OEL manga is garbage

Discuss.

I like Serenity

>>2

lol

I do like Serenity.

Subject pretty much sums it up.

japanophile

You don't have to be a japanophile to hate OEL "manga."

Just someone who likes decent comics.

OEL manga are trying harder to be like japanese manga, and less to be good manga. Which is why they suck.

Serenity is nice.

>>8
Yeah, seriously

>>8
They treat the "Japanese manga style" like a gimmick (in most cases a poorly executed one, too), or some kind of selling point, and don't bother with a decent storyline.  Unless your name is Oh! Great, the artwork probably can't compensate for a bad or even mediocre storyline.  This goes for pretty much any comic, though, not just manga or "pseudo-manga/OEL manga."

You can blame publishers like Tokyopop for flooding the market with bad OEL manga.  I'm sure there's some decent ones out there, but their decisions to release pretty much anything, whether or not it's actually good, has, at least for now, created a stereotype for OEL manga being "garbage."

Wapanese think "Manga"-style is some generic anime look in comic form. They think manga is a art style, but how can that be when there many different types of art styles?

Like comparing Naoki Urasawa to Tsutomu Nihei or comparing Hideo Yamamoto to Akira Toriyama, so many different styles of art. You could go on and on. What OEL needs is good stories.

The only reason why companies like Tokyopop is putting out OEL is because its cheaper to get some weeaboo webcomic artists to make some OEL titles than it is to get Japanese stuff. That's why they also bring out all that Korean garbage as well. As long as they continue licensing good stuff like BLAME! and Dragon Head, I guess it doesn't matter.

>>12
has it right. tokyopop loves people who will work for cheap. their approach to selling comics is sheer, overwhelming volume. so of course they hire as many hacks as they can (though to their credit they at least didn't hire that BotI plagiarist). that doesn't mean there isn't a diamond in the rough out there somewhere. i'll give the stuff coming out in this format a chance when i start hearing really widespread praise for one. well. there's dramacon, but it sounds a little too conventionally shoujo for me.

>>13
Just out of curiosity, who's the "BotI" (which I assume means "Blade of the Immortal" plagiarist?

the comic was a finalist in the "rising stars of manga" competition called Samurai Zombie. author's name is Hendra Wahjudi.

http//www.a/...
http://www.villagephotos.com/viewpubimage.asp?id_=16302599

it's not just the art; the story is about, get this, an cursed samurai who has to kill a thousand bad guys to lift the curse. once it got to the finals there was a bit of an uproar, but it very nearly slipped by.

>>15
That's fucking horrible, thanks for the link.  What a hack.  How the hell did this get past TokyoPop?

As much as I hate the rampant lawsuits associated with intellectual property, this one, if any one, deserves one, just to protect the integrity of most artists.  Once again, people like this give OEL manga the stereotype it rightfully deserves, as of now.

>>15
"Once it got to the finals there was a bit of an uproar, but it very nearly slipped by."

It's probably due to the fact that nobody actually reads the "Rising Stars of Manga" collections.  I've tried reading a couple, they're on average unreadable.

>>15
Wow.  kill 1000 bad guys.  Talk about god-awful.  *imagines an inuyasha-like saga with 1000 volumes filling the bookshelves of the Anime section of Joseph-beth*

i think i'm going to cry.

I hate Tokyopop.  They ruined everything.

This is the first time for me hearing about this, and after looking at the side-by-side comparisons, I think someone would have to be pretty damn stupid to expect to get away with it.  I mean, if anyone's going to notice, it's going to be people like otakus, that know their favorite manga like the back of their hand, as well as a professional (I use this term loosely, when talking about TokyoPop) publishing company.  I don't know of anyone dumb enough to practically put their entire art career on the line (whoever it is, this person, unless they used some kind of pseudonym, will never work in that industry again), for a contest like that.

And since you'd have to be borderline retarded to pull a stunt like that seriously, my best bet is someone did this on purpose, under a pseudonym, just to make a statement; that OEL manga artists are practically doing exactly what he/she is doing: just copying a style's most basic and noticeable elements and using that like some kind of hook or gimmick.  He/she probably wanted to make the statement that these OEL manga pretty much bring nothing new to the table, and are, in fact, most often not only lacking in a decent story, but in the artwork department, are most often far inferior copies of the styles that they are trying to emulate virtually verbatim.

Bottom line, most OEL manga and what this "Hendra Wahjudi" did are practically one in the same.  There really is no difference.  He/she just took it one step further.

>>18
actually blade of the immortal runs on the same premise, except for it's completely awesome.

>>19
you're totally overestimating the author's intelligence, here. just from the writing (it read like he was lifting the most awkwardly translated dialogue from fansubbed anime) i can tell you that the dude couldn't possibly have been smart enough to do that.

>>20
Maybe I am; after all, I never actually read it, so I have a much less informed opinion on this.

Still, what he/she did is just a more obvious version of what most OEL manga artists are essentially doing, both in terms of stories and in terms of artwork.

I find the fact that out of all the "OEL" comics from Tokyopop so far, the only ones that I felt didn't suck to an extreme degree were ones by a Canadian, an Australian, and a German. (And why you can't strictly call it "OEL"--the German comic came out in Germany first, published by Tokyopop Germany. However, TP screwed up; the comic they got is a sequel to one that was published by Carlsen, and didn't get licensed in North America. ooops.)

>>13
I don't know if Dramacon is that conventionally shoujo yet. What it is, is a comic about fandom, and convention fandom at that, and even more specialized, about artists in general.

You could call it a Canadian shoujo "Comic Party", though. It would fit.

gotta give the person points for having the balls to try it.