Zack Davisson --> SDCC: I still laugh remembering Stan telling the story of how in the late 90s / early 00s when he started getting invitations to anime conventions. "You do know I'm American, right?"

@debaoki.bsky.social had a good thread going on another site about US-based artists who want to break into manga. They don't want to make comics, they want to make manga. They want to be in Shonen Jump. Which is an almost impossible goal to reach. And ABSOLUTELY requires fluency and living in Japan.

It's unfortunate, because there are potentially many great artists who could be producing great comics--here in the US. But because their personal metric of success is "to be published in a manga magazine in Japan" they will most likely never achieve their dreams.

I've said for a long time that it is a shame manga and comics have become treated as two different things in the West. They are the same medium.

I’ve had people seriously argue with me that Stan Lee is a mangaka because he wrote Heroman but Stan Sakai is not because he lives in America.

I would argue with those people that they don't know what the fuck "mangaka" actually means.

This argument came about because I brought up that the American definition of manga becomes complicated when you consider how global anime and manga creation is nowadays and defining manga by nationality becomes complicated when you take into account international Japanese artists

And that just using Japanese comics makes things a lot simpler

I still laugh remembering Stan telling the story of how in the late 90s / early 00s when he started getting invitations to anime conventions. "You do know I'm American, right?"

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