The Metamorphosis of Manga
When I was growing up, watching anime and reading manga gave me a connection to a worldwide, multicultural community of people. (It also got me my first boyfriend, but that’s beside the point.) I’m definitely guilty of favoring anime over manga, because I can use my Netflix subscription to stream for free, but I also adore reading manga and seeing its intricate artwork.The originally Japanese medium has spread in recent decades, attracting new mangaka (manga authors) from all around the world. Here are three up-and-comers.
Brandon Chen -- United States
I hadn’t noticed that the creators of my favorite anime and manga were almost all Japanese men until I met American mangaka Brandon Chen. A chance meeting via TikTok last year opened up a whole new world for me.
Chen, who is Chinese-American, started out selling homemade comics on the playground for a quarter and is now an internationally-known author. His new Somnia series––which is about a teenager named Ren who receives a mystic lantern that can make his dreams into reality––has gotten him a lot of buzz.
Chen is also a novelist, and he doesn’t illustrate his own manga; he works with outside artists to make his stories come to life. He is dedicated to his craft and finds that everyday, he continues to improve as a writer. Sometimes, he says, “the stories write themselves,” and in the end, “the product is much different from the original plan.” His influences range from the manga series Nanatsu no Taizai (“The Seven Deadly Sins”) to one of my personal favorites, Dante’s Inferno.
He also has a vibrant social media presence, and with it, he is inspiring a whole new generation of manga readers. When we met, he had already built up a following of around 573,000 TikTok users. That number has nearly doubled since.
“It's quite interesting how having a following really makes you stand out,” he tells me. “Now people are offering to hire me for manga projects or sponsor their products. Without TikTok, I don’t think I'd be at the same level of recognition.”
In the future, Chen hopes to see animated adaptations of his stories—or simply to collaborate on an anime project as a writer. He finds it encouraging that the manga industry is starting to spread around the world.
“I believe that we'll start to see a disruption in the mangaka space where many more international folks start breaking into the industry,” he says. “Manga can always be professionally translated, so I don't believe it will hinder any publication opportunities.”
Odunze Whyte Oguguo — Nigeria
Like Brandon Chen, Odunze Whyte Oguguo uses social media to spread his work.
“My journey as a manga artist began after I saw potential benefits to artists and all kinds of content creators online,” he says. “It became easier to ‘break into the comic industry’ and carve your path.”
Oguguo started making YouTube videos and now has quite a respectable following, if I do say so myself, of fans who watch his videos to learn how to draw and make comics. Oguguo has also documented his journey as a creator on his YouTube channel, and it shows that hard work and ambition can really pay off.
Being a Nigerian creator sets him apart from the typical mangaka, he says.
“I’m a Nigerian drawing comics influenced by the Japanese approach to making comics, so sometimes, certain people can be a little condescending towards me,” he says. “However, I've never let that stop me.”
Oguguo has two publications that he writes and illustrates, Apple Black and Bacassi, which are serialized in the popular indie manga magazines Saturday AM and Saturday PM, respectively.
Apple Black is his current project, with Volume 3 set to drop this year. The series follows Sano, a young sorcerer blessed with Arodihs, “the arm of a god,” as he struggles to fulfill his prophesied destiny to become “the Trinity” and save the world.
“With my manga, and with the manga published within Saturday AM, Saturday PM, Saturday Brunch, and more, we hope to expand the diversity of anime and manga in every sense of the word–not just with global characters and creators, but also with ‘diverse’ [ideas about] what manga can be,” he says.
Natalia Batista — Sweden
Natalia Batista has been working at breaking into the manga scene since the early 2000s. She says Sailor Moon was one of her community’s earliest introductions to anime and manga. (We absolutely bonded over this, because the same is true for me.) The first two seasons were released in Sweden in the late ‘90s, and the remaining three became available in 2002, when Batista was a young teenager.
“Every morning, you would get up, eat your breakfast, and watch Sailor Moon,” she says. “It opened up a new world to many young people like me.”
Sailor Moon, written by female mangaka Naoko Takeuchi, and Inuyasha, written by female mangaka Rumiko Takahashi, were the first works that inspired Batista to write her own manga. The strong female leads that Takeuchi created gave Batista and many other emerging manga artists a blueprint to follow and helped spread the idea of the “strong female lead.” One of Batista’s more recent series, Sword Princess Amaltea, breaks the rules and has women doing all of the “saving.”
Batista has the unique experience dealing mostly with American and European manga readers. She says the European manga community seems to be much more accepting of their peers’ original works than the American manga community.
In countries like Germany, France, and Italy, local artists were already being professionally published as early as the mid-2000s. Batista told me that the European manga industry has grown considerably due to both the willingness of publishers and the work put into making the local scene thrive.
“When I compare the European manga industry to the American manga industry, something I have noticed is the lack of manga artists that go ‘professional’ with their own original works in America,” she says.
American anime conventions have a severe lack of representation among creators who show original work, according to Batista.
“In 2018, I went to AnimeExpo [in Santa Ana, CA]. I was invited there by Tokyopop because they published my manga Sword Princess Amaltea. I went to Artist Alley to try and network, and it was 97% fanart.”
She says Tokyopop is very involved in the international manga scene and has published works that originate from places like Austria, Egypt, and Iraq. All of these works, she mentions, were written by women.
Batista is a huge advocate for female and international mangaka and makes it a point to stay updated on new original works from all over the world.
“I am always looking for comics, especially manga, made by local artists to bring to Europe and show to publishers in Europe so they can publish it.”
Not to sound like a cheesy shounen character, but I truly believe these mangaka and their international peers will change the manga world.