in this thread we discuss the different comic cultures around the world
my take: manga: really nice there is a lot of generic shit that relies to much fan service and plot less porn like "stories" despite that it is probably the best comic culture there is as not only it has a strong emphasis on new and exotic kind of stories but it also pumps out a lot of pages each month which enables it to have a broad audience and dedicated fans
european: probably the most unique and creative culture both story and art vice but it's difficult to get a good look at the comics as each country has it's own culture and comics outside of the francophone rarely get's translated and exported to other countries and when they do it's in small numbers
american: abysmal shit fuck DC and marvel those fuckers ruined the american comic industry in various ways and should be forcibly shut down it has it's moments where it makes some of the best but those examples are almost solely found outside those two behemoths
my opinion: most of my favorite comics are either european and american and i actually have a hard time finding mangas i like
I haven’t many European comics so I don’t really have an opinion on them. I have to admit I’m a DCfag, but I like manga over comics because their stories are better. Although American comics has better art.
James King
i recently discovered this Argentine comic called clara after dark it's about a prostitute with a heart of gold
Carson Martinez
Not to be a contrarian but Euro comics are shit, Tin Tin and fucking Asterix only appeal to hipster sensibilities amongst people reading comic books today, otherwise what you get is art house stuff that's similar to American graphic novels from the 1990's or 1980's serious mangas, and even then it's hit and miss as for the most part it's style over substance and rarely impressive artwork, much less good plotlines. By all means prove me wrong, I' always up for reading something good.
You need high volumes of publishing in order to allow for the quality stuff to slip in there and it's hard to beat the US and Japan in that, especially since they both now serve global audiences as opposed to niche national markets.
As an example my own country's comic book industry relies mostly on pornographic titles descendants of old Tijuana bibles, this allows enough artists to make a living and go pro that you get something good every now and then, tho mostly mainstream comic books are still dominated by graphic design majors with time on their hands and therefore shit for the most part.
Joshua Sullivan
recommend European comics , I've never read any comics other than Marvel/DC
Samuel Flores
thorgal (haven't read the entire series as it changed author but some of the albums in this series is the best i have ever read) metabarons
actually cant think of any more right that are published in english lmao
>only appeal to hipster sensibilities i guess this is true at least for modern european comics
Jaxon Allen
I haven't read a lot, but 2000 AD is the most well-known of the Europeans, with Judge Dredd being the best known character from it. If you don't want o go through a bunch of different stories they have Dredd collected in a bunch of volumes.
Mobius was perhaps the most well-known Euro artist, with the "Incal" being his most famous work. I would also checkout the work he did on the limited Silver Surfer issues.
One I really liked was "Cathago" bu Humanoid also.
Carson Clark
Wha, perhaps its because different sensibilities, but Eurocomic and Latin American (like the ones from Ignacio Altuna) are the best, be it the art or the plots, than are normally self content in themselves. It also depends of what you like of course, but I dunno, apart of Hellboy and other titles like Artesia or Mouse guard I don't find the USA industry to be that hot, Marvel use lots of tracers for example, while Euros tend to at least have decent art in them. Also Historical comics tend to be very good, informative, well researched and with interesting plots. A few are now dated like Ramiro or Vae Victirs, but still get baller art.
Adrian Price
*Self Contained. Wew.
Ethan Wilson
>I read comics :o
Jayden Cox
The fact that duck comics exist makes your statement already invalid
Aaron Sullivan
Read XIII. It's a Franco-Belgian comic that was the inspiration for the Bourne series. Blacksad is also a good read as well.
Nicholas Wood
Awesome shit that asdly will never get an end.
Nicholas Cruz
Any Gundam fans here ? Mobile Suit Gundam the Origin is great, honestly one of the few mangas that managed to have a great story and some really nice art. As for American comics, Hellboy, the Sandman, the Boys and Marvels are all pretty fun.
Duck comics at what got me into the medium, and I just love Don Rosa's art. The life and Times of Scrooge mcDuck is easily one of the best comics ever.
Nolan Thomas
Comics are nice as long as they aren't cape/shonenshit.
Xavier Russell
don rosa is awesome meet him at a comic con in denmark some months ago
cape can be good when done right what is happening in america is terrible and NOT done right
Jaxon Jackson
Gundam aren't my prefered, but I love mecha shows. Xabungle being my prefered.
