around explaining everything they do and have a retarded amount of focus on "special moves". How many fucking times has one person just stood around and let themselves be hit by whatever "special technique" (that almost certainly comes with its name being shouted while/before it's being performed) the other person is using? How often do they just stand around and talk no matter how out of place it is after landing one hit instead of following up? How many fucking times do we have to see some faggot get beaten almost to death only for him to make some oh-so-miraculous or clever comeback and win thanks to a magical powerup?

And there's also the issue of how when manga isn't having everyone explaining their past and future actions, it's just a clusterfuck of cut-ins and speedline nonsense. The Bleach manga was a good example of this shit, at least back when I stopped paying any attention to it. Artist loves to show things like close-ups of feet to show that someone is starting to move (which is made even worse by the fact that so many people in it wear the same or similar uniforms, meaning you can't even tell whose foot it is) or swords swinging or some shit. The result is that all you get out of it without painstakingly examining every panel in close detail is that "shit is happening". That's fucking awful in an action scene. In an action scene, you have to be able to clearly tell what's going on and not sit and carefully examine every panel, because that defeats the whole fucking point of an action scene.

JoJo is another example where they just stand around talking about and explaining their powers and then throw special moves at each other. I'll give it credit for having everyone using their superpowers in inventive ways, but that just leads to situations where everyone is a genius and the protagonist knew that the other stand user knew that they knew that they were going to do X, but they did in fact do Y instead!! etc.

tl;dr mango is perhaps better at using powers in original ways, but the way they handle it usually squanders it all anyway.

That's why Akira Toriyama is the god of drawing fight scenes.

Keisuke Itagaki, Buronson, Tetsuya Saruwatari, and Yukito Kushiro are my favourites for fight choreography.
They always find a way to keep it fresh.

aren't comics kind of written like that with the whole trend of decompressed storytelling? *cough cough Bendis*

I read all of your post.
You lack brevity.

Here are your points.
I agree, things like the Marvel Manga-verse and Antarctic Press are terrible.

Yes, Japan's graphic novels aren't predicated on officially sanctioned fan-fiction.

That is because the goal is to tell an interesting adventure story that is mostly aimed at children while comics tend to be made with the goal of letting a gaggle of untalented liberal shitheads vomit out their political views between 20 pages of full color men in spandex and 28 pages of immersion destroying advertisements.

Your central point seems to be your dissatisfaction with conflict resolution.
To be frank many superheroes lack limits.
You need limits so you can work around those limits.
People say "One Punch Man" at that point but One Punch Man is satire that underlines the writing flaw known as powercreep.

Batman works well because he is more or less your run of the mill action hero in a bat costume.
Say Batman is fighting Bane.
Batman cuts or rips out the venom IV tubes, Bane doesn't die and he falls over.
Not that great a resolution.

Lets say Bane has his regulator turned up and he overdoses on venom as a kind of "just deserts" resolution.
Better, but not really that inventive either.

Ideally Batman is forced into a situation where he seemingly can't fuck-up banes tubes or regulator.
Maybe Batman manipulates Bane into a situation where he has to power himself down.
Maybe Batman manipulates a part of the environment or another powerful villain to take down Bane, ideally with a delayed action.
Maybe Batman knows Bane can only last a precise amount of time and has to figure out a way to bide that time.

The other half of the equation is having Bane formulate plans to counteract whatever Batman is trying to do.
Introducing new factors that make the death defying act Batman is trying to pull off all the more death defying.

The real thing though is that none of it is as strait-faced as most comics.
The breaks in action are not just set-up to more action, there is comedy.
But jokes offend some peoples fefes and also take a little more than no-effort to produce.
There is character growth in manga where a modern comic would have really low brow political commentary.
Talking about current events takes no fucking effort because they're not actually creating anything.
They are taking their pissy blog posts and distilling them into a series of word bubbles on top of a mediocre artist's drawings.

I think Bane stopped using the Venom at one point but kept the tubes for the aesthetic. It would be interesting if he turned the venom into a pill so he can have his strength and no tubes for batman to cut.

