Actually, this has been on Yen Plus, their online magazine, for two months, but if you don’t subscribe, now is the time to jump in. Here are the details.
Seems it was just yesterday that Tim Beedle was saying that no one is publishing global manga any more… oh wait, it was! Yen has actually been taking submissions for a while, and they ran a short story by Queenie Chan in the print magazine. Most of their global manga are based on licensed products (Maximum Ride, Twilight, Gossip Girl) so it will be interesting to see where this is going.
Hmm are there any sucessful OEL manga other than Nightschool which aren’t channeling an established fanbase from an established brand?
Oplu- I’d toss Scott Pilgrim as one of those options- even before the movie it had a large audience, though it just concluded [as did Bizenghast with vol.7]. And the longrunning Empowered, from Adam Warren.
Though yeah, the current range of titles is very limited compared to a few years ago, primarily being put out once in a blue moon by smaller comic publishers, stuff like Super Pro K.O. Stuff that is now being marketed less heavily at manga fans by the way it looks too.
Oh, and there’s also Tintin Pantoja’s magical girl manga with Hope Larson on writing that’s coming out next year. There is stuff out there, mostly coming from people who go their starts in webcomics, Tokopop’s OEL program or selfpublishing who’ve since gotten picked up by kids publishers, bookstore GN publishers, projects adapting novels and the occasional manga-influenced book from DH,Oni or other comic pubs.
But Tim’s article really nails a lot of things down regarding the problems new artists face, and the perceptions they have to overcome from editors/marketing and readers
Of all the OEL Mangas that I’ve seen, only Madeleine Rosca’s Hollow Fields stands out as an above-par work. Maybe it was because she was from Australia that explained the exoticism in her work. Maybe it was the similarities in tone to Harry Potter and Gunnerkrigg Court. Or maybe she just put more effort in her creation than the competition. Too many of the attempts to emulate Manga that I’ve seen try too hard to copy the styles and don’t lend themselves to freely experiment the layout of the page. Telophase covered this kind of thing more eloquently than I can:
http://telophase.livejournal.com/203071.html
http://telophase.livejournal.com/353702.html
While American comic companies may feel reluctant to adopt the Manga style, that didn’t stop European and French Comic companies from jumping on the bandwagon. Many of their early attempts were embarassingly amaturish, but they were able to learn from their mistakes and eventually evolve their style in a manner that embraced both types of storytelling without having to sacrifice one over the other. One example I can think of that’s been translated over here is the Elsewhere Chronicles.
http://elsewherechronicles.com/?page_id=2
Rather than try to compete with Manga on its own grounds, we should be taking what works in combination with ours to create a new enity worthy of reading. The goal shouldn’t be to produce Pseudo-Manga, but Quasi-Manga that’ll work on it own terms. If you’re going to try to beat the competition on their home ground, you’re going to lose unless you’re immensely talented.