Anatomy lessons, anyone?

Nonono, that's not true. If you find a publisher and your story is good enough, people will buy it and read it, even without illustrations. Both kids and grownups still read books, at least they do where I live.

I get that people who don't draw themselves aren't so demanding over graphic quality : I know that from talking to kids who read my stories. They don't mind as long as they like the story: that's most important to them. Whereas for the publishers, graphic quality is the main item: even the best story in the world, a Belgian publishist won't even look at the script, if the drawings aren't up to scratch. They're fools, really. If it were up to the kids, it would be much easier to be a Belgian mangaka.

I keep finding it funny how girls like reading yaoi so much. The Japanese mangaka discovered this phenomenon, and now all girls in the world seem to greedily devour their work! The only thing I can compare it with, is the way many boys love watching lesbian porn. X-D

If you use the terms uke and seme as the equivalent for active and passive party in a couple, top and bottom if you will, it must be rather difficult to get along for two tops, don't you think? Same thing goes for two ukes.

Say, does your panel starts jumping up and down like crazy too, soon as you write a bit more than 3 or 4 lines? So annoying! If we want to talk , why don't we pick a forum? F.i., http://www.animea.net/forums/ or so. That one is very good. Nice people, large panels that don't jump rope while you're typing!

I love that an actual mangaka reads this stuff on here :)

Well, I was a mangaka as a little kid as well as one that devoured comics, and ever since, I am two people in one: a manga reader and a manga maker. I started when I was very young, and I drew stories about mice, a bit like Mickey Mouse but different. I started drawing realistic style when I became a bit older, my scripts grew more serious: the mice didn't fit anymore, so I started to draw real people. I remember the grownups (parents and teachers) didn't like that at all, at first; they liked my mice a lot. But I had little choice: adventure stories that would be qualified as "seinen" over here, aren't really served with mice in the lead role, are they? Imagine "Lone Wolf and Cub" by Kazuo Koike, (if you don't know it, check it out) with a big guy mouse and a baby mouse in the lead roles, and all the samurai mice also? Wouldn't that look ridiculous? :-D
(Now that I think of it, it would look funny rather than ridiculous. Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea? But I don't know how to draw those mice anymore, now.
And yeah, I am interested in how kids think about manga, you're my public, after all! So I read your comments. Sometimes they're very silly, sometimes they're very intelligent.
There, it starts jumping up and down again. So annoying! :-( Better stop!

I get what you're getting at, but I don't believe manga should be realistic. Rape is immoral, if somebody doesn't understand that they're sick in the head. The point of made-up stories, in any shape or form, is that they provide a sort of mild 'escapism'.
All of you, stop being such moral faggots. If the truth of manga & real life is too closely associated in your mind you need professional help.

This cosmic dance of bursting decadence and withheld permissions twists all our arms collectively, but, if sweetness can win, and it can, then I'll still be here tomorrow, to high five you yesterday, my friend. Peace.

@Itzarit: Everyone knows rape is immoral; but so is killing and hitting and shooting, but still all adventure stories are crawling with violence, beit manga or comics or movies or novels. Good can't exist without bad, else we wouldn't be able to distinguish good as being good, lacking anything to compare it to. Understand what I'm saying?
Besides, rape and other types of violence is only "immoral" if it's real: in a comic, nobody gets hurt, since it's just paper people. You can kill, rape, cut into pieces, do anything you want to those paper people, if you feel like it: they don't exist anyway, so what's the harm?

About realism in manga, I was merely talking about the artwork: if the proportions of the bodies are well-drawn, many readers like it better, because beautiful bodies and scenery is pretty to look at. Depending on your keen eyes, one can be more or less demanding, in that respect. Being used to try and do it as good as possible myself, I also like to watch it done well by others. But I know plenty of people aren't half as demanding as I am. Still, a minimum of anatomic correctness is necessary, I think.
I get what you mean by what "escapism" means for you: but that too is different for everybody. Some people want to escape from harsh reality into fairytale sweetness, and some people want to escape from boring and tedious reality into a world of bloody violence and rape, knowing full well it's just fantasy and done to paper people. That too is escapism, you see.
So there have to be manga and movies of all types, for all sorts of people. The more escapeways we have at our disposal, the less chance there is we might try and do bad things (or stupid things) in reality.