Not bothering to spoil too much, but One Piece specifically starts out in the East Blue, considered the weakest sea in the world; the least interesting place in the world, where there's the fewest superpowers and weird shit going on. Probably one of the better places to settle down, so long as you don't get an Arlong coming along; almost literally a big fish in a small pond. (Or an Ax-Hand Morgan. Or any petty tyrant of which the setting has no shortage, really) Devil Fruits and other powers are rare there, because users very rarely bother going there. (and the way they work ensures that's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy, since Devil Fruits regrow somewhere relatively near where their last user dies)

And then they go to the Grand Line, which is basically if the Bermuda Triangle encompassed the entire equator. All kinds of weird shit, ancient civilisations, giant sea monsters, fish-men, mermaids, etc etc. Also happens to be where the government and its military is based, along with what seems like a good chunk of the world's population lives. It's a rough neighbourhood, so the tough people are a lot tougher, and everyone's always looking for an edge- like a Devil Fruit. And then the second half of the Grand Line is basically on steroids compared to the first half; it's the weirdest and most dangerous place in the world, where you need some degree of superpower just to survive, and thus most of the famous and powerful people have one.


Always thought that was a bigger problem in anime than manga, since they're constantly drawing out every single scene to spend less on actual animation and make more episodes, and to desperately kill time waiting for the next chapter of the manga to come out.


A huge problem in comics is that a shitload of are literally just repeating stories and events over and over with different set dressing and worse writing, as writers desperately try to retell an old story worse and worse every time.

One Piece did power creep pretty well I think; Luffy's whole solo arc basically has him on the lower decks of a conflict where he's actually middle-ranked at best on the totem pole, and the most powerful people in the world are still way above his pay grade even if he's massively improved from where he started.

Power creep usually becomes a problem in anime like in Dragon Ball where the clearly intended end point was killing the big bad space bastard who can destroy planets on a whim and dying in the process, and then he comes back as a cyborg with his dad but they die like bitches and the only legitimate threat involves Goku dying from a disease, and then a character who's explicitly a clone of all the strongest heroes and thus has all their OP strength and powers built in. The rest of the world doesn't have any relevance to them anymore, so they have to keep bringing in shit from outside or cosmic threats.

My guess was Blackbeard having an undeveloped twin in his body, but since he's apparently going after other Devil Fruits, who knows. Maybe he has no soul?

Considering One Punch Man and My Hero Academia have surpassed Western capeshit, they should try and give it a go.

Except One Piece still falls victim to power creep every shounen gets into.
At this point, Gold Rogers experience is a lie or Luffys grandfather and Gold Roger are planet busters. At least Goku isn't trying to be a leader of Saiyans and than causing fuck ups. It's what turned me off One Piece, a fucker aiming to be King but causing problem after problem for his friends and allies. It's like amusing a mental retard who aims to rule a country.

What are you talking about? Caesar was soundly defeated, Luffy didn't even break a sweat with him. They kept him prisoner for the next several arcs. He defeated him with a freaking Gear 3 move.

And Luffy unveiling Gear 4 despite all the delays and everything was incredibly satisfying. I absolutely adore Luffy's characterization, I always have. He's easily become my favorite fictional character in any media period. He's basically just a really good little kid with incredible super powers. From the moment he first saved Robin's life and she went "No, leave me here, I want to die…" and he responded "Shut up! I don't have to do what you tell me!" His explanation of his desire to be king of the pirates being as simple as "I want to be the most free. Pirates are free, therefor the king of the pirates is the most free." How every time they encounter a new villain no matter how ridiculously overpowered they are he drops the simple refrain "I just have to kick his ass, right?" How he's broken through Law's tough guy act and basically turned him into a subordinate.

When Luffy unveils his gear 4 form and goes "Bounce-man!" and he looks like a gorilla got a basketball pregnant, and he just keeps bouncing there, and Doflamingo starts laughing at him and Luffy just goes "Shut up! I'm gonna kick your ass!" and Doflamingo goes "You look ridiculous. You can't even stop bouncing with that body. How is bounciness supposed to defeat me? I thought you were serious. I thought you had a strategy." and in-between bounces Luffy just goes "I am serious." "This is my strategy. >B("

Then after sending him flying across the city when he flies over to pursue him, the citizens awe is somewhat chilled when he awkwardly bounces away after Doflamingo.

