Welcome to Gaia! ::

Hey to all of you who really want to make something great for the world to love! Check out all six parts to this video. In order to really get a feel of what is expected and required in this field we all want to get a piece of.

O^_^O

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-4V9AbUu1s&feature=related

Thanks for the video! I'll make sure to look at it. I'm assuming the the things they discuss apply here too, right?

Yes it is a documentary of a manga artist and what he does and his process while he makes his manga called Vagabond. I thought it was very interesting and a nice little preview of mangaka life.

This breaks my heart. I'd thought that Vagabond had beautiful art... Is that traced too?

I was wondering about that. I remember Slam Dunk being in some article about comic artists that traced and I thought I might have been the other way around and someone traced his work much like how Bleach was traced.

In some ways I do sympathize with the rampant tracing with manga artists. Very often you have to come up with the story and the art yourself and churn out about 15 pages a week and have a weird sleepless work schedule. Its almost justified that there's so much use of cut books, tracing and pre-made backgrounds.

Those aren't traces, they're eyeballed copies. Not much better, but for what it's worth, felt like pointing that out.

I think it's best artists looking up to mangaka know both the good and inspirational side of the story, and the bad side. I think it's important for artists to know when and why some of their idols trace, copy, use copypasta backgrounds, etc, and why it may (or may not be) justified for them. Most aspiring artists around here don't have such gruelling work schedules (and likely never will), so they need to realize that they don't have the same excuses/justifications that their favourite mangaka do.


That video made me feel better about how much I struggle with my thumbnailing/writing phase.
I wish they had focused a bit more on the actual work, instead of spending an hour drawing parallels between Vagabond and Inoue's life.

I agree there. I guess his rationale is that while they make ref books for a lot of things for artists to ref/copy from, they don't make them for basketball and basketball is quite specific. Is it a good rationale? In the manga business, yes, but to me? Absolutely not. But again, this is something aspiring artists should know about and draw their own conclusions.

Unfortunately, I don't think copyright law even covers that situation, so this is something "artists" will get away with.