@Youreadthiswrong: I have no idea what you're talking about ┑(￣Д ￣)┍

I totally agree, I also tend to criticize Manga art but I usually let it slide if the story is really good making it worth reading, but this one had all the negative things that happened resolve way too quickly....weakly built I guess. I draw a lot so hands and feet are always things I look at in Mangas I read cuz some are just insanely bad, I wanna try making a Manga o.o or a webtoon, do you make a decent/good living being a mangaka?

"good can't exist without bad... We wouldn't have anything to compare to", no, that's not true. There are things that are just inherently bad that you feel uncomfortable around, how do you think children get traumatized? They don't know what domestic abuse is, so they shouldn't realize anything bad is happening when they see dad hit mom, right? No, it's called observation and independent thinking. People feel things on their own and form opinions on those things based on what they feel. As far as "idk what you're talking about", don't you worry your pretty little head. (´ڡ`)

You misunderstood my "good can't exist without bad". If someone hurts a child, it cries, because of the pain; but pain isn't there to hurt us alone, it is meant to protect us from danger. People who can't feel pain (there's a condition with that symptom) have it very hard to survive without severe injuries and scars! So a child doesn't get traumatized -physically or mentally- unless the pain is too bad. When someone hurt it out of cruelty. That is the downside of this useful thing called pain. Life without pain is impossible: a woman who has been a mother once knows that very well. Pain is not "evil"; it can be used to hurt people, by other people whom one could call evilf. The same way as one can make somebody suffer by exposing him to severe cold or heat; but that doesn't make the heat or the cold evil, just the person who uses it to make other people suffer. There are no such things as inherently bad things, even killing isn't, at least not for some people who consider some ways of killing to be good, like upholders of the Death Penalty for instance. People don't just recognize things as "good" or "bad" out of their own instinct, by observation, but from the moral standards they are being brought up in. In one civilisation people wouldn't think twice about revenge being a very good thing, in an other it would be called taking the law in one's own hand, and call it bad. Good and bad are extremely relative, and depending on the culture you live in...

I'm not understanding what i misunderstood or how my last response didn't cover what you said. I see you're now talking about pain, or physical trauma. Yes, people/kids realize that things are bad by registering pain, but i don't know why you're focusing on that specifically when there're other ways of feeling discomfort about something, or "bad" if you will. The example i just gave being one that functions at all times, regardless of whether or not you can feel physical pain. Observation and independent thinking. We all look at things and feel based on what we see. You don't need a scale of "good" to feel "bad" while looking at something. If i see a car crash i know it's sad because logic says so. I don't believe you need to be taught that "car crashes are bad" for you to register "oh, no. That's not good" when you see one. Especially if someone you care about is involved. Our brains function in that we can make our own observations, and no, this isn't inherently limited by nurture as rebels exist. People are raised a certain way and decide they don't like these things based on their own observations. Science is expanded through individual observation, the source of that "subjective nurture".

I elaborated on the issue of physical pain because you spoke of child abuse. Of course there are other ways to feel bad: there's fear, humiliation, anger, remorse, whatnot. But I merely tried to explain my point of "no good without bad" with the arguments you brought in. One could do it in an other way if one tried. But you're claiming that people are able to identify something as either good or bad without any exterior influence doesn't deny that there is no good without bad. They're different philosophical points.

I mean, literally yes it does, but okay lol.

I spoke of domestic abuse, you brought up child abuse and physical pain. Tell me how pointing out that people can register "good" or "bad" without outside influence doesn't disprove "good can't exist without bad". You're just saying it doesn't. That implies that if you notice "bad", it's because you had a scale of "good" to compare to. You even said that in your own words "there'd be nothing to compare to", to this i gave you an example of a method to register either good or bad without a scale. It literally directly contradicts what you were saying and we all know observation works as i described it so we know i'm not wrong there.