Isaiah Jackson
The Japanese manga industry is the largest comic industry that is also primarily created by auteurs. Because there's so much creative freedom inherent in having one person create an entire work there's a huge range of topics and countless amazing stories. Sadly a lot of them never get translated and thus people in the west usually only hear about the more popular ones/ones that happen to get a fan translation. Unlike anime where the vast majority is translated to English there really are huge amounts of great untranslated manga just due to the vast quantity that's been produced ever since the 50s.
Kevin Cooper
most swedish comics are edgy hipster shit like pic related. they still used to be good, but today, many of them have become tumblr tier.
Jaxon Jones
Same can be said about Euro-stuff, lots of them never get translated to english. Being Spanish helps because French or Italian are easy to translate, but there are lots than never get the oportunity. Than they tend to be of few tirades and they tend to be a lot shorter than mangas has it's ups and downs too.
Anthony Collins
Japan: weird system sustained by having boatloads of shitty cliche pandering comics that are always the same in magazines where sometimes the occasional really good stuff comes around. The do all genres with varying degrees of quality, but they clearly shine at romance and drama, with somewhat decent sci fi. They clearly suck at fantasy and related. The art is self handicapped by tradition and tends to look very samey or become obsessed with penciling styles
Franco-belgian: easily the most artistically developed scene of all the world, to the point where and artists will take several years to release the next volume of a series if it means polishing it to his standards. Extremely strong with adventure, sci fi and fantasy, with a strong dose of surrealism and comfy. Writing wise it's always decent, but tends to fall into cliches ie the protags always gets a girl and they fugg in scene.
Their systems puts artistic vision above all so there's no set schedule for publication, and the books themselves are fuckhuge
Christopher Ramirez
The arthoouse stuff came first. The mutt graphic novels of the 80s are the cheap copy
t. Comic pro
Cameron Flores
Cont.
Italian: Undisputed masters of realism. Some of the best comic talent used to be Italian and if it wasn't, it was italian inspired. Sadly, the italian scene has decayed as they failed to produce new talent on the level of the old pros.
They are easily the best cyberpunk producers, which also means they make the best sci fi and urban landscapes rife with 80s countercultural ideas. On the other side they have strong war comics and history comics (though the french have been beating them on the hsitory genre as of late) They have a notorious arthouse erotica industry recognised internationally and few italo comics nowdadays don't have a naked chick or three. They have close ties with the italian and spaniard scenes and lots of talent is exchanged between them
I don't know much about their publishing system except that bonelli comics sells them by the million
David Reyes
*close ties with the argentinian and spaniard scenes
Tyler Taylor
It obviously is different sensibilities, medieval stuff was never really popular here whereas Conan was huge in Spain from what I know, most of the long running series in Mexico, outside of kiddie comics, are either political satire or action genres like Westerns, one of our iconic heroes, Chanoc, is basically a diver/sailor having marine themed adventures with very little of fantasy elements (outsized oversea fauna). There was a lot of re-printing American comics, obviously we're strongly influenced, so superheroes are always present tho in vastly dilluted forms, more akin to American comic book heroes from the 1950's or in genres such as horror or luchadores.
What I'm getting at tho is you don't see the same kind of vitality in Europe as in Japan and I'm talking adult themed manga alone (not hentai or risque) and you do get a ssense, from over here, that there's more than a bit of snobbery regarding American comic books, leaving aside the more niche stuff like Mauser or Watchmen there was a lot of good stuff coming from the major publishers like say Barry Windsor Smith's Weapon X or Peter David's run at incredible Hulk, dismissing a comic book a priori just because it's ridiculous.
And then I've read hentai manga with legit moving quality writing and amazing art, I'm talking the kind of stuff that can move you to tears or the kind of subtle nuances that can add twists on just one panel, I've yet to see that from any European, or Mexican, comic book for that matter, it's just people doing their craft long enough and cmpetitively that they git gud. Take the stuff you posted for instance, it looks almost baroque to me, a lot of detail but facial expressions are shit, they're inexpressive, too realistic maybe, it doesn't quite look as epic as it should.
Obviously Amerindian people are portrayed quite differently in our own comic books
I may give that a shot, thx
Carter Wilson
Fair enough, quote works, my understanding is up until the 1990's Comics were not really considered serious art.