Easily like, 4th best moment of the series to me.

Oda did say he deliberately designed Luffy's powers so that even the biggest fight scenes wouldn't be too serious.

One Piece is a lot more well thought out than it gets credit for. I do like that when given the opportunity to learn what One Piece is, Luffy immediately says stfu and he'll turn around and go home if someone spoils it for him, because you don't take on the whole whole for something that you know exactly what it's going to be. And the point of being the Pirate King is that you basically have to be the biggest badass on the planet to conquer the end of the Grand Line. It's supposed to be a huge, grand quest that takes years, and wouldn't be half as interesting if it didn't. The real story is how the world and the people changes along the way.

The reveal of Gear 4 easily made the whole Dressrosa clusterfuck worth the wait.

so you are saying we need more creator owned comics? i completly agree

Oh boy, another "stealth" manga thread.
Why does it bother weebs so much that there's a board dedicated to Western comics and animation?

The model of many authors writing stories under various publishers will give higher quality content than several IPs belonging to publishers who assign writers to them.

This gives a higher quality product to the consumer, but is a greater risk for the publisher, since they have to bid against each other to get the best writers and the writer's work has a finite run time. The Publisher owned IP model has considerably less risk, but DC and Marvel tend to drop the ball when it comes to quality control, since the stories are in the hands of money men instead of writers. Because their product sucks, their sales drop, which causes revenue to drop, which makes them tighten the budget and hire cheaper labor which reduces the quality of their product and causes the cycle to feed on itself.

As a consumer, I definitely want Writer controlled stories, but it wouldn't be an issue if the publisher had a good creative director for each IP.

Which they don't and can't do if they're profits drop. But then you can't support bad "writing" in the first place or else you're feeding the beast in a different way. Honestly it's just best to start supporting the industry through creator owned stuff instead. If Marvel and DC suffer because of their own idiocy than so be it. Leave em to run dry.

Shounen is a target demographic for manga magazines. It's not a genre.

A lot of people also seem to think that manga starts and stops at Dragon Ball and similar works.

What's actually happening is that everyone but the die-hard patriots are getting fed up with grinning potato cartoons and virtue signaling comics. Animu and Mangoo look like gold compared to the shit we're getting.

Also pigeonholing. Is there even such a thing as a western comfy slice-of-life series? Maybe technically MLP, but the characters all being animals detracts from the slice-of-lifeness. I'm a little frustrated that none of those get dubs because they're so culture-oriented.


Characters getting stronger isn't a problem. It's when getting stronger is the entire plot. Also Luffy losing round one to Ceaser is good writing IMO. Just because Luffy's "stronger" doesn't mean he should have the upper hand at all times. Ceaser is a clever Logia user after all.

The closet we get to slice of life stuff in western animation is usually shit that gets annoying in art style or comedy very very fast.

How the fights go down depends on where you're at in the series, but there's definitely an internal logic to it. Luffy doesn't really struggle at all until Crocodile. Even Arlong basically gets his ass kicked the entire fight. Crocodile defeats Luffy like three times before Luffy is finally able to beat him. From then on most of the fights are a struggle, and the entire cast gets completely humbled right at the two year timeskip.

What someone pointed out to me that I think says a lot for the series that another place One Piece differs from typical shonen is the new generation aren't just automatically stronger because they're the new generation, the younger characters are constantly getting their shit slapped by characters in their 50's and older. And Oda's characters all look dramatically different from eachother (less so with the girls, but still there are notable differences.)

That's because [Cartoon+Kid=Slapstick Comedy] is heavily ingrained on our culture and it takes way more effort to write clever sitcom than it does to write slapstick one-liner schlock.

There's also the fact that positive male lead characters are oppressive and female leads have to be "strong" instead of acting like real girls. We need both the SJW wave to die and for western animation to kick the Kidz R Dum stereotype before we can get good cartoon slice of life comedy.

Exactly. The notion of cartoons being solely for kids and thus must be dumbed down to insulting levels has existed long before the SJWs came. Now we have two huge problems piling onto each other. They both need to be stopped if we want animation in the west to survive. Now what's it gonna take for that to happen? Who knows. Possibly a massive crash in the market of either cartoons or comics to give these stupid fucks a wake up call.