Gee, you're a stubborn one...
Bad as in a real thing, a concrete thing, like pain, or hunger, or sunburn, or frostbite, those things people can feel, because they're meant to feel bad. if we didn't feel our stomach contract and cramp up, we wouldn't try all we could to find food, and we'd die starving. If our mouth and our throat didn't become dry and burning from thirst, we wouldn't go out of our way to find water, and we'd die from dehydration. If too cold a temperature didn't feel so bad on our naked furless body, we woudln't go look to find shelter and die of exposure.
One of these alone would already have been enough to make our species get extinct long ago; so that sort of 'bad' things we can distinguish by instinct allright. Nature made sure of that.

But experiments have shown that humans have no innate moral compass: we are a social animal, with a strict hierarchical lifestyle, and if we have no moral rules made up for us by tradition or culture, depending totally of the society around us, all we would show for, as behavior rules go, would be what other social animals have. Elephants and chimpanzees and wolves andso. Nothing more.

So yeah, we can recognize a few negative things by instinct. But not all of them.
The rest is interpreted as good or bad depending on the "context": if we had happened to be members of a tribe that practices cannibalism, because somewhere in the past someone decided that eating the flesh of our slain enemy, especially if this enemy was strong and brave, will make us strong and brave too, we would see cannibalism as a very good thing.
Other tribes who would come and invade our wilderness territory and see us practise cannibalism would shriek in horror, if in their culture cannibalism is a big taboo; they would see us as barbaric monsters. And that would totally surprise and puzzle us.

Yeah, i can agree with that and have been saying the same thing. I said "there are things we look at and just feel bad seeing", as in "there are some bad things that can be registered through observation rather than through a scale of past experience/knowledge". What i said leaves room for exceptions like the few you just gave, what you said is "bad can't exist without good" and "there would be no scale to compare to", what you said encompasses ALL bad. What i said proves that you can register bad without a scale. It was just poor wording on your part if you meant specific bads.

You sure like to get the last word, don't you? 'Bad can't exist without good and there would be no scale to compare to' encompasses all bads indeed, but that doesn't contradict the difference between the instinctive bads and the "educated" bads, as I explainsed. Your claim 'one can register bad without a scale', really should be 'one can register SOME bads, and a lot of others one can't. For all those, one needs a scale"

No, because i specifically brought up observation, nothing else. Do you assume i'm talking about other things if i mention one thing? What you said ecompasses everything and is incorrect because of that, i talked about one thing.

I think i should clear something up, all i'm here to do is tell you "hey, that's not quite right" for the reasons i've stated. This wasn't supposed to drag on. If you look, i haven't been rude to you or called you names. I'm just responding to you, it's not that i "need the last word" or that i'm "stubborn". I can see from these two quotes that you're getting frustrated for some reason, so i thought i'd recap what's happened so you can see i wasn't meaning harm. What happened was, i pointed out that your all-encompassing word usage isn't right, you kind of went off topic with examples of physical pain, i explained what i was saying because you started talking about physical pain and child abuse while acting as though i brought those up when i didn't say those things and since then it's basically (and this is going to sound harsh, but i don't mean it to be) you going on multiple tangents about things that don't really change what i said. What i said was basically "you don't need a scale of good to register ALL bad like you just said you do verbatim" and gave the example of observation to prove there is SOME bad you can register without a scale. Your response to this doesn't make sense as you started listing off ways to register bad and saying that not all bad can be registered without a scale. I never said that. Do you see what i mean by "tangents"? My argument was that there is SOME bad you can register without a scale, NOT that there isn't any bad that you need a scale to register.

Okay, okay.
I'm not at all frustrated, it was meant in jest. You just like debating, I guess. And you DO like to have the last word, admit it ;-P
But since you are polite and decent about it, I am gladly prepared to give it to you. I totally forgot what this thread started out for, or about which manga it was anyway...

Okay :^)