Jack Jenkins
Manga all the way, variety of genres,settings and situations is limitless.
Argentina-Paraguay: Imagine if every comic artist was neil gaiman. That was argentina in 1960. Orthodox to the point if ridicule, the vast majority of argie comics exist in a black & white realist format where everything in it exists to prop up the writing. Everything is secondary to the wrting.
This naturally made them shine in narrative genres like noir and western, however their most memorsble works are sci fi and fantasy. In the 80s they nurtured an arthouse narrative scene rife with couter culture (read: italy) and surrealism, still in black white. The argentine comic industry collapsed in the 90s and never recovered as everyone now prefers vidyagaems to comics. Only in this decade we saw a return of the scene, but it's pretty much starting from step 0 and has to learn the ropes again. This also means theres plenty of room for innovation. Paraguay follows the same line, except their comics scene edged heavily towards arthouse. In fact some of the most prolific writers in argentina where paraguayan
Jeremiah Davis
My fucking man.
Daniel Powell
You know, porn French/spanish/italian por magazines aren't uncommon, and most great artist tend to do porn at the side for kicks ir quick cash. Dunno, read Gypsy, Estella or the Quest of the bird of time, they are quick fun with some nuances, the art in manga varies a lot but they tend to simplify the faces because it's faster to draw, the same with Funny/kids comics in Yurop where they are a lot more expresive for jokes. .
Gabriel Lopez
I love manga btw,stuff like Berserk, Vinland Saga or Golden Kamui are top tier (the later turn to ultra gay is weird as fuck, still a good comic).
Luke Collins
USAUSA: There's way too much history to sumarize mutt comics. The one ting that can be said is that they have the best action comics out there, and some of the most iconic designs in comics. But they don't shine neither artwise nor writing wise. They are usually at the forefront of innovation, and if they are not, they are quick to adapt, and also quick to monetise. The only comic scene to have made their artists legit rich.
Their design innovaions are no joke. Things thay we assume to be comic standards now were developped by mutts in tge 60s and the 80s, some of these by completely forgotten publishers. They are also webcomic pioneers and led some of the most famous webcomics out there. With the introductiom ofdigital art, mutts have developed some serious coloring skills.
Right thier scene is seen as a get rich quick scam and filled with idiot sthinking they can score a movie deal. However this has allowed plenty of super arthouse ideas to get published and have a strong indie scene.
Eli Walker
>I like mango >Hasn't even read Taiyo Matsumoto
Joshua Ortiz
Minor scenes:
Spain: their comics tend to follow franco velgian and italian trends, however i believe they have something they both lack with is strongly introspective and semi pholosophical graphic novels
Mexico: they jave a strongyl regional comedy scene that's lewd af, including porn comics and just ehii stuff. Many of the mexican greats drew one or two of these. They are kinda a tradition in mexico even if their numbers have greatly diminished.
Russia: they dkdn't have a comic scene until some kid convinced his rich daddy to let him start one and it's now a literal ip farm, which surprisingly is getting movies.
Zachary Rodriguez
I think I'm missing the brits, germNs and scnadis but i don't wanna improvise a paragrpah about 2000ad
Adrian Mitchell
> they clearly shine at romance and drama, with somewhat decent sci fi. They clearly suck at fantasy and related
What gives you this impression?
You don't seem like you've read very much manga past the very surface of the medium. The sheer volume of published manga that exists and the 70+ year time range over which it's been produced means that making any sort of broad statement about what genres manga is "good at" obviously the mark of someone who thinks they know way more than they do. According to this wiki page there are currently 58 manga magazines being published, and I know for a fact that some are missing from this list. Of course if you read stuff from the top few most popular ones you're going to think there's a lot of cliche stuff. What you're doing is like listening to the radio in America and deciding "American music is clearly only good at pop music and hip hop". There's so much music that has been made in America over the last 100 years that describing American music as "good at x" or "bad at x" is laughable. The same applies to manga.
>judging comics by country and not by particular authors brainlets
Ryder Thompson
>He will never finish it. >Poxa gronka.gif intensifies.
Nathan Foster
I love me some crazy Franco-Belgian comics
Benjamin Thomas
I'm big into manga too, more leaning towards works like Devilman or Angel's Egg. Europe has some good illustrators, don't get me wrong.
