Though I grew up with European comics, I
really learned to appreciate manga and anime when I was in my early teens. I
watched anime far before I read manga, however, because they would often air in
the local channels. Among the very first anime I watched were Akazukin Chacha, Cardcaptor Sakura, and Pokemon. Among the three, the first two were
of the shoujo genre (lit. little girl). As the name suggests, the target
audience for the show was for little girls. I got bored of television and by extension,
anime, for a time, but I got back into it when AXN started airing anime as part
of their television schedule. By then, the shows I watched were of the shonen
genre.
I cannot recall the first manga I read,
likely because I read them first in Bahasa rather than in English. Part of the
reason for that was probably because I read them in the format of weekly or
monthly manga rather than in individual volumes, which meant that I read single
chapters of multiple manga titles rather than many chapters of one. I read them
because my dad liked to read them too; he used to buy a few volumes when we
went back to Jakarta, and I would read them after he was finished. In the same
vein that my mother introduced me to European comics, my father was the one who
first inspired me to read and appreciate manga.
Even though I’d been an avid reader of
manga for many years, I hadn’t read much of Osamu Tezuka’s works. Reading it
now, however, has brought me a new appreciation for manga. It was nice to see
the origins of manga (which many believe to be Astro Boy) and especially interesting to see how it would later
evolve as more and more people began to draw manga as well. I had also heard of
Bakuman before, though I am more
familiar with the artist’s previous work, Death
Note. It was fun reading Bakuman,
though I didn’t get very far with it. To my understanding, drawing a serialized
manga is a lot of hard work and involves a lot of planning and cooperation with
other professionals. It’s nice to see a manga focused specifically on that, as
we learn to appreciate just how much work it takes to make a successful comic.
I will admit to having manga being my
main driving force for making art when I was a kid. When I was much, much
younger, I used to draw cartoons based off of the shows I watched – Mickey
Mouse, Powerpuff Girls and so on. Then one day, I saw my cousin drawing in the
style of Japanese manga, and I was so impressed by it that I tried to emulate
her (even though I had no idea it was manga back then, just that I knew it was
very pretty and that I wanted to try it too). And so I grew up drawing with
that kind of style, and for the longest time, people were impressed by it and
liked what I did.
…Which, of course, made moving to an
international school and then studying art in Ringling all the more jarring.
Suddenly, it wasn’t cool to watch anime or to draw manga anymore; in fact, in
Ringling it is blatantly discouraged, and we are outright told not to do it. Coming from a culture
where manga and anime played extremely large parts of my childhood and upbringing,
I couldn’t help but find it extremely insulting to be told something like that.
We discussed weeks ago about stereotypes affecting people negatively, and I
believe that this is one such example. Many are often dismissive of manga because
they lump them all into one collective lump of moe and eroge, while that
is obviously not true in the slightest.
While I still don’t exactly appreciate
the general bad consensus anime has around here, I do think that it has ended
up affecting me positively as well. I had to develop a new style to avoid being
called out by my teachers (a fairly large number of them), but it soon became
one that I grew comfortable and familiar with. In a way, I’m glad I came here
because I learned how to deal with an environment which forced me to adapt my
skill set and forced me to broaden my art style.
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