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Forum - View topicNEWS: Diamond April Solicits
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Ztarr
 Posts: 44 Location: Canada |
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Please don't call anything "OEL"...yukkies.
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Tempest
 I Run this place.ANN Publisher  Posts: 10421 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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WTF ? First people get pissed off when we call it Amerimanga, originally a completely benign title, and demand that we call it OEL, and now you don't like "OEL" ? What do you want us to call it ? Should we make up a new term every 6-months when people start to associate the old one with crappy manga imitations ? This is going to happen regardless of what we call it, and fact is, for every good OEL title published there's about 5 bad ones (just like for every good manga published in Japan, there's about 20 bad ones). I hereby pass an ANN moratorium on not calling OEL titles anything other OEL or World manga for a period 18 months. I don't care if the marketers invent a new title in the meantime. -t |
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Peter Ahlstrom
Posts: 72 Location: Los Angeles |
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(No objection to "OEL" here...)
But believe it or not, Death Jam is actually manhwa (published in Korea in 2002-2003 by Haksan) so is not OEL. |
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ACDragonMaster
 Posts: 405 |
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Personally, I've taken to refering to everything as "comics". Especially manga-style stuff done in English, if I really need to specificy then I'll use "manga-style comics" or "Japanese-style comics", but I generally try to avoid the other terms.
And yes, I do fairly often refer to manga as "Japanese comics". In fact, it's generally only when I'm speaking with anime fans that I'll say "manga" more often, and even then "comics" works just fine. *shrugs* They're all comics, so why not call them that? |
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dizzywulf
Posts: 102 Location: Wakayama, Japan |
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Is Boys of Summer based on a book? I think I remember there being a novel called Boys of Summer a while ago.
The author's name is different from the artist...is it an OEL? Personally, I don't really care what it's called. I think OEL works best, because I think Japanese people call American comics (i.e. Batman, X-Men and such) "amerimanga". |
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Tempest
I Run this place. ANN Publisher Posts: 10421 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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American author, Japanese artist. -t |
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Tenchi
 Posts: 4471 Location: Ottawa... now I'm an ex-Anglo Montrealer. |
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You're not the only one around here who prefers to use the C-word (well, the other C-word that's not "cartoon") when talking about comic books created in English primarily for an English-speaking audience. I suppose that, if I really wanted to be über-Scott-McCloud-pretentious, I could always call them "manga-style sequential art". |
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Patachu
Past ANN Contributor
 Posts: 1325 Location: San Diego |
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Because when you say "it's all just comics," that is tantamount to saying "I refuse to participate in your culture of word games." True story: In April 2005, I casually typed "Original English Language manga" in a blog post to refer to Tokyopop's line because I wanted to be fair to their non-American artists. (I believe the work in question was Dramacon; the creator is Russian-Canadian, for crap's sake!) I didn't quite expect half the internet and several comic publishers to adopt the term. Even now I am discovering its shortcomings, because it doesn't cover stuff from Europe, like nouvelle manga (which falls quite handily under the "world manga" umbrella). I guess for someone who's just a comic reader, it's easy to pull out the semantic bazooka and say "it's all just comics/pumpkin pie/your mom/whatever" (BOOM! End of discussion! Game Over, Abort/Retry/Fail?) but for someone who writes about comics, well, shit ... you gotta use nouns and adjectives to tell things apart, you know? Try bringing up the finer points of Nausicaa and they think you're talking about Snoopy. |
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ACDragonMaster
Posts: 405 |
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Except that you got one very important point wrong there- I said "they're all comics", but I never said "it's all just comics". Comics is a perfectly suitable word for manga. When I went to Japan, the manga section in the bookstore was frequently labeled コミック. "comics" is simply the word that covers the entire genre, like "graphic novel" covering effectively anything, in any language, that's a litteral book but telling a story with sequential art. Within that description of "comics", however, there's subdivisions, like "manga" generally being stuff out of Japan. But on the other hand, even within "manga" you get stuff as fine as Nausicaa, as well as banal gag every page stuff aimed at little kids. "manga" has no special meaning that means it's any more sophisticated or whatever than "comics" in the US are- most people already recognize "comics" as being both daily newspaper strips and more serious or in-depth serialized stories, anyway.
Ah yes, I use "sequential art" quite a lot as well, especially when I'm ranting about webcomics and generally people not having a proper grasp on the medium and how it differs both from typical writing and standard art. And really, the more exposure I've had to Japanese and such, even though I still use the term "manga", I'm at least as likely to say "comics", because when I went to bookstores when I visited Japan, or when I'm browsing Japanese websites, they frequently use that term. It *is* a perfectly good word after all, and "Japanese comics", "Korean comics", "English comics", etc as terms eliminates the whole fuss over terminology. If you want to get specific, you can say manga- or Japanese-style American comics, or even do the reverse, as I have heard of instances of Japanese comics that the art is more like a Western style... |
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Patachu
Past ANN Contributor
Posts: 1325 Location: San Diego |
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All right then, let me correct myself: Because when you say "they're all comics," that is tantamount to saying "I refuse to participate in your culture of word games." Same difference, right? There is nothing wrong with wanting to sidestep the comic-naming game, but by that same token, I think that those who do enjoy playing with terms and definitions should enjoy the freedom to do so. I see that it annoys and confuses people like yourself, but hell, music wonks make an entire livelihood out of making up new genres of electronica every couple of days. Why shouldn't comic fans? |
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ACDragonMaster
Posts: 405 |
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If people want to play with names, fine, but when it's an issue of what to call things as far as a standard term for the whole fandom, that's a bit different. If there needs to be some sort of consistant standard for, say, a news site to use, and people can't make up their minds on some of the suggested terms, then simply using "comic" might be the best idea.
Similarly, while I'm all for playing with language and such, at the same time I don't see any reason to deliberately muddy the waters and make it difficult for everyone when there's a simple and straightforward way to go about it. Also, as one of the comments to that post you linked states, labels can be rejected because they're too limiting. Why should English-language comics drawn in a style inspired by Japanese comics be necessarily judged solely by association with manga? What about those artists/authors who have been influenced by the style but otherwise have no intention of trying to make their work "manga"? And then the whole issue of more and more comics and cartoons not produced by any companies traditionally associated with anime and manga but still definitely influenced by the style... In short, I wonder whether trying to come up with a lot of fancy phrases and designations is reaching the point where it's no longer feasible, let along accurate, and thus better described as the broader "comics" or "animation" along with, if necessary, qualifiers to specify the exact origin or style. |
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