Blake Harris
That fucking sucks man, Stokoe's veiny, dick-filled world was truly a thing to behold
Parker Anderson
redpill me on kill six billion demons
Elijah Turner
>Russia: they dkdn't have a comic scene until some kid convinced his rich daddy to let him start one and it's now a literal ip farm, which surprisingly is getting movies. Interesting, any examples? I only heard about Major Thunder or something like that.
Brayden Martinez
Not bad, interesting world, the MC isn't bad, good color work. The lore bits are interesting.
Aaron Collins
Seriously man, you know shit about Mexican comic books if you're putting it down to just that. I don't want to turn this into a shit flinging debate but leaving Brazil aside Mexican comics dwarf the rest of Latin America as a whole on just sheer volume of production for the 20th century. And that's even leaving the bulk of it aside which was basically drawn telenovela equivalents.
What the Mexican scene did have, apart from no dictatorship censor issues, is that much like Japan there was a big public for whom it was their main form of literature.
Christopher Powell
Have you acually read any of their classics? 60s and 70s era? They are really lackluster. 70s marvel tier lacklusteraka fucking retarded. They didn't really develop a strong scene until the early 80s.
I respect them for what they are but as someone who eats up enough fantasy and scifi to make a fa/tg/guy blush, they just aren't good at those genres. Not on the levela yuropoor or can be. Japanese comics have always shined for their use of interpersonal relationships.
And you really have no idea how much i know about comics. But I shouldn't be surprised a mutt weeb is jumping in defense of grorious nippon.
Adam Bell
>it has it's moments where it makes some of the best but those examples are almost solely found outside those two behemoths
Jace Wright
...
Brandon Bennett
I know mexico had a big scene in the 60s/70s, but volume doesn't mean good. Else the gringos would be 1st.
In the end my knowledge is based on what i could get my hands on and what mexicans themselves talk about. People speak woth fond memoroes of those books
>is that much like Japan there was a big public for whom it was their main form of literature
Please elaborate
Jacob Williams
Manga: I mostly read shojo manga (Love so Life, Kuragehime, Dengeki Daisy), horror stories and weird shit (Junji Ito, Shintaro Kago, Suehiro Maruo, Kazuo Umezu) and stuff like Akumetsu, Sun Ken Rock, Tenjho Tenge, etc.
American comics: I'm into X-men, I read pretty much everything, but I hate (nu) X-men, Old Man Logan is the only decent book. Generation X is a gay drama and all those comics with O5 are cringeworthy. I like Spider Man, but One More Day is my limit. I haven't read anything (well, just Spiderverse) beyond One More Day.
European comics: Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, I read all the obvious classic writers.
Argentine comics: I used to read Patoruzito, Isidoro, Patoruzu, Mafalda, Inodoro Pereyra.
Carson Perry
Yes, I have. And even if you were only talking about manga from the 80s until today that's still nearly 40 years of producing original content at a rate much faster than any other comic scene. I'm sure you have a lot of facts memorized about comics and have likely read a good deal but it seems to me that you lack the critical thinking ability and holistic knowledge to actually put those facts to use in a way that doesn't come off as just flaunting unsupported statements to show off.
Dylan Price
Read 2000ad and then druillet for the true 80s brit experience
Guilty pleasure of mine if philippe caza.
Gavin Miller
Patricians choice pic related, all other comics are shit
Matthew Wood
>that's still nearly 40 years of producing original content at a rate much faster than any other comic scene
lol nope. Don't exaggerate. Gringos beat them, italians gave them a run for their money.
Manga just began getting big by the turn of the 80s and was comparable to the usa and euros. Then the comics marlet shrinked and so did the overall number of comic titles - except in japan.
Knowing about comics isn't just reading comics mate.
James Ward
The only comics I read were the beano as a kid.
BASED Banaan man desu
Michael Cox
...
Jack Kelly
i prefer european comics mostly especially italian stuff like corto maltese japan has variety but i feel they often suffer from the serialisation process and cliches american are mostly capeshit pr disney and they rely on developed characters so things get stale once again italians did mickey mouse the best with topolino, mickey detective stories and phantom duck, when i was a kid we loved all that unfortunately greek stuff are mostly indy and wierd but we have some pretty great political cartoonists
Brandon Sullivan
Good coloring and design, extremely good lore and panneling.