Yes, and manga are not comic books, but that won't stop anyone pointing out the pure coincidences, now. Will it?

Smarter fight scenes aren't unique to manga, you super retard. The reason why they aren't fighting with their actual powers is because the writers don't know and don't care about the source material. It's just a shoe-in for dough, rather than anything actually made with passion.

Your Lie in April is shounen. You will notice however that it's nothing at all like Dragon Ball.

I should have clarified that I was talking about capeshit. All these unique powers and all writers use it for is visual flair to spice up their political rants. I haven't read a good superhero fight scene in the past 15 years.

Well this is what happens when everyone with actual creative potential says 'fuck you' to working for corporations with a known track record of treating their employees like shit. If you wanna keep love for capestuff then read indie cape stuff, people can be pretty inventive with the shit they come up with for those.

I once read a comic where a hero's origin story was that he was the product of a sleep experiment. He was the manifestation of a glowing cat's dreams, it was god damn awesome.

To be fair, nobody is going to dedicate several pages to a comic book fight scene when one or two pages will do. The widescreen days are dead, deal with it.

I mean, there's a whole sub-arc/theme about how in the New World, arrogant Logia users are the first to bite it because everyone's onto their tricks.

what was the name of that comic user? Sounds interesting.

Ceaser definitely qualifies for arrogant, but he's at least not dumb enough to be caught off guard by haki. And now that I think of it, the first time Luffy was trying to capture him as per Law's plan. Round two he was just "fuck this guy."

I talked about it in a thread before. It was called 'The Victories' done by Michael Avon Oeming. The overall plot was pretty meh but some of the heroes origins were pretty cool.

Teen Titans Go is western slice of life.

Oh victories. I remember now thanks user.

And then you realise that the Crocodile fight was also full of Luffy having to really think and learn about how to actually win. Then there's the subtle hint that Luffy may have been exhibiting armament haki back then when he was able to hit Crocodile using his blood soaked fist. Oda has put so much thought into the series.

I want reddipol to leave.

Well, as the most autistic of weebs insist that true /a/ only comes from Grorious Nippon, maybe /a/ is also /a/ free.
Captcha: uZckgd… "You's Cucked Good?"

If western comics were written like manga, Batman would spend 38 issues getting his ass beat, and in the 39th issue he'd ass pull a victory by suddenly having more "fighting spirit" and punching the bad guy harder than before, as he screams to himself about believing in himself.

Not that western comics are any better than that, but neither is manga.

Toriyama was a hack. People regard him highly only because DBZ was popular, not because it was any good. DBZ was the Limp Bizkit of animation, a lot of retarded people like it and therefore people got the mistaken idea it must've been good. The only difference is that the rest of society looked back and said "Limp Bizkit was actually really stupid." That's a moment of clarity that no anime fan has ever had in their entire lives, they will go to their graves never once reevaluating anything they have ever once liked in their entire lives, in fact they will vehemently defend anything they liked even if it was when they were 10. If you question them even politely, they get way way too sensitive in defending it. This is a reputation anime fans have earned over decades. The only people unaware of this are anime fans, and it's gotten so bad that even a scant few anime fans have started to realize it about 20 years after everyone else already knew it.

But I mean, it's pretty obvious that the vast majority of anime fans still have no clue.

It popularized a lot of the stuff that has become staples of the genre, though.

-Power levels
-Hair changing to show a transformation in power
-Training arcs
-Incredibly high speed aerial battles with energy blasts and the combat moving so fast casual onlookers can't even see what's happening.

What if people kept /a/ in /a/ and Holla Forums in Holla Forums?

No, anime still isn't made in Korea.


Manga is not limited to Dragon Ball or Naruto or whatever you're talking about here. Manga encompasses just about any genre and topic you could think of.

All really shit stuff though.

Arial Battles are some of the worst in my opinion. 90% of interesting combat is environment. Flight begins with ignoring ALL of it.

Its like saying that it popularized herpes and aids.

I prefer The original Dragon Ball series because it actually had some stuff going on. I got sick of DBZ during the Buu arc when the power level arms race started going stupid fast.


Come to think of it, where are newspaper-style comics going to go? We have some cute and comfy in those, and some series like azumanga started in jap comic format.

Daily reminder that Holla Forums mentions on /a/ are instant bans

Limp Bizkit is good though. Popular opinion may say LB is garbage and meaningless, but that's just a meme to collectively hate something.

You're just being a hipster by hating on it.

It happened a year after the death and return of superman. DC was experimenting with 'killing' their iconic heroes to increase sales. They didn't want to have bruce die and then come back to life so they gave him a more…. shall we say 'earthly' problem to overcome instead.

Nowadays it's more like Batman is Peter Griffin levels of retarded to the Batfamily and is surprised when they call him out on it. I still can't get over him actually revealing everyone's secret identity to the Joker of all people just because he wanted to gloat after seeing him in jail.
Which of course, will end up happening because status quo.

Yeah, he was trying to be a fatherly figure in an anti hero team at some point. It was fun.

Caesar beat luffy in less than 5 minutes the first time they met by catching him off guard and eliminating all oxygen in a wide area.
He then lost because he is not a fighter and he didn't kill luffy while he could.
Who am I kidding Oda won't kill anyone in the current story. An assassin who works as an assassin headshotted brown beard with a canon sized handgun at point blank range and he still lived.

A ton of webcomics very specifically emulate the newspaper comic format. At this point, mostly old ones, though at least ones that tend to update regularly come hell or high water.


To be fair, Batman being a shit dad is very believable.

I think that team was the secret six.

What if someone experimented by making a board built for discussion of animation and comics regardless of western or eastern origin?

It's already dead. Would give it a look, though.

Reading through this thread I can tell a lot of experience people here have with mango are limited to Shonen Jump, or even more limited to just a series or two from WSJ.
There are a lot of weird generalizations in some posts that only apply to a handful of series.
Manga is not just shonen, you guys. And shonen manga isn't just WSJ. And WSJ manga isn't just Dragonball, Naruto, Bleach and One Piece.

Well, that's kind of predictable since both comics and cartoons have struggled to break out of their respective pigeonholes. I mean anything that even looks like an action cartoon is rare and most go action-comedy with more emphasis on the comedy.

Breakaways are rare and short-lived, and I think one crappy thing about american culture is the need to classify everything into a neat box.

To change this, something will need to be a groundbreaking hit that reaches outside the "weeb" audience that's currently forced to import, and it will have to happen once for each medium/genre combination and be followed up by more quality.

The shonen generalizations are probably because the OP question is only applicable toward Big Two superhero books.

Toriyama wasn't a hack; the original DB was good, especially the first arc. It's just that the guy begins to struggle with continuity and handling power cycles when he's forced to keep going for years and years and years, even when he originally planned to stop.
I'm guessing you don't remember the original DB, and that you've never looked at his other stuff. Sand Land's a really good example of how great his writing can be.

Though my original point was that he was a god at drawing fight scenes, and you haven't proven that wrong.

I think there is a point to be made in OP overall, just not in the way he meant, and more in art than writing. Western comics aren't as good at composition as your typical Japanese comic. I know there was a thread about this some months ago, about how Western comics move from action to action, while Japanese comics will focus on setting and movement more.
Pics related– Lone Wolf and Cub (could have better panel flow, but it's a good example of how the content of the panel differs from Western stuff) and Kick-Ass. Western comics are more likely to just show the action of hitting, while Japanese comics focus on the wind-up. I'd like to see more LWAC-esc panel composition in the West. It makes for faster, easier reading, and it helps space out dialogue. Western comics have a problem where they tend to get really wordy because they flow so differently.

Fair enough, but I think there's a lot the big two could learn from the whole range of comics japan makes.
Japan started to make good comics and cartoons when they started taking good ideas from western stuff, but usually, on the other hand when you look for western comics trying to take something from manga it's usually that god-awful attempt at imitating the art style and it stops there.

Agree and also I think is usually done better in mango is showing intensity.
I know it's just one page as an example, but those panels in Kick-Ass barely feel like he's trying to hit hard, while even in mango without super powers there's a lot of eye catching explosive action.