Tge author seems to be in a cinstant struggle to not draw with his dick and the various females in the comic constantly oscillate between plain and ara ara tiers
Austin Walker
thanks, ill check it out then
Grayson Smith
Reach heaven through violence, friend.
Lucas Barnes
We had a lot of barely literate people and comic books, particularly in sepia and small format were cheap as fuck and easy to follow, it's what a lot of working class Mexicans read. For a peasant in much of the late 20th century it was the equivalent of today's watching the movie if you're not going to read the book. What I wrote about mostly pornography is today, after media killed publishing, not back then. And the point you seem to be missing about volume is that it both allows people to get good at their craft and for publishers to take risks on more risky projects. On just the sheer number of serials alone I would make the very bold claim we probably come amongst the top, next right after the US and East Asian countries, on sheer number of printed title characters.
It's not a quality vs quantity thing, it's quantity allows for quality, as you seem to also be missing the point for Japan. And it allows for inovation, take luchadores for instance, it's a very specific genre no one else in the world has which was also movies, granted most were campy as fuck but that allowed a b film tradition which was actually highly regarded in France and even managed to produce some legit works of art.
I get it we are each unfamiliar with each other's tradition, I'd have thought that outside Mafalda, Argonauta and some Native American equivalent to blackface characters your country had produced next to no comic books for the 20th century (political cartoon aside) and yet here you are showing something different, which makes me glad I'm not educating people on subjects I'm not familiar with.
Christopher Torres
Pat mills writes that comic tho. He's a brit of 2000ad fame
Angel Gonzalez
Brits are French rapebabies anyway
Joshua Mitchell
The quantity allowing for quality thing was the point I made for Japan.
Please don't misunderstand. I know there's good mexican comics. Read a couple Sup Forums storytimes about that comic with the black mexican kid and his gang that were comfy af. But most of thede were forgotten by people, in the same way many of argie niches were forgotten by the people or omitted from my posts (ie: our ridiculously strong kids market)
>native american blackface
Huh? What comic? All known native american comic characters here are dedigned on super nativists ideas ie paturuzu. Or you meant a particular artist?
t. Breton
Xavier Bell
It seems that it's harder for minor artists in US to find success. Maybe I'm just ignorant, but it seems that obscure manga as a pretty solid chance of becoming animated or finding wide spread popularity compared to comics in the US where the same few IPs i.e. marvel and dc are rehashed over and over again.
Jose Lopez
The deal is: obscure to us, not to them. The language barrier is a effectively an iron curtain to us.
Our measures of whst's popular and what's not there are rather limited. Of course someone could be buddy buddu with a studio person and have nigger chsmces of a pitch.
And these days other mediums are gotting adaptations like light novels
James Gomez
Yeah, I meant Patoruzu, I get it isn't any worse than Memin Pinguin but in all fairness that was a kiddie comic. But Mexican comic books are far from forgotten, their characters remain a big part of popular culture, as in de rigueur references for most Mexicans.
Paturuzu is the opposite of racist, it all out nativism and interior gaucho/farmer worship
I see where you come from. The designs of paturuzu and all the works by the artist (a fucking lot of characters) are all done in a traditional argie kiddy style that's fucking ugly, but highly popualr back in the day. Stuff you'd find in newspaper comic strips, which is wher they originated from and then moved tovtgeir own comics
Zachary Barnes
No, I meant it's harder for minor American artists to have their work become successful in the US than it is for minor Japanese artists to to have their work become successful in Japan.
Brayden Brooks
Why is Howard Chaykin so hated?
John Harris
Definitely. Animation in the US is dead (people on Sup Forums can write entire thesii about the topic) and what little remains is expensive af. There's very little room for a comic artist in the usa to get an adaptatin that isn't tv
Though I reject the idea of success in comics means getting an adaptation. An insult to the medium, that is.
Austin Stewart
...
Daniel Gonzalez
Nah, animation in the US isn't dead, it's just the actual work gets outsourced to Asia, mostly Korea, but the character and set designs, storyboarding , audio, etc. all gets done stateside which is where the studios are actually located. Disney and CN basically operate on the model as do most of the fringe projects eg Jayden Smith's ego trip cartoon about